SB 51: the California politics thread

Uh, so the Democrat who's probably about to win a usually-Republican seat on the California Board of Equalization is a disbarred lawyer and perennial candidate who was previously ordered to stay at least 100 feet away from comedian Brad Garrett. https://t.co/MkrlixLfqF https://t.co/RBGhb1sZ8A

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) November 13, 2018

Meanwhile

In the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, @TonyThurmond opens up a 67,161 vote lead over @MarshallTuck. The two candidates were two hundredths of a percent apart at the last update. https://t.co/qlv13fzE56

— Rob Pyers (@rpyers) November 14, 2018

BREAKING: Democrat Josh Harder wins U.S. House seat in California farm belt, defeats 4-term Republican Rep. Jeff Denham. https://t.co/YfFnH2YEJH

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 14, 2018

sweet! I donated. time to open the ILX influence-peddling thread.

shakey your thoughts please http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-pge-paradise-fire-destruction-20181114-story.html

PG&E's fire liabilities are going to continue to go through the roof because this kind of thing is likely to keep happening every year. Why? Because maintaining their extensive network of capital assets (the only thing keeping the company afloat, at this point) is way less profitable, more expensive, more time consuming and more dangerous then building new capital assets. Combine that with perpetually dangerous conditions and its likely PG&E will cause more fires as time goes on.

They were just bailed out by the legislature in the previous session over exactly the same issue - if they were held liable for the Carr fire (or was it the Tubbs fire? I forget) they would have been bankrupted and then who knows what would happen. The state would take over, I guess? Frankly as much as I hate PG&E I don't see the state taking any better care of gas lines and electrical lines than PG&E does. Although at least the state wouldn't have a profit motive to *not* take care of their shit.

So - either the legislature bails them out again and holds them non-liable for this kind of thing, or PG&E's finances are going to look increasingly grim until they finally death-spiral out. They have a lot of other pressures on them at the moment - declining customer base/competition from distributed energy resources, competition from CCAs taking their customers (I just signed over to SF's Cleanopower SF), a state mandate to basically not sell gas anymore by 2050, etc.

I have no idea what's going to happen. Maybe they'll go bankrupt and get broken up and taken over by CCAs or POUs (perhaps the ideal situation tbh)

obviously the more people that die the worse it's going to get for the company, all of their money will be tied up in lawsuits and insurance claims and liabilities and their profits will tank

interesting, thanking you

idk if my point was clear about their capital assets, what I was trying to get at is it costs them a lot of money to ensure that all of their existing assets are working safely and properly. Their network is *gigantic* and old and there are all kinds of property/jurisdiction issues involved, it's hard to get qualified crews out to remote areas, etc. None of that stuff turns them a profit.

But if they put in a new substation, or build a bunch of electrical infrastructure to service electric vehicle charging stations, for example - *those* assets go on their books as profitable (because they contribute to increase in generating capacity/serving more customers, which = revenue).

So they have a financial incentive to build stuff, but a financial disincentive to maintain it to ensure that it doesn't blow up houses/burn down entire towns/kill people.

Cool financial model they have there, thx capitalism etc.

obviously the more people that die the worse it's going to get for the company, all of their money will be tied up in lawsuits and insurance claims and liabilities and their profits will tank

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 2:20 PM (one hour ago)

Their collapse may precede any financial reporting... 50% loss in 5 days. Massive sell-offs.

https://i.imgur.com/U1U8abt.png

also, w/r/t tuck vs. thurmond upthread, it sounds like all of us (candidates included) are on the same page w/r/t underperforming charter schools in urban areas.

well personally the page i'm on right now (as an immigrant trying to figure the situation out over the next few years, and admittedly not in full possession of the facts) is that the only schools that receive public money should be public schools, and there shouldn't be any charter schools. but yeah, start with the underperforming ones.

9120 votes have been added in CA 39 in OC/SB, republican Young Kim now only ahead over Gil Cisneros by 122 votes, down from 590 votes. still many votes to be counted as far as I can tell

sigh

charter and public are not mutually exclusive categories

some of california’s public charters are among the most progressive schools in the nation

i have worked at three of them. one of which you could fairly call an underperforming urban charter

and one of which is the top performing urban school on the state so

in, not on

i’m going to preemptively excuse myself from this conversation though, i can already feel myself getting irked by the presence of strong opinions absent strong background knowledge of the topic

(voted for tony k thurmond btw because my teachers union said so)

i’m sorry to be snippy, obviously i take broad criticism of “charter schools” much too personally

but i’m just curious like what’s the alternative model to charters that you would follow in order to offer a performing arts school or a project based school or a college prep academy or a hybrid homeschool etc etc and how would you avoid the flaws in that model?

like that’s a question that i’ve spent literally months if not years of my life workshopping and believe me there are a lot of dimensions to that question

i guess you could say like thurmond and tuck i’ve come out neutral on the issue, or, better yet, agnostic on it

i don’t want to be uh pedantic about it though

Plenty of public high schools that are not charter schools in America offering alternative programs

tell me about them. where are they? how are they administered? equitably, i hope

tell me about one

My elementary and middle schools offered Spanish partial immersion. My high school was a science and technology magnet. I had friends who attended an alternative progressive-education-based middle and high school program in my county. All were public, non-charter schools

Spanish immersion I believe was open enrollment. My high school was competitive. The alternative program was by lottery.

where did the money come from? how big was the district?

http://echoices.lausd.net/Magnet/Information

that's is the program for specialized public schooling in LAUSD. it's extremely popular. it's equitable in the sense that it's district-wide (i.e. doesn't consider location, which is a de facto race-based admission in large parts of LA), and provides free transportation.

IMO "public" and "charter" are not mutually exclusive only if you redefine what "public school" means. charter schools that receive public money and are not run for a profit are still not public schools in the usual sense of the word.

From the school district, presumably allocated per student based on the funding model. My high school’s labs were set up with corporate sponsorships for some specialized equipment when they were established but to the best of my knowledge the operating budget was all district funding. Probably a richer PTA than average but they dont pay for teachers. This was Northern Virginia fwiw if that tells you anything.

well shucks that’s only the second largest district in the entire country, no idea why their model wouldn’t be portable to smaller districts, no idea at all

also your complaint sounds more ideological than practical to me, but whatever, i guess i’m just a parasite on the public teat

Public money should pay for public schools operated by public school districts is how I break it down to an extent.

competitive high school admission is a barbaric practice outlawed in the golden state

I mean yeah it’s ideological. I’m not a student teacher or parent I’m just an Internet poster.

well there you go!

in my case two of my chartering bodies were a) the university of calfornia and b) the public library

what do you make of that, hmm? it’s like public teat inception

anyway this dumb. my feelings are hurt. instead of being on the internet, i will just try to hustle as hard as you guys hate.

tlg I’m v much not trying to win an argument and I don’t doubt your bona fides or your superior knowledge of the landscape but “charter school” is synonymous to me with the rapacious and anti-government propaganda of the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and Newt Gingrich and you’ll have to forgive me for categorically opposing the use of public money for them. If you work for a Good One I suggest a rebranding exercise

you might want to consider rebranding too, unless being a smug self righteous asshole is your brand

Reports vary but yeah it kinda is

also yr prose is overheated

I’ve heard that before too! I truly do not know another way to be.

U can blame my public school education I guess.

the rapacious antigovernment likes of bill and melinda gates?

reading lab reports is better than this

the smaller districts in LA country all have significantly better public schools (and much fewer charter schools) than LAUSD. so if you're saying that lessons learned in LAUSD aren't applicable statewide then 1) sure 2) but public schools are _even better_ in the small districts near us and 3) LAUSD is where i live and i care most about it, so that's the way i think about the statewide SPI race.

and yes, i'm starting from an ideological place. my broad criticism of charter schools is that they literally should not exist. source: i come from the UK which, to a great extent, gets by without them (state-funded religious schools notwithstanding, ha!) and gets better, more uniform results than local school districts, states or the country of the USA.

obviously that's a glib and unfair comparison, and i'm still learning though. i assume the fact that california fund its schools less per student than pretty much any other state is part of the deal. that's not an argument for or against charter schools, but it's a confounding variable.

i don't think charter schooling is (always) a parasite motivated by money. (except the for-profit ones. those should get fucked.) but yes. my prior is: public money should go to schools run directly by public agencies. not independent charities or non-profits. anything else diverts resources from the schools we should focus on, and empirically doesn't yield better results on average. if that's ideological i'm fine with that.

as a non-ideological matter though: based on our research (we're ~4 years out from enrolment) LAUSD's magnet schools test better (fwiw) than LAUSD's charter schools. admission is lottery based (with points for siblings, underrepresented races in that school, etc.), except the gifted/highly gifted programs. they also don't shut down a week into the semester (see the "NEWS" section of this school https://www.pucschools.org/iprep/. can you imagine being a parent at that school?!) wasting public money and time and causing huge disruption.

caek when did u reproduce?? Did u post abt it?

Tell us abt your anchor baby is what I’m saying

public schools are not even better in the small communitiies
around you unless you are only talking about LA beach cities

ha! my anchor baby rules. he is 14 months. he has passports for the world's two most insane democracies.

fwiw our list of school districts to move to in LA county if we leave LAUSD for school is 25 long, 8 are beach.

we send our kid to an LAUSD public school which has a lot of extra programs only because it's a school with a fair number of affluent parents and a lot of fundraising going on. they have some excellent programs but it's not perfect. results vary by community w/public schools, South Pasadena's are great and Pasadena's are not, ours is great and one down the road a mile away is not.

we're considering a magnet in the future.

the couples we're closest to send their kids to a) an expensive private school, and b) a charter.

it's very tough, sometimes i kinda envy my parents, they just shoved me out the door to the bus stop and i went to the one option i had in a ten mile radius.

i think one benefit to our school is we live one block away

the story with pasadena's public schools is insane. i asked friends at caltech and jpl and couldn't find anyone who sent their kids there. they all deliberately lived in south pas or la canada, or went private.