SB 51: the California politics thread

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.

It looks like you mean “La Cañada”

si.

charter schools obviously did not cause the situation in pasadena, but afaict they're a big reason it has persisted http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pasadena-schools-201707-story.html

You mean “sí”

So much fucking pressure around schools these days. My kids go to an SF public school that gets like a 2/10 on greatschools, and guess what? They’re going to be fine (and I love their school, teachers, and administrators!). If you are engaged enough to care about what school they go to, it doesn’t really matter what school they go to.

I’m not reflexively anti-charter. It seems ok to me to try our new ways to teach. Obviously they should be monitored, and if there is shadiness/corruption, they should be shut down.

It does seem that our public schools get saddled with so much. They're ground zero for the culture war as people fight over what gets taught. They're among the first thing to be cut when taxes are cut (CA after prop 13, states like Kansas more recently). It does seem like there's a substantial effort to sabatoge them, so they can no longer serve their original purpose.

Perhaps I do have this all wrong. But I am very skeptical.

I love my kids' SF public school as well.

outic thanks so much for that PG&E breakdown, very relevant to my work

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

― the late great, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 7:31 PM (yesterday)

lol, yeah, it's uh a complex issue, and thanks for calling out the rest of us who are just posting based on our knee-jerk biases. and speaking of knee-jerk biases:

public money should go to schools run directly by public agencies. not independent charities or non-profits

Uh, I disagree. As someone who has dealt with public agencies and worked for independent charities and non-profits, I am biased against a lot of public agencies.

But it's a bit complicated, in that there are plenty of educational programs/services in public schools that are subcontracted to independent charities/non-profits, so one could argue that the charter school is on a continuum as opposed to one side of an either/or

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.

ha, up here we have "the Piedmont surcharge" -- people will pay at least $100k more for a house in the small town of Piedmont than for the same house blocks away on the Oakland side of the city boundaries. My aunt and uncle did so, at least. It is seen as financially prudent, as you could save money sending the precious offspring to Piedmont public schools vs. paying for private schools and living in Oakland.

right. there are situations like that all over. the weird thing with pasadena though is that it's home to some of the best academic institutions (caltech! jpl!) and the richest white liberals in southern california.
apparently it dates back to supreme-court mandated bussing in the early 1970s. the white people of pasadena responded by withdrawing their kids from public school the following year, and the school district has never recovered from the reputational and financial hit.

Uh, I disagree. As someone who has dealt with public agencies and worked for independent charities and non-profits, I am biased against a lot of public agencies.

― sarahell, Thursday, November 15, 2018 1:45 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

public agencies like school districts would be better if they weren't underfunded in california relative to the rest of the US, which underfunds them relative to the rest of the world. like i get that america has a cultural hostility to the idea that government can be not only competent but optimal, but ... it can be.

the underfunding aspect is probably key to the potential for competence and optimality

back next year:

We’re working hard to re-tool #SB827 - legalizing apartment buildings near public transit - as we approach 2019. Governor-elect @GavinNewsom is a housing champion. I look forward to working with him & my colleagues to create a bright housing future for CA. https://t.co/R7W8edPcAw

— Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) November 15, 2018

cool, I liked that the first time around. It's just so inconvenient that California's transit-rich areas ripe for high-density redevelopment have such incredible historic and cultural value. At least we can mitigate by having licensed anthropologists take photos of the buildings to be demolished, and having our city planners conduct proper AB 52 consultations with tribal governments to discuss how cultural resource monitors will be on-site to dig through any disturbed soil.

caek, I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

In defence of the spirit of that legislation, the goal is make apartment buildings legal near transit, not to make them compulsory.

Why is it…not legal…

Having read the article it seeks to overrule nimby local governments blocking densifcation around transit.

It overrules that, but not the California Coastal Commission, which limits residential structures to a height of something like 50 feet within the "coastal zone," the boundary of which can vary anywhere up to something like 2 miles from the actual coast, depending on how the zone is defined by local municipalities' Local Coastal Programs (which of course have to be approved by the Coastal Commission). But the intent of Wiener's bill would be to leave it up to the state to decide, and limit local control over density in these state-defined high-density areas.

Why is it…not legal…

sheepish ellipses warranted! it's a good question

it's not that multi-family residential is illegal near transit. it's that multi-family residential is illegal (i.e. forbidden by local zoning) almost everywhere.

the argument for 827 goes like this afaict.

1. california is not building enough homes. in raw numbers (population growth vs new homes, affordability of housing relative to cost of living, number of homeless people) the problem is worse here than anywhere else in the US. i think this is pretty uncontroversial.

2. it's important to build homes! 827 argues that it's so important that, in the same way the state regulates education at the city level, it should regulate housing at the city level to provide some baseline level of service.

3. the social, economic and environmental cost of long car commutes is enormous. for this reason, we need to build houses not out in the desert, but near jobs and, failing that, near transit.

827 is kind of a blunt instrument though: i'm sketchy on the details, but the version they tried last year would immediately upzone everywhere within 1/4 mile(ish?) of transit (light rail and express bus, not local bus) to require cities to permit somewhere between 4 and 8 story residential (depending on details of transit, etc.), subject to other zoning restrictions (e.g. the various insane requirements about parking etc. still apply).

i'm very sympathetic to the view that the effect of 827 would have had on south LA (which would pretty much all have been upzoned by this), in combination with the 2028 olympics, would have been catastrophic. these are the poorest people in the city of LA.

i am totally unsympathetic to the protests of cities like berkeley, which refuses to build apartment buildings near their three bar stations, at the same time as building 8 story parking lots https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/5/18065382/berkeley-new-parking-garage-housing-nimby-cars-homes.

i'm interested to see what carve outs and changes and pork the 2019 attempt has.