California budget cuts affecting school discipline, educators say

If they had more money to improve discipline in their schools, administrators would spend it on counselors, staff training, conflict-resolution programs, support services and rehabilitation services, rather than security, a study released Monday reported.

But of course they have less money. And the study, by the Oakland-based education resource and research group EdSource, found that state budget cuts are affecting the ability of administrators to deal with student discipline and behavior. Overwhelmingly, the respondents -- from 315 school districts around the state -- said they were concerned about discipline and also whether it varies by students' racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The survey found that two-thirds of high school students and 42 percent of middle school students who are suspended are forced to stay out of school three or more days.
Sometimes, those punishments are mandated by the state's Education Code. There is also unhappiness, at least among a minority of administrators, with state law on expulsion.
Twenty-two percent of those responding who had expelled students said they wish the law offered them an alternative.

The discipline study comes as the Oakland Unified School district is set to consider a plan Wednesday, hammered out in response to an investigation by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights into whether the district has been more harshly punishing black students than other students. Last spring, a UCLA study found that in  California, African-American students were three times as likely as white students to be suspended at least once, and that students with disabilities were twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension as their non-disabled peers.


In San Jose, the East Side Union High School District -- which has severely cut back support staff and increased class sizes by three students -- is seeing teachers more often sending academically struggling students out of class, Assistant Superintendent Juan Cruz said. "Students may be referred because they routinely don't bring in homework or are pretty passive in class," he said, incidents which accumulate and may get them suspended. Next week the district will discuss creating an alternative to "zero tolerance" policies that force suspension.

In addition, East Side has been working with the Santa Clara County Public Defenders Office on recrafting discipline policies. "We want to see if we can intervene earlier than when students are having to be in the (criminal justice) system," Cruz said.

Likewise, the Contra Costa County Office of Education works with the county District Attorney's Office and others on reducing truancy, including in early grades. "It's good for schools to have students in school -- from the very beginning," spokeswoman Peggy Marshburn said. The office is also looking at imposing in-school rather than out-of-school suspensions.

The EdSource survey also found that 59 percent of schools use video cameras on campus, but only 5 percent have metal detectors on all their campuses. In addition, administrators feel that community resources -- those helping students with academic as well as other issues, such as mental health or counseling -- are not adequate to meet students' needs.





By Sharon Noguchi snoguchi@mercurynews.com
via Contracostatimes.com

Mobilize to Final Meeting of the Citizen's Commission on Jail Violence

Join The Coalition End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails for a Rally and Press Conference at th final meeting for the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence! What: Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence will be presenting their recommendations for L.A. County Jail reform! When: September 28th @ 9:00am for Rally and Press Conference! Where: 500 W. Temple Los Angeles, Ca in front of the Board Hearing Room Los Angeles Sheriff-Deputy Abuse Must End Now! Mass incarceration directly affects Black and Brown communities and is being used at every level of government as the primary solution to dealing with so-called “crime.” L.A. County houses anywhere from 15,000-20,000 daily inmates, making them the biggest jailer in the world. But, what we also know about the jails is that its the most dangerous and violent jail, not because of the people incarcerated but rather the Sheriff-Deputies who “guard” the jails. In the last 2 years of reports by the ACLU and due to the recent findings of the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence, the public has been notified that L.A. Sheriff-Deputies have systematically used vigilante brutality towards people incarcerated in L.A. county jails. Many of our coalition members have described their experience inside L.A. county jail as an environment that is akin to torture. Deputies twist hand-cuffs so tightly that a person’s skin tears, they force people to put their hands out of the “tray-slot” and handcuff them so they are unable to fully stand or sit for hours, leave them naked in their cells to sleep on the concrete without blankets or mats, break bones, knock out teeth, and regularly taze those who are incarcerated. Deputies often disrupt the basic livelihood of those jailed in Los Angeles; often denying them regular access to their mail, food, or restricting their access to showers for up to three weeks. In addition, deputies frequently manipulate race wars and place rivals in the same cells. All of these are conscious techniques that deputies utilize to not only physically brutalize those incarcerated but also cause deep psychological trauma that affects our families and communities. Sheriff Baca and the Sheriff’s Department have lied time and time again. They have refused to confront the allegations of violence, and have labeled “inmates” as an unreliable source. Let’s demand a Los Angeles that is safe for communities of color and working class people! We are tired of jails being used as away  Join us at the Final Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence! The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails is demanding: 1.Civilian Review Board~ Get rid of OIR and Separate Custody and Patrol 2. No new construction of any L.A. Jails, particularly Men’s Central Jail-Use dollars towards community-based programs 3. Reduce the L.A. county jail population- Overcrowded jails creates and impacts VIOLENCE! 3. Respect and Dignity for all Incarcerated People-and End to all Sheriff-Deputy Abuse

--
Patrisse Cullors

Lead Organizer

The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails

work: 213-375-4518

      “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there's shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” 

― Harriet Tubman

Tomorrow: Stop the San Mateo Jail!

Please circulate widely... The fight against the new jail in San Mateo is heating up, and we need your help to keep the pressure on!  See last weeks op-ed: Jail will not bring long-lasting safety in the San Mateo Daily Journal and two recent articles about a recent report that calls the new San Mateo Jail unjustified: Report calls new jail plan unjustified, and Consultant says contract killed when information about jail influx was sought! Here are 3 ways we need you to get involved: 1. Speak Out at the Board of Supervisors Meeting Tomorrow we're going to demand that San Mateo's Supervisors cancel the jail, starting with the 44.2 million dollars in this year's budget. We need to turn out in full force--that means not just you, but your neighbors, friends, family, and coworkers.  We need you to start talking to people on your block, at your church, and in your classrooms. We can stop the County from locking up so many people and wasting so much money, but we need your help.  Come speak out against the jail construction plan! ALL OUT: San Mateo Board of Supervisors Tuesday, September 25th 8:30am Meet in Court Yard 9:00am Meeting Starts Board Chambers 400 County Center, First Floor Redwood City To RVSP for carpool leaving West Oakland BART at 7:15am, or for help with transportation from East Palo Alto, contact Emily at emily@curbprisonspending.org    For more information: 510-435-1176 - info@curbprisonspending.org - www.curbprisonspending.org 2. Contact the San Mateo Board of Supervisors Call or email your Supervisor and say: I am a constitutent of _____ District and I am calling to urge that the Board of Supervisors to strike the money for a new jail from the 2012-12 budget before September 25th and hold a public hearing on strategies the county could implement to reduce the jail population.  San Mateo doesn't want a new jail, doesn't need a new jail, and can't afford a new jail. Supervisors Dave Pine, District 1: (650) 363-4571 Supervisor Carole Groom, District 2: (650) 363-4568 Supervisor Don Horsely, Distrct 3: (650) 363-4569 Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson, District 4 (650) 363-4570 Supervisor Adrienne Tissier, District 5 (650) 363-4572 3. Spread the Word Forward this email, share this link on your Facebook wall and your friend’s walls, and repost from our Twitter!   In solidarity, Californians United for a Responsible Budget

California community college enrollment 17 percent below peak

Enrollment at California Community Colleges has dropped 17 percent below its 2008-09 peak, system officials said today, blaming the decline on post-recession state budget cuts.

The 112-college system had 2.4 million students last school year, 485,000 fewer than in 2008-09. Community colleges have long served a variety of needs, including recent high school graduates, adults seeking new skills and retirees taking recreational courses. It is unclear who comprises the group that fell off.
 
Community colleges are heavily subsidized by the state, and leaders said campuses have cut back their course offerings by 24 percent to save money. The state has also raised costs from $26 per unit in 2010-11 to $46 per unit now, though more than half of students have their fees waived.
 
Schools have tried to protect courses necessary for a degree, remediation or vocational education. But even those essential courses have filled to the brim, leaving long wait lists, said spokeswoman Paige Marlatt Dorr. System leaders believe students have fled community colleges because they can't get the classes they need or want.
 
"The real tragedy in all of this is the students we're pushing out of our institutions," said Los Rios Community College District Chancellor Brice Harris in a statement. "At the high water mark of January 2009, Los Rios had 93,000 students. This week we opened the doors with 82,000 students but that's only half of the story because state projections showed us at about 100,000 students. So, really the number of students being denied access to these colleges in the Sacramento region is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 to 18,000."

Via Sacramento Bee

ead more here: http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2012/08/california-community-college-enrollment-17-percent-below-peak.html#storylink=cpy

California colleges receive millions in funding for job training

The U.S. Department of Labor announced Wednesday more than $500 million in grants to nearly 300 community colleges and universities -– including 17 schools in California -– for job training.

The grants are a part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training initiative, an Obama administration program designed to promote skills development and employment opportunities among students. The $500 million is the second installment of the four-year, $2-billion initiative, according to a Department of Labor statement.

“These federal grants are part of the Obama administration’s ongoing commitment to strengthening American businesses by strengthening the American workforce,”  Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in a statement.

Solis, who began her career in public office as a member of the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees, said the investments will enhance the access students have to the skills and resources needed to compete in the job market.

Locally, East Los Angeles College received nearly $3 million. Cerritos College, Los Angeles Trade Technical College and Los Angeles Valley College will receive funding through their respective consortium memberships with other colleges around the country.

In Northern California, a consortium of 10 community colleges, along with UC Berkeley and Cal State East Bay, received $15 million. The community colleges include Berkeley City College, Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College, Los Medanos College, Ohlone College, College of Alameda, Chabot College, Laney College, Merritt College and Solano College.

California budgets $1 billion more to prisons than higher education and leaves students hanging

Imagine a society that spends more money on keeping its prison system alive rather than educating their citizens. Imagine a society where you soon might have more youth spending time behind bars than behind the desk.

There is no need to imagine this kind of society; this is our reality.

The United States – especially California, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country – needs to reconsider its priorities when it comes to funding public education versus prisons. Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2012-13 budget allocated nearly $1 billion more to prison spending than to higher education.

The solution to our economic problems should not be weighted on the backs of students, and universities should not have to compete with prisons for state funding. We need to prioritize public education as an inalienable right and transition towards making the institution very affordable, if not cost-free to students.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a record 19.7 million students were expected to attend American colleges and universities in Fall 2011 -  an increase of about 4.4 million since 2000.

Some have argued that through charging students more for their studies, the government will gain more money and use it to supplement lacking tax revenue. From the perspective of public school officials like the CSU board of trustees, an increase in tuition fees seems like the only solution to a shrinking educational budget during one of the worst recessions in history.

The problem lies in allocation. Because funding for both institutions come from the same California General Fund, prisons and universities are actually in competition with each other. According to research by California Common Sense, California’s higher education received 13 percent less state funding in 2011 than it did in 1980, while funding for prisons expanded 436 percent during the same period.

Dr. Tracy Lachica Buenavista, who teaches research methods in the department of Asian American studies, stated that though the relationship between education funding and the “prison industrial complex” is complicated, there is an identifiable correlation between the two.

“Research that has found that access to education is a deterrent to incarceration,” said Buenavista. “If they have an access to education, they are less likely to be incarcerated.”

Our budget priorities also impact the number of participants each institution can serve and maintain. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the total prison population in California was 124,00 in June – 155 percent above “design capacity.” The age group that spends most time behind bars are those between 20-24 year old – a common age for college students.
By divesting from education, we are possibly increasing the population most prone to getting caught up in the prison system – the socio-economically disadvantaged.

“There is a larger police presence in areas that are more economically disenfranchised,” said Buenavista. “The likelihood that low-income and poor people will be policed or incarcerated is greater.”

Not only does higher education deter young people from prisons, education can sometimes be the only opportunity for low-income people to lift themselves out of poverty or low social status.
“Without viable access to higher education, people who are economically disenfranchised are more likely to have just three options for life opportunities: low paying jobs, the military, and incarceration,” said Buenavista. “Without higher education, those who find themselves in poverty don’t have much opportunity for socio-economic mobility.”

Divesting from education impacts existing students. It is likely that the number one reason why students drop out of higher education is that they can no longer afford the high cost of tuition. A 2011 survey titled “Trends in College Pricing,” conducted by the College Board shows that the average cost for tuition and fees at four-year public institutions has increased nearly 51 percent over the last 10 years.

“Today, more so than any other time in California’s history, the government is giving the least amount in funding to higher education than it has ever given,” said Buenavista. “The students have to fund their higher education, rather than it being subsidized by the government.”

By contrast, college education is free and funded by the government in many other industrialized, first-world countries, such as Sweden. Many critics point out that the taxes in Sweden are relatively higher because they fund social services such as education and health care. But when education is treated as a societal benefit rather than a private good, it will not only benefit students, but likely decrease the prison population.

According to a 2010 report by The International Center for Prison Studies, the US has both the largest incarcerated population and the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, with 748 inmates per 100,000 residents. Meanwhile, Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population.
Having a degree typically results in gaining higher levels of employment and earnings. With a free and fair education system, the likelihood of people relying on public money for welfare is decreased. When the responsibility to fund the education system is taken seriously by governments, we will be on track to ending systemic inequality and help all our people to succeed, regardless of individual circumstance.

– Muna Adem is a Communications and Journalism double major and international student from Sweden. 

California Defies Lower-Tax Texas in Creating More Jobs

California, which sent a delegation to Austin last year to find out how the Lone Star State had beat it in employment growth, surged ahead of Texas to lead the nation in job creation for the last two consecutive months.

California added 365,100 nonfarm jobs in the year ending in July, a 2.6 percent increase and the state’s largest 12-month gain since 2000. Texas picked up 222,500, or 2.1 percent, according to U.S. Labor Department statistics. California also outpaced Texas the prior month.

Texas led California in job creation in 18 of the last 24 months, since August 2010, the first month both states posted employment gains following the longest recession since the 1930s. The latest numbers show that California has defied comparisons with financially troubled Greece, including a joking reference by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney earlier this month.

“What these new figures do is drive a stake through these weak Republican talking points,” said Gil Duran, a spokesman for California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown. “California jobs are coming back at a higher rate here. We hope that happens everywhere.”

To be sure, California is the only state where three cities have filed for bankruptcy in the past two months. The state’s unemployment rate of 10.7 percent in July was the third-highest in the U.S., trailing only Nevada and Rhode Island. Texas ranked 30th with a jobless rate of 7.2 percent, beating the national average of 8.3 percent.

Austin Delegation

Texas’s economic performance impressed California Assemblyman Dan Logue enough that the Republican from Linda organized a delegation of California lawmakers and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who was San Francisco mayor, to Austin in April 2011.

California’s job picture reflects the depth of the recession in the state, where the economy relies more on housing and construction than energy-dependent Texas, said Christopher Thornberg, principal of Beacon Economics LLC in Los Angeles.

“California got hit a lot harder than Texas during the downturn,” Thornberg said. “We hit the ground pretty damn hard, so you’d expect more of a bounce back.”

The increase runs counter to the notion that growth favors states with lower taxes. California, the world’s ninth-biggest economy, has the highest statewide sales tax in the U.S., at 7.25 percent. That would rise to 7.5 percent if voters approve a November ballot initiative. The income tax rate for those making $1 million or more a year, now 10.3 percent, would rise to 13.3 percent, the most of any state.

Income Tax

Texas, the 13th largest economy if it were a country, has no income tax. Most state revenue comes from a 6.25 percent sales levy.

“Texas is still the model for job creation and economic growth in this country,” said Josh Havens, a spokesman for Governor Rick Perry, a Republican.

The state that was once a sovereign nation will maintain economic growth by following Perry’s policies of “low taxes, restrained spending, reasonable and predictable regulations, and a fair judicial system,” Havens said by e-mail.

Texas has higher general-obligation credit ratings than California from both Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, meaning the state can borrow at more favorable rates. Both states received top ratings for short-term notes they sold in August. Texas completed a $9.8 billion sale of one-year notes Aug. 21 at yields of 0.23 percent, a week after California paid 0.33 percent to 0.43 percent on $10 billion in short-term notes.

State Rivalry

The rivalry between the two most-populous U.S. states came into relief in April 2011 when 10 Republicans and a Democrat from California’s Legislature, accompanied by Newsom, visited Texas to study its job-creation strategies. That month, Texas’s year-over-year job growth of 254,400 was more than 100,000 higher than California’s.
Logue attributes much of the growth to early implementation of President Barack Obama’s health-care program. Educational and health-care employment grew 3 percent in the year ended in July, California’s Employment Development Department reported. The biggest increase was in professional and business services, at 5.4 percent.
Newsom, a Democrat elected separately from Brown, said lingering difficulties such as negative equity on 2 million homes in the state’s Central Valley threaten to hold back California’s recovery.

‘Structural Problems’

“We may have another year or two of a recovery based on low-hanging fruit, but we still haven’t dealt with our structural problems,” Newsom said. “It’s good to be on the other side of bragging rights in terms of our competitive position with Texas, but we need to be cautious about reading too much into that.”

California and Texas have different strengths. Texas has a lower cost of living and fewer regulations, while California has a more educated workforce and availability of venture capital, said Ray Perryman, a Waco, Texas-based economist.

“Both states have fiscal challenges, though California’s is somewhat more severe,” Perryman said by e-mail. “Texas has had the lead in that arena for some time, but long-term investments in education and infrastructure (primarily roads and water resource development) will be needed to sustain it.”

Moving Out?

Andrew Puzder, an executive who joined California’s delegation to Texas, said he’s no longer considering moving his company’s headquarters from Carpinteria to escape the state’s taxes and regulations. Puzder is chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants Inc., which operates the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains.

Most economic recoveries are led by manufacturing and construction, with professional services gaining afterward, said Puzder, co-author of the book “Job Creation: How It Really Works and Why Government Doesn’t Understand It.”

“Professional and business services are people who generally are not involved in creating wealth,” Puzder said. “They’re involved in managing and directing wealth.”

To contact the reporters on this story: James Nash in Los Angeles at jnash24@bloomberg.net; Darrell Preston in Dallas at dpreston@bloomberg.net

Via Bloomberg