WitnessLA has acquired some interesting documents this week regarding the ongoing dispute around LAUSD’s choice not to select the lowest bidder when, this past December, it awarded the district’s five year contract for waste management—which is a fancy way of saying trash and recycling pick up.

The contract is worth tens of millions of dollars so—given all the cuts elsewhere in the district—although usually we don’t spend LOTS of time thinking about the waste management business, it is in all of our best interest that LAUSD gets the most bang for its buck, even when it comes to garbage collection.

A recently filed lawsuit contends that the district is not getting the most for its money at all due to an improper bidding process.

Here’s the back story leading up to the dispute:

HOW THE LOS ANGELES SCHOOL DISTRICT DECIDES WHO TAKES OUT THE TRASH

Every five years, the Los Angeles Unified School District awards some worthy company or other the contract pick up the district’s waste. In order to select the vender, an RFP (Request for Proposal) goes out, specifying the scope and requirements of the job and what kinds of companies may bid. Then bids and proposals come back in, and the district gives the contract to the firm with the lowest bid, as long as other general criteria laid out in the RFP are met.

On December 6, 2011, however, LAUSD handed its business for the district’s newest waste management contract, not to the low bid company, which was a firm called BMAKK Apex, whose bid came it at $30 million. Instead LAUSD gave its business to Consolidated Disposal Service, for $40 million—-or a price tag that was a not inconsiderable $10 million higher for what is reportedly the same scope of service.

(Originally Consolidated’s bid reportedly came in even higher, at $50 million, but we’ll get to all that in a minute.)

To make matters more confusing, BMAKK Apex is a combination of a couple of companies who had the LAUSD waste contract for the previous five years, according to their president, Anthony Uwakwe, with no complaint and plenty of praise. (Although we’ve not confirmed these evaluations.)

Only three companies qualified to be able to put in bids at all, BMAKK Apex, Consolidated, and a third big LA County company, WM or Waste Management.

According to the RFP, in addition to the bids, each of the three firms had to make a technical proposal based on the district’s published criteria explaining how they’d carry out their services, et al. The three proposals—with the company names redacted—- were given to a panel of experts who then rated the proposals on a point system.

BMAKK Apex got the most points of the three, plus it had the lowest price, at $30 million. Whereas WM came in second, with Consolidated reportedly coming in third out of three with a bid price—at that time—of $50 million, a full $20 million higher than BMAKK Apex.

At that point, BMAKK figured they’d won the contract process, but unexpectedly the district said, no, that there would be a round of interviews to clear up a few questions.

The interviews took place, BMAKK figured they’d done fine, but after the interviews were completed the companies were informed that the new metric for handing out the contracts would be as follows: 30 percent for the bid price, 70 percent for the interview, and 0 percent for the points gathered from the previously scored blind proposal process, which the district folks had now decided to toss out entirely.

And, with this new interview-centric process, the contract was awarded to Consolidated, which had the “most comprehensive program,” the other two companies were told, although “comprehensive” was reportedly not defined, nor—according to BMAKK Apex—-were the losing companies provided with any reports or documentation from the interviews that would explain the discrepancy in the process and outcomes, that differed so greatly from the process that the district had used in past years.

As mentioned above, originally, Consolidated bid $50 million, but then the number reportedly got dropped to $40 million after the other companies questioned the humungous dollar discrepancy.

When the contract was awarded, LAUSD sent out a memo saying that, under the new contract, Consolidated Disposal Service, would be doing more aggressive recycling efforts with the schools, thus cutting still further the amount of junk that ended up in the public landfill, all worthy goals to be sure. But BMAKK says that it offered similar outcomes for less money.

In any case, unhappy at what they saw as an inexplicable contract decision, BMAKK Apex filed suit on March 31, asking the court to overrule LAUSD’s circumventing of their own RFP process.

WitnessLA has acquired a copy of the court filing.

Predictably, LAUSD asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. The court has declined, saying that BMAKK Apex may proceed.

IF YOU FIND YOU DON’T LIKE FOLLOWING THE RULES—CHANGE THE STINKING RULES

Today, Tuesday, LAUSD’s Chief Operating Officer will ask the school board to vote to amend the district’s procurement manual—after the fact—to retroactively make this non-low-bid contract awarding okay, now that it’s being challenged in court.

Certainly, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the district’s new oddball bidding process that has resulted in a contract going to the highest bidder, not the lowest one.

However, according to section 20111 of the California Public Contract Code, which would sure appear to govern such transactions, the parameters are pretty clear. To wit:

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A song for May Day, 2012, “Jack of All Trades”

THE FBI HEROICALLY STINGS, THEN LOCKS UP INEPT AND RIDICULOUS ANARCHISTS ON MAY DAY

This is from Alex Pareen at Salon. It will make you very sad for the FBI, very sad for the idiotic anarchists, very, VERY sad for the rest of us who are paying our hard earned tax dollars to fund this nonsense. A clip:

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park….

To give you an idea of the…um.. ept-ness of the group: among their discussed strategies to avoid capture was to get tacks to throw in the road behind them in the event of a chase.

The LA Times also reports on the arrest, albeit in a more serious tone.

PEW CENTER FINDS WARM & TRUSTING FEELINGS ABOUT SCOTUS REACH A QUARTER CENTURY LOW

Yeah, now that’s a shocker. (cough) Bush v. Gore, Citizens United (cough, cough).

Actually, the interesting part is that the grim view of the Supremes is shared almost identically by Democrats, Republicans and independents. Moreover the survey was taken right after the health care hearings in the high court. So where ever you fell ideologically on the matter, it seems you were mighty disgruntled. Or at least half of those surveyed were.

Check out the rest here.

ADULT ED: SHOULD LAUSD REALLY TURN ITS BACK ON A QUARTER MILLION STUDENTS?

Former Adult Ed teacher John McCormick challenges the wisdom of eviscerating adult education in Los Angeles in an LA Times Op Ed. Here’s a clip from the center of the essay:

….The repercussions of cutting or losing adult education would extend far beyond the staffs and students at the schools. Many local businesses, such as pharmacies, hire students who have been certified by adult school skill centers. High school dropouts return to adult school to get their diplomas. Eliminating adult schools would diminish the workforce. And people who make less money pay less in taxes, they spend less, and they often have to depend more on government to meet their basic needs.

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

THE OTHER BIG SUPREME COURT CASE: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin writes about another potentially far reaching US Supreme Court case that we should all be tracking. As usual everything rests on Justice Kennedy. Here’ a clip from Toobin’s story:

As the legal and political worlds await the Supreme Court’s verdict on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Justices have another case in the near future which may prove nearly as significant. The health-care case will be decided by June, but next fall the Court will return, perhaps for the last time, to the fraught subject of affirmative action in university admissions.

The facts of the new case are straightforward. Abigail Fisher, a white high-school student in Sugar Land, Texas, was rejected for admission to the University of Texas-Austin. The state requires all students in the top ten per cent of their high-school classes to be admitted to state universities, but students who fall just short of that threshold, like Fisher, are admitted according to a formula; race is one factor in the equation. Fisher’s lawsuit is based on a claim that any consideration of race by a university in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case amounts to a direct challenge to the most famous decision authored by Sandra Day O’Connor during her long and consequential service on the Court. In 2003, the Court held, by a vote of five to four, that the University of Michigan Law School could consider race as one factor among many in determining whom to admit. In Grutter v. Bollinger, O’Connor said that diversity was such an important goal in American life that universities could engage in some level of race-consciousness in screening candidates. But O’Connor’s opinion imposed a time limit:

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

Now, less than a decade after her ruling, the Court appears poised to throw it out….

“SAVING OUR SONS: A COMMUNITY CONVERSATION” WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT LA TRADE TECH

This is from the press release on the event, which is sponsored by a bunch of good folks:

California Community Foundation invites parents, educators, employers, community, civic and religious leaders, and all concerned members of the public to participate in a historic town hall on the need to change and improve conditions for Black male youth in Los Angeles that are adversely affecting their futures.

Twenty years after the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Black male youth have significant challenges related to their educational and employment prospects. Additionally, while Black male youth make up 10 percent of L.A. County’s youth population, they comprise approximately 33 percent of all youth under probation supervision.

The event on May 2 is supported by Brotherhood Crusade, Community Coalition, Liberty Hill Foundation, Los Angeles Urban league, Youth Justice Coalition, Youth Mentoring Connection, and the Office of the Mayor, City of Los Angeles, and will feature a personal appearance by actor and activist Larenz Tate (TV’s “Rescue Me”, and films such as, “Ray”, “Love Jones”, “Crash”, and “Menace II Society”).

The event will take place on Wednesday, May 2, at 6 p.m., in the North Tent at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College, 1937 Grand Ave., Los Angeles 90015

Photo by David Maxwell, European Pressphoto Agency / May 1, 2012

LYRICS FOR “A JACK OF ALL TRADES”

…after the jump

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by Taylor Walker

CAN MARRIED GAYS DIVORCE IN NON-GAY MARRIAGE STATES?

Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy reported Monday

on a same-sex couple seeking divorce in Maryland, where gay marriage itself has not been legalized.

Here’s a clip:

The electronic board outside the courtroom identified the case as “No. 69, Jessica Port v. Virginia Anne Cowan.” That title is misleading. Port and Cowan are on the same side of this case: They both want to get divorced. But a Prince George’s County judge said they could not, reasoning that because same-sex marriage is not legal in the state, neither is same-sex divorce.

Now the highest court in Maryland will decide whether he was right, and whether the women will be required to maintain a bond they’ve tried for almost two years to sever. The case represents just one of the many blind spots in the legal infrastructure of same-sex marriage in America. Couples often have different rights when they cross jurisdictional lines and may not have the same status in the eyes of the federal government as they do in their home states. The laws are constantly evolving and election-year politics promise to heighten the already divisive passion surrounding the issue.

VISIONARY LEADER OR AUTOCRATIC BULLY? WHY DO THOSE WHO WORK WITH LAUSD’S SUPT. JOHN DEASY SEEM TO EITHER LOVE OR LOATH HIM?

The LA Times’ Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume took a look at LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy’s aggressive methods for cleaning up the K-12 school system and the wildly divergent opinions of his efforts thus far.

Here’s a clip:

…Deasy is pushing to change the culture of a behemoth school system with 660,000 students on 743 campuses across 710 square miles of urban sprawl. Some see Deasy as a dynamic leader driven by a moral urgency to give all students a quality education. But others view him as a relentless taskmaster intolerant of dissent.

“Either you do what he wants or you’re gone,” said one senior administrator who, like most senior aides and top administrators contacted, asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Antonia Hernandez, president of the California Community Foundation, is one of many civic leaders who believes Deasy should press harder to improve a district where just over half the students graduate on time and half are not proficient in reading and math.

“We all know what LAUSD has been doing in the past hasn’t worked,” she said. “He needs to be even more aggressive. People are hungry for leadership.”

Deasy admits he can be impatient and undiplomatic but otherwise makes no apologies for his style. He says he wants to find common ground with teachers and administrators; consensus is his preference rather than his priority.

THE NY TIMES ASKS WHY IN SOME STATES KIDS ARE STILL HOUSED WITH ADULTS IN ADULT PRISONS A NY Times Sunday Op Ed called on the DOJ to reform the juvenile justice system nationwide and eliminate the unethical placement of youth in adult facilities. An estimated 10,000 youths under 18 can be found in adult jails or prisons on any given day, according to federal statistics. As [32 members of Congress] pointed out, data from a 2005 study showed that youths made up only 1 percent of the inmates in jails and prisons, but 21 percent of the victims of sexual violence.

Numerous studies show that placing children in adult prisons leads to more suicide, victimization and recidivism, which is costly in both human and economic terms.

EDITOR’S NOTE; A RALLY FOR KENDRIC MCDADE WILL BE HELD TUES. 6 PM ON THE STEPS OF PASADENA CITY HALL

According the the email from the Youth Justice Coalition, the NAACP of Pasadena will be attending, so will the Pasadena Foothill ACLU, the League of Women Voters, the Pasadena Community Coalition, various religious leaders and a list of others.

Chronic truancy is a daunting problem in districts all over California, but it’s far worse in the Los Angeles Unified School District where nearly one fourth of the district’s middle-school students are chronically absent from school.

What is even more alarming is that an identical number of LA’s kindergartners— 22.7 percent—are also chronically absent from their classrooms.

(Chronic absence” is defined as missing 10 percent of the school year for excused or unexcused reasons.)

Fortunately, not every school district in the state has those miserably high truancy numbers.

In fact, earlier this week, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced that 11 districts have been designated as models of attendance improvement and dropout prevention by the State School Attendance Review Board. The 11 model districts, which include Alhambra, Montebello, San Bernardino and San Diego, will be given awards at a conference in April.

““There’s a very basic fact that is often overlooked: Even the best teacher can’t help students who don’t make it to school,” Torlakson said in a written statement. “These [districts] are proving that there are highly effective strategies for improving attendance and reducing the dropout rate”

After new research pointed to chronic absence as a key indicator of a kid’s academic future, reducing absenteeism became a major focus for Torlakson’s administration, which is trying to find low coast ways to motivate districts to identify students who are are missing too much school, and then intervene early.

“And by early, that means kindergarten, says David Kopperud, the chairperson of the state’s School Attendance Review Board. “We thought the problem began in middle school and high school,” Kopperud told me. “But it starts way before that. It turns out that even kindergarten is important because that’s when students learn beginning reading skills.” Once kids fall behind in their first three years, he said, the slide can all too easily become cumulative until, by middle school they’re in trouble.

“Now they’re too far behind to catch up, and so the next thing is, they start to misbehave.”

School suspensions follow the misbehavior, which means more classwork in missed.

“In a lot of schools,” Kopperud said, “20 percent of their absences are due to suspensions. And we find that schools with high suspension rates, have a high drop out rate.” It’s what other experts call the push out factor. And pretty soon you have this really large population that is lost to law enforcement.”

So what to do?

“We’re learning that the best kind of drop-out intervention, is prevention,” said Kopperud. “But that means analyzing the school attendance data so that you have a good early warning system to tell you when kids are missing too much school, and then intervening aggressively.”

But aggressive and timely intervention requires the personnel to do the intervening—at a time when districts like LAUSD are in a frenzy of cutbacks.

So that’s where the awards come in..

Kopperud said that he and his board members hope that the other districts will look at the honorees and think, hey, if those guys over there can improve , we can too. “So we’re handing out certificates and plaques,” he said.

“It’s a reminder that there are places where, despite the odds, they’re beating them,” said Kopperud. “So it can be done. Even in this economy, it can be done.”

Let’s hope LAUSD takes note. So far what they’ve done districtwide is….not much. (Unless you count paying consultants fat fees to produce this and that report and analysis, without any appreciable follow-up that would change outcomes for actual kids.)

AND IN OTHER KID-RELATED NEWS…… AN OPPONENT OF OPENING OF JUVENILE DEPENDENCY COURT SLAMS LA TIMES COVERAGE OF COURT HEARINGS AS HARMING KIDS

Whittier Law School professor William Wesley Patton evidently slammed LA Times editor-at-large Jim Newton for his coverage of LA’s newly-opened child dependency court in an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (which is hidden behind a hefty pay wall, or I’d link to it).

Newton, who wrote two excellent columns about his visits to court in the weeks since Judge Michael Nash ordered the opening of the long-secret proceedings to the press (here and here), decided not to simply ignore the slam, but to point out its truthiness. Here’s a clip:

The shift from holding almost all Dependency Court hearings in private to declaring a presumptive openness of those proceedings to the press is understandably upsetting to those accustomed to working in private. It is hard to have prying eyes where once there were none.

And yet, what is often lost in the resistance to change is what is most important. The interests of children are, of course, paramount in all of this, but those who side with Patton, in my view, see those interests too narrowly. Secrecy in Dependency Court has protected social workers, lawyers and even judges who perform poorly from being held to answer for their work. We would never tolerate such immunity from scrutiny in our adult and family courts, nor should we when the stakes are even higher — the preservation of an opportunity for children who have done no wrong. In the end, the victims of secrecy in Dependency Court are children whose caretakers are allowed to fail them without consequence; the beneficiaries of a more open system would be children as well.

So far, the experiment in Los Angeles Dependency Court is bearing out that argument. Perhaps that’s why Patton distorts it.

What Jim said.

COMMENTARY AFTER WATCHING SIX HOURS OF HEALTH TESTIMONY AT SCOTUS.….

Dalia Lithwick of Slate sounds stunned and depressed after Wednesday’s round of arguments….

Amid all the three-day psychodrama, it’s easy to get confused about what’s happened and what hasn’t. Court watchers seem to generally agree that the individual mandate is in real peril and will rise or fall with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. Court watchers also agree that 19th-century tax law—while generally adorable—will not prevent the justices from deciding the case by July. And they also agree that they may have counted five justices who appear willing to take the whole law down, along with the mandate, and the Medicaid expansion as well.

But the longer they talked, the harder it was to say. A lot of today’s discussion started to sound like justices just free-associating about things in the law they didn’t like. That doesn’t reveal all that much about the interplay between the four separate challenges—what happens when they all have to be looked at together—or anything at all about what will happen at conference or in the drafting of opinions. Could the five conservative justices strike down the entire health care law, and take us into what Kagan described this morning as a “revolution”? They could. Will they? I honestly have no idea anymore. As silent retreats go, this one was a lot less enlightening than I’d hoped.

While Adam Teicholz at the Atlantic wonders morosely…but interestingly…. if bloggers killed the health care mandate before it got to court…

Back in early 2010, before the 26 state attorneys general, before the angry protests and the breathless headlines, before the six hours of oral argument at the nation’s highest court, the legal challenge to the individual mandate was greeted with head-scratching skepticism. The constitutional argument was dismissed by many Court-watchers. A week after the first challenge was filed, one liberal scholar suggested the claims were so frivolous that the lawyers could face sanctions.

Now, however, the atmosphere has changed, “and that,” Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, told me last week, is in part “a testament” to the persistence of a small group of conservative and libertarian attorneys. In the last few days, Politico and the New York Times have shone a light on Randy Barnett, the Georgetown Law professor who has taken on the dual role, unusual for an appellate lawyer, of spearheading advocacy both in court and in more public forums.

[BIG SNIP]

Blogs — particularly a blog of big legal ideas called Volokh Conspiracy — have been central to shifting the conversation about the mandate challenges. At Volokh, Barnett and other libertarian academics have been debating and refining their arguments against the mandate since before the ACA was signed. At the beginning, law professor Jonathan Adler fleshed out the approach that came to typify the elite conservative response for the first months of the public debate: the Founders never intended for the Constitution to permit such broad federal power, but given New Deal-era precedent, the mandate, if it became law, would pass muster. Things changed on Volokh around the time that it became clear that an insurance mandate would be part of whichever health care reform package passed into law.

One congressional floor speech seemed to mark a tonal turning point for Volokh, the moment its writers realized their power to shape debate…..

AND IN GOOD LASD NEWS…..A DRAMATIC AIR-5 RESCUE SAVES WOMAN’S LIFE AFTER CRASH

Amid the Aero Bureau controversies, it’s important to remember the great work LASD pilots do day in and day out, both in patrol and rescue. Here’s a KTLA report of the most recent dramatic example of Air-5’s rescue work. (Scroll down for the video.)

LAUSD BOARD GRITS TEETH….THEN SLASHES AND BURNS: VOTES TO CUT ALL ADULT SCHOOLS….AND A LOT MORE, HOPES THAT A PARCEL TAX & UNION CONCESSIONS WILL SAVE ALL

The LA Times Stephen Ceasar reports:

The Los Angeles Board of Education approved a preliminary, worst-case $6-billion budget Tuesday, a plan that would eliminate thousands of jobs, close all of the district’s adult schools and cut some after-school and arts programs.

But Supt. John Deasy presented a less severe deficit than initially expected to the board and several scenarios that would restore millions in funding and save some programs from either elimination or partial cuts before the budget is finalized. Much of that, however, is contingent on voters’ passing the governor’s tax initiative in November, which he hopes would stave off more education cuts.

“I can say that this budget, even with its clear and present dangers, remains a budget of hope,” said board member Steve Zimmer. Deasy then interjected, “I don’t want to hope, I want to plan.”

The very excellent Tami Abdollah of KPCC has LOTS more.

KCET’S SO CAL CONNECTED GOES INSIDE CHILDREN’S DEPENDENCY COURT, FINDS POTENTIAL DISASTERS

KCET’s So Cal Connected (which has been on a roll in the past year) brought cameras inside LA’s children’s dependency court, and saw a lot that alarmed producer Karen Foshay, and correspondent Jennifer London.

The first of the resulting episodes aired last Friday. The second will air this coming Friday, March 16.

Both episodes demonstrate why Judge Michael Nash’s controversial order to open the court to the press is so important—despite the loud protests by those who thought reporters would trample on the rights of the children whose lives were being decided at these formerly closed proceedings.

Here’s what KCET had to say about episode 2, titled Courting Disaster.

Los Angeles County’s Dependency Court is the largest in the nation, handling 25,000 children. For the first time television cameras were granted access, revealing in graphic detail how deep budget cuts are devastating our justice system and putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk. We profile Judge Amy Pellman who is scheduled to hear 33 family cases in six hours, sometimes deciding a child’s fate in as little as three minutes. We meet parents who have completed counseling programs and are hoping the judge will grant them custody of their son. But other parents are stuck, unable to get into overcrowded programs that are required in order to get their children back.

We see how judges and attorneys often learn the facts of a case only minutes before the case is heard; how attorneys who are supposed to represent 160 children are burdened with 240 cases. More delays and backlogs are inevitable as 300 layoffs and 50 courtroom closures are scheduled to occur in L.A. County, following a statewide $650 million slash in funding.

California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakaueye says “I think its devastating to be told to come back in four months and that we’ll hear your case on child custody. What’s a person to do in four months?”

Hell, we certainly wouldn’t want reporters looking into any of that.

And, by the way, So Cal Connected focused on exactly the sort of thing that has rarely been adequately reported. We will hear about the ghastly tragedy of a child dying at the hands of abusive parents, but we rarely hear about the everyday tragedies that occur when a system with the power to save or ruin the lives of children and families is overburdened.

CA DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS OUTLINES NEW POLICIES FOR HANDLING PRISON GANGS, AND FOR CLASSIFYING PRISONERS AS TO RISK

As the CDCR rightly states, California prisons manage “the most violent and sophisticated prison gangs in the nation.” Sadly, yes. That’s about right. And much of that management in the past has been to crack down hard, and then crack down some more.

How has this strategy worked out? Not all that well, actually—at least in the long term. Or as the CDCR put it, “Although this [suppression only] strategy reduced violence in prisons, it lacked prevention, deterrent and interdiction components.”

So what did the CDCR do? To their great credit, after 25 years of ever-more aggressive crack downs, they decided to stop and really examine the problem, and then try to institute the most effective methods to solve it, rather than the methods they’d always used.

Here is the report on the new methods that have resulted.

I’ll tell you about the report in more detail in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that it’s quite smart—and, among other things, gives gang members who are willing, a step-by-step road out that is rehabilitative rather than punitive.

It is also good news to note that, in a separate but related report, the CDCR has redone it’s risk classification system. In short, they found that they were overclassifying and/or misclassifying prisoners, which they discovered did greater damage to the prisoners and to public safety, then did underclassing them. Research showed that prisoners who were overclassified—i.e. put in more restrictive units than their behavior warranted—were more likely to act out, more likely to learn criminal behavior from the truly hard cases, and more likely to do poorly when they paroled. (Here’s the report.)

More on this too at another time. In any case, it’s really, really good to see the CDCR stepping up and doing the right thing in these crucial but difficult areas.

Go CDCR!

PS: It’s important to note that many of these reform elements were requested by the prison hunger strikers of last year, during the hunger strike that began at Pelican Bay’s SHU (Secure Housing Unit) and then spread throughout the system.

PPS: As the CDCR points out, these changes are made possible by the population relief brought by realignment, which is exactly right. Despite all the wailing, realignment is wise and necessary. Change is painful in the beginning, but under Jerry Brown’s governorship, Matt Cate and the CDCR is actually starting to slowly but steadily make genuine progress.

ANIMAL ADOPTIONS UPS—AND SO IS EUTHANASIA IN LA’S SHELTERS

Commissioners resigning, euthanasia is up, three of the five commissioners who oversee the Department of Animal Services have recently resigned thus paralyzing the department, a million dogs are running around LA unlicensed, is LA’s critter oversight a mess? Warren Olney with Which Way LA? wades into the issue.

AUTOPSY SHOWS JAIL INMATE’S DEATH LIKELY CAUSED BY DRUGS GIVEN HIM FOR MENTAL ILLNESS

LAT’S Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard report.

CALIF. PRISON INMATE FINDS HE HAS TALENT FOR SCHOLARSHIP IN HIEROGLYPHICS

Read this very cool Column One story in the LA Times by Thomas H. Maugh II.

Photo by KPCC’s new education reporter Tami Abdollah

SHUTTING DOWN ADULT ED WILL MEAN A TEN PERCENT HIGHER HIGH SCHOOL DROP OUT RATE, SAYS LAUSD’S OWN PROJECTIONS.

BUT IT WILL ALSO AFFECT THE LIVES OF THOUSANDS OF LA RESIDENTS TRYING TO REACH FOR A NEW FUTURE

On Tuesday, March 13, the Los Angeles Unified School board will vote on the question of whether or not the district’s Adult Education program will continue to exist.

Right now the odds against Adult Ed surviving are not considered to be good.

In the newest draft of the district’s so-called worst case budget, which WitnessLA has obtained, all 24 of the district’s adult ad schools are scheduled to have their doors slammed closed.

There are also huge cuts schedule for the district’s arts education and LAUSD’s gifted and talented programs (GATE). The ranks of school nurses and librarians are decimated. And a bunch of continuation schools are marked for shuttering.

But it is the approximately 300,000 adult school students and their teachers who have been the most active in protesting the truly ruinous slashing of their adult ed programs. While the ongoing demonstrations (like the one above at West Valley Occupational Center) have surprised and rattled the board, in the end it still appears that adult ed will be hit by some of the most crippling cuts, which will, in turn, affect thousands and thousands of worried students.

Supt. John Deasy has said repeatedly that he’ll do whatever he needs to do in order not to not raise class sizes in the K-12 grades.

Never mind that in in a recent report sent to the LAUSD board by the Superintendent’s office (that WLA has obtained), according to the district’s own calculations one of the impacts in cutting adult ed is that “the district’s drop out rate would increase by approximately ten percent as students who have fallen behind would not be able to attend adult schools for credit recovery and therefor not graduate.”

[You can read the report yourself here. Scroll to p. 48 for the Impact Statement.]

An increased drop out rate is, however, just one of the impacts that closing adult ed would have on its students, present and future—as evidenced by the stories below.

A FORMER HOMEGIRL EXPLAINS WHY ADULT SCHOOLS MUST STAY OPEN

“See, everybody’s freaked, because of how much this school means to us,” said a 34-year old mother named Rosa, who is a student at West Valley Occupational Center, where approximately 20,000 students a year take classes in ESL, GED prep, various job training and vocational programs…and more.

Rosa (who asked me not to use her last name) said that her adult school classes have changed her life.

Rosa explained that she is a former gang member who grew up in an abusive household and who, during the early years of her life, thought very little about her future.

She managed to leave her gang with the help of a boyfriend whom she eventually married. But her new husband had his own problems; he was addicted to rock cocaine, which gradually led to a spiral downward. “He didn’t know how to fit into society,” she said.
Rosa was three months pregnant with her second child when her husband was shot dead on the street.

After her husband’s death, Rosa kept the household together the best she could for the sake of her kids. But then in 2009, she was fired from her job. Her boss liked her, she said, but told Rosa that her skills weren’t up to par.

“I didn’t know how to type or use the computer. I mean, I was typing with one finger,” Rosa said with a small laugh.

For the next two years, while Rosa searched for employment, she lived at her mom’s house, got by on public assistance, and tried to be a good mother. But she felt terrible about herself. “After the kids went to school, and I cleaned up the house, I’d just sleep. I didn’t want to do anything. Finally I realized, I was really depressed, you know?”

Rosa understood she had to make a change—if not for herself then for her children. A man who was mentoring her son (as part of the mayor’s GRYD program), gave her some advice. Go back to school, he said.

“I told him I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough to go to school.” she said. “And I meant it.”

But the mentor pushed her. So in September of last year, she enrolled in three classes: office Procedures. Business English, and computer basics.

“I took business English because I needed to learn to talk better to be in the business world.”

Now she’s taking another three: Typing, and Computer Software Application, and Physical Therapy. She goes to class for four hours in the morning and four at night.

“I know if I keep working, I can really make something of myself. And I want to give my kids a better future,” said Rosa.

“This school has changed my life. It changes a lot of people’s lives. That’s why it’s so important they don’t close it down.

“We’re the future,” Rosa said. “Our kids are the future. But to get to that future we need the help that we get from these schools.

“If they close down, what will people like me do? Where will we go to get the skills we need? Really, where?”

THE LETTER WRITING CAMPAIGN

Students from West Valley and other adult ed schools have been writing piles of letters to Supt. Deasy, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and anyone else whom they could think of who might have some influence on the future of adult ed.

Rosa’s letter is below along with that of a woman named Nancy who, like Rosa, is taking classes to “meet employers’ requirements”….”so that I can show my daughter and everyone in my life that I’ve made it, after 10 years of being out of school.”

Her story is also a compelling one, as you’ll see when you read her letter.

[CLICK TWICE ON THUMBNAILS TO MAKE LARGE ENOUGH TO READ]

NOTE: Aaron Liu writing for Neon Tommy has an excellent story on the proposed adult ed cuts and student reaction.

We have heard that Los Angeles Unified School District Adult and Career Education director, Ed Morris, was fired on Tuesday afternoon.

According to our source, Morris received the news around 4 pm from Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Jaime Aquino, who is Morris’ direct supervisor.

There is no word yet on why Morris was let go.

The news came on the same day that WitnessLA reported statements made by Morris (and to a lessor degree, Deasy) in an interview with an NPR reporter, in the course of which Morris harshly denigrated the value of the GED test.

Adult Ed teachers found the remarks particularly egregious in that GED prep classes have long-been considered an important part of the Adult Ed curriculum—the budget for which is on the chopping block, its fate scheduled to be voted on by the LAUSD board in mid March.

More as we are able to confirm it.

UPDATE: A number of sources yesterday confirmed that Morris was escorted out of the building and put on leave. However, most of those we spoke with on Wednesday who know him personally assured us that Ed Morris is, in fact, very much in support of the Adult Ed program, and that it is Deasy who seems determined to dismantle it.

Some adult eduction teachers with whom I’m acquainted sent me a link to this NPR story that explores whether a GED—or General Education Development test— is a valuable credential for people who have dropped out of school to acquire. In delving into the question, the story cited a study indicating that a high school diploma was better than a GED. (Duh!) NPR reporter Claudio Sanchez also talked to a management official from the GED testing service who told him they are working hard to improve the design of the test, to make it a better tool for both college and career readiness, and that a new and improved version will be out in 2014.

In addition to the above, however, the story had embedded in it interview clips with two Los Angeles educators. One of the interviews is with our own LAUSD Superintendent Dr. John Deasy, and the other features the head of LAUSD’s Adult Eduction program, Ed Morris.

Neither man had anything good to say about the GED. In fact, they were both fairly withering in their assessments.

“The GED is a credential. Is it adequate for gainful employment and a living wage in the United States of America today? I do not think so,” said Deasy.

Morris went still further.

“If I were prepared today with a GED,” he told NPR’s Sanchez, “and that’s what I had as an 18-year-old, I’d be scared to death of the future.”

My! What a helpful outlook.

The adult ed teachers with whom I spoke, and their colleagues who had also heard the interviews,- (some of whom have even taught those poor deluded adult students who still want GEDs)—-were utterly incensed to hear their two top bosses say publicly they saw little or no value in something they—the teachers—had seen hundreds of adult students sweat to achieve.

“Morris says he’d be ’scared to death’ if all he had was a GED,” one adult ed instructor wrote in an email. “How he would feel armed with nothing at all? How ironic that the NPR reporter interviewed the very men who [are] working to dismantle LAUSD’s once thriving adult education division.”

(It should be noted that since, every ten minutes, some official is carving yet another ghastly chunk out of the LAUSD adult ed budget, with near fatal cuts now immanently threatened, these teachers are not, by and large, in a good mood.)

As someone who has reported for two decades on populations for whom the GED is often a hugely important milestone, I too was stunned at the dismissive tone both these men used.

Of course a high school diploma is better than a GED, and a college education is much, much better still. (Despite what the ever more bizarre Mr. Santorum might opine.)

But for many of the men and women I have known who dropped out of high school because of gang membership, or pregnancy, or incarceration, or a family crisis, or any one of a number of other education-interrupting reasons, going back to high school in one’s 20’s or 30s no longer felt like a reasonable option. However, a GED felt doable, and the process of getting one did not feel humiliating.

Moreover, for many of those men and women, and others like them, while the acquisition of a GED doesn’t guarantee employment (far from it, but then neither does a Master’s degree in this employment climate), it is nonetheless often the psychological gateway that allows them the confidence to pound on doors until they find the decent job they might not otherwise have found, and then, from there, they are able to reach for the decent life that previously seemed to elude them. Even better, for a surprising number, a GED is the first step on the path to belatedly go to college.

Really, right off the top of my head, I can give you a dozen such examples of late college goers I have known—few of whom would have gotten on the college path were it not for the GED.

Sure, for some the certificate doesn’t count for a lot, but for many it does.

Thus it is more than a little dismaying to find that the two men who have the most power over GED prep programs in LA County, don’t appear to understand their value.

Or maybe they do. And this is just some creepily disingenuous way to rationalize the gutting of them.

The GED prep classes are, of course, only one of many reasons why Deasy and Morris must not to slash and burn Adult Education. There are all the job training programs, which have successfully helped thousands get back to work, and the English learner classes…. the list goes on and on.

Let us hope that Deasy and Morris hold the rest of the Adult Ed programs in higher regard than they hold the GED.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board will vote on Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, on whether or not to cut nearly all funding from LA’s adult education program that serves 300,000 people with classes that, in many cases, make crucial differences in lives.

Adult ed teachers and students demonstrated at school sites all last week, but it is unclear if anyone is listening. The district is so budget strapped that board members are looking everywhere for cuts, and eyes have landed on adult ed.

Sunday’s Daily News ran a good story by Barbara Jones about the various sides of this important education issue.

Here’s a clip:

High-school dropouts can go there to earn a GED or diploma. Veterans, laid-off workers and young adults with vocational aspirations can learn a trade. Immigrant parents can acquire basic English and math skills so they can help their kids with homework.

At nearly three dozen adult education and occupational centers operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, nearly 300,000 students are enrolled in low-cost programs designed to help them better their lives.

Their fate now lies in the hands of the school board, which is set to vote Tuesday on a budget that would cut the program and divert most of the $200 million in state money earmarked for adult education to ease the district’s $557 million deficit.

While LAUSD leaders say they desperately need the money to fund core programs at K-12 campuses, adult education advocates say the program is essential to building an academic support system for LAUSD parents and training a skilled workforce for Southern California.

“Los Angeles Unified is the perfect storm,” said Chris Nelson, president of the 3,000-member California Council for Adult Education. “Ending all services for 300,000 students will have a huge impact — not only on the students, but on the community.”

There is no easy solution to the quandary facing the school district, which is wrestling with how to balance the $6 billion budget for 2012-13.

For the last five years, the cash-strapped state government has provided the district with just part of the money it is supposed to receive and has extended IOUs for the rest. This year, for instance, Los Angeles Unified got just $3,338 of the $6,506 it had been promised to educate each student, according to district officials.

[SNIP]

Kathrin Middleton of dropped out of high school more than 30 years ago to help raise her siblings. She kept her lack of education a secret until her own daughter entered kindergarten — a milestone that prompted the Encino homemaker to enroll in a diploma program at Rinaldi Adult Center in Granada Hills.

“I was living life in a box, a life filled with shame and limited by fear,” Middleton said. “I didn’t want that for my daughter. I wanted her to be brave and courageous, so I faced my demons.”

A dropout from Granada Hills Charter, Ashley Mu oz thought she’d closed the door on her future until a friend encouraged her to get her high-school equivalency certificate at Rinaldi.

“It gave me a second chance,” Mu oz said. “I’ve got my confidence back and I’m ready to face the world.”

There are countless success stories like these among the 10,500 students at Rinaldi, a satellite of the Kennedy-San Fernando Community Adult School.

Principal Kathy Javaheri said there’s a misperception that adult centers teach nonessential subjects like handicrafts or foreign language for travelers.

In reality, they’re designed to help students earning their GED or high school diploma, which helps LAUSD fulfill its goal of boosting its graduation rate. There are also basic English and math classes for parents of K-12 students so they can acquire the skills to help with homework and participate in their children’s education.

“We’re part of the fabric of LAUSD,” said Javaheri, who has been with the adult ed program for more than 30 years. “Taking away adult ed would be tearing away that fabric….”

I spoke to four Adult Ed teachers on Sunday afternoon, and they were not feeling optimistic about Tuesday’s meeting.

We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Photo by Andy Holzman, Daily News Staff, of students in class at the West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills

LAUSD PAID $40 GRAND TO SETTLE WITH MIRAMONTE TEACHER MARK BERNDT, BUT PUT BLOTCH ON RECORD OF INNOCENT MIRAMONTE TEACHERS. REALLY.

KPCC’S Tami Abdollah with Shirley Jahad broke the $40 K settlement story and the opening paragraph pretty much says it all:

The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed last June to pay about $40,000 to settle its dismissal case against former Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has since been charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct, including spoon-feeding his semen to children.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter if Berndt is convicted of all 23 counts, he still gets his pension, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and presumably the 40 grand—according to his unbreakable union contract.

Read and/or listen to the whole thing.

Then in Friday’s LA Times, Howard Blume, Angel Jennings and Richard Winton, follow up on the Berndt settlement story, and take it farther by delving into the unbelievably careless way the non-semen spooning Miramonte teachers were treated.

Here’s one clip from their story, but there’s lots more:

“When teachers were told that they were being transferred, dozens of teachers were in tears,” union President Warren Fletcher said. “They are part of the fabric of this community.”

The union accepted the transfers, Fletcher said, on the understanding that the move was temporary and that no innocent teacher’s employment record would be marred. L.A. Unified, he said, broke both promises, by categorizing the teachers’ relocation as an administrative transfer. Such paperwork frequently results from a disciplinary action…..

WHO ARE LAPD’S RESERVE POLICE? AND ARE THE EFFECTIVE? SO-CAL CONNECTED TAKES A LOOK

Here’s So Cal Connected’s summary of the segment, which airs tonight, Friday:

They look the same, dress the same, get the same training and wear the same badge, but they’re not full-time cops, and they’re not even paid. Meet the members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Reserve Corps, the regular citizens who back up the city’s 10,000 cops and whose numbers are on the rise.

AS CRIME RATES DROP, PRIVATE PRISONS ARE NO LONGER CASH COWS—UNLESS WE CAN LOCK UP MORE PEOPLE (WHICH—P.S.— IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION)

Okay, did anyone really think that private prisons would not end up presenting weird and creepy conflicts of interest if crime went down and we started having more sensible sentencing laws?

Llewellyn Hinks-Jones for the Atlantic Monthly has the story.

Here’s a clip:

Over the last 30 years, Texas built over 90 prisons, quintupling the number of detention centers in the state and earning the title of highest state incarceration rate in the process.

As much as Texas ended up an outlier, it was by no means alone. All across the U.S. during the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, depressed villages and hamlets in need of an industry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Coal Belt, signed up to build oversized detention facilities on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and klieg lights, in the hopes of bolstering the local economy with taxes, jobs and associated retail.

But ever since the nation’s crime rate began leveling off in the late 1990s, with the total state prison population decreasing for the first time in 40 years, there haven’t been enough inmates to populate these new-found penitentiaries….

THE PROP 8 CHALLENGE: IS IT TOO EARLY?

David Cole, an expert in Constitutional law, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books about whether or not the Prop 8 challenge, that will now go to the Supreme Court (presuming that SCOTUS takes case), was premature.

There was much discussion of this issue when Ted Olson and David Boies first talked about taking on this case. Olson and Boies argued that this was exactly the right time.

In any case, Cole’s essay on the issue is worth reading. Here’s a clip:

…..gay rights organizations have stayed away from the federal court system. They have instead sought to obtain legal rights for same-sex couples state by state, going first through the legislatures and only thereafter through the courts; and even then, only in the state courts, relying on arguments based on state law that could not be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The strategy has proved quite successful. Since 2004, six states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York) and the District of Columbia have recognized same-sex marriages. On February 8, Washington’s state legislature passed a bill that will make it the seventh such state once the governor signs it. Twelve more recognize some sort of partnership status that gives same-sex couples all or most of the benefits and obligations associated with marriage..

Yet many other states have moved in the opposite direction. By June 2011, 29 states had banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment, and another twelve by state statute. (Some states, like California, have both recognized same-sex civil unions and banned same-sex marriage.) In short, we are far from reaching any national consensus on the issue….

Photo by the AP