MOVIE REVIEW: Waiting for 'Superman'

Finally saw the acclaimed documentary Waiting for 'Superman'. It was showing at my favorite second-run theater, the Regency Academy 6 in Pasadena ($2 for a matinee, $3 other times). As an educator myself and someone interested in reforming mathematics education (especially 8th grade algebra) I had heard that this was a must-see film, and I was not disappointed.

Waiting for 'Superman' is the film which provoked the greatest emotional impact on me this year. It made me cry with despair and it made me gasp and groan with shock and disappointment. In the year of films with $100 million visual effects budgets, the most suspenseful moment I experienced in a movie theater in 2010 was waiting for a lottery ball to drop and reveal whether a student had been selected by random drawing for a slot in a public charter school!

The movie follows the educational hopes of five multicultural children, Daisy (a Latina 5th grader in East Los Angeles), Francisco (a Latino 1st grader in The Bronx), Anthony (a Black 5th grader in Washington, DC), Bianca (a Black kindergartener in New York City, NY) and Emily (a white 8th grader in Redwood City, CA). Each of these kids has engaged parents(or caregiver)  who have inculcated a love of education in their charges. However, the school uses an array of facts and figures to demonstrate that in order to improve their chances in life they will need to get a superior education, and in order to do that they will need to change what  schools they are going to. However, the decision of what school a child gets to attend in America depends on a number of things, and the primary thesis of the film is that the most important factor in the decision is luck. Either luck in being born to parents who have the resources to send you to private school, or the resources to buy a house in  a school district with good public schools. If you are not lucky to have been born to rich parents then you need the luck of the draw to win the lottery for admission to a public charter school that is committed to insuring that all their students have a good education and a better future.

The director, David Guggenheim, is already an Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth, and decided to tackle the issues of education reform when he realized that he was driving by numerous public schools on the way to dropping his kids off at at their private school.

Some would question the director's motives and are upset by the depiction of teachers' unions (American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association) as the primary impediment to meaningful education reform and the lionization of controversial Washington, D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee and charter schools KIPP and Harlem Children's Zone. But I think people who dismiss the film for these reasons are missing the point; what Guggenheim's movie is trying to point out is that the American education system is  "about the adults" instead of being "for the children." And until that prioritization is corrected (and hopefully reversed) education is not just "other people's problem" it is all of our concern.

Title: Waiting for 'Superman'
Running Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.
MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic material, mild language and incidental smoking.
Release Date: Friday, September 24, 2010.
Seen: Tuesday, December 28, 2010.

Plot: A+.
Acting: N/A.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: A+.

Overall Grade: A/A+ (4.11/4.00).

13-Year-Old Morehouse Whiz Kid!

.Thanks to Jack and Jill Politics, I found out about this heart-warming story about a 13-year-old Black male college student:

At thirteen years of age, Stephen Stafford is causing quite a stir at Morehouse College. Stafford has a triple major in pre-med, math and computer science. Though he loves playing video games and playing his drum set, he is no typical teenager.

"I've never taught a student as young as Stephen, and it's been amazing," said computer science professor Sonya Dennis. "He's motivating other students to do better and makes them want to step up their game."

Stafford began his college career at the age of 11, after being home-schooled by his mother. Stafford's mother said that when Stafford began to teach her instead of being taught by her, she knew he needed to be in a college environment.

Isn't that a great story? In a perfect world, Stephen Stafford's name would be more well-known than Chris Brown. I'm jus' sayin'!

Black Homeless L.A. Teen Girl Head To Harvard

(Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times)

There was a great story in Friday's Los Angeles Times about a local homeless African-American teenaged girl who is attending Harvard this fall. Her name is Khadijah Williams:

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

[...]

Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

"I still remember that exact number," Khadijah said. "It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did."

In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn't feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. "You ain't college-bound," the pimps barked. "You live in skid row!"

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

It's exactly programs like these that will be threatened by California's financial mess. How many more Khadijah Wlliams will not be able to be rescued because the safety net has been slashed by budget cuts?

I strongly urge you to read the entire inspiring story by reporter Esmeralda Bermudez, "She finally has a home: Harvard."

Openly Gay Candidate Makes LA Community District Runoff

In the City of Los Angeles elections last week openly gay candidate Robert Nakahiro made the runoff for the Los Angeles Community College District Seat #6 by a mere 200 votes! MadProfessah endorsed Nakahiro after meeting him at the 45th Assembly District State Party delegate elections on Sunday January 12th. If you live in any of the yellow sections of the map above, you will have the chance to vote on May 19th, 2009 in the special election for this candidate.

WSJ Declares Mathematician Best Job in US!

Not that I spend very much time reading the Wall Street Journal but a colleague pointed out this interesting article which claims that being a mathematician is the #1 job in the country!

The Best                     The Worst
1. Mathematician             200. Lumberjack
2. Actuary                   199. Dairy Farmer
3. Statistician              198. Taxi Driver
4. Biologist                 197. Seaman
5. Software Engineer         196. EMT
6. Computer Systems Analyst  195. Roofer
7. Historian                 194. Garbage Collector
8. Sociologist               193. Welder
9. Industrial Designer       192. Roustabout
10. Accountant               191. Ironworker
11. Economist                190. Construction Worker
12. Philosopher              189. Mail Carrier
13. Physicist                188. Sheet Metal Worker
14. Parole Officer           187. Auto Mechanic
15. Meteorologist            186. Butcher
16. Medical Laboratory Tech  185. Nuclear Decontamination Tech
17. Paralegal Assistant      184. Nurse (LN)
18. Computer Programmer      183. Painter
19. Motion Picture Editor    182. Child Care Worker
20. Astronomer               181. Firefighter

This is just one of the many reasons I do whatI do every day.: teach mathematics

Judge Blocks Statewide 8th Grade Algebra Requirement

The controversy over whether and when algebra should be taught (and tested for) in California schools just keeps going and going, sort of like a limit heading towards infinity! Last Friday a judge blocked the state from requiring all 8th graders to take algebra four months after the California Board of Education had approved such a policy at the strong urging of the Governor.

MadProfessah has been involved in a project to improve algebra instruction in Los Angeles-area high schools for a few years now and getting to know the details of the problem is quite sobering.

How Much Should A Free Book Cost LAUSD??

Spoken word artist (and CalTech alum) Sandra Tsing Loh has been spending a lot of time battling with Los Angeles Unified School District administrators and has lot to say about the experience. Recently, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by her entitled "LAUSD needs a pit bull PTA mom"

My L.A. public school mom friend -- and Oprah Angel Award winner -- Rebecca Constantino is the founder of Access Books, a 10-year-old non-profit that brings 10,000 new and almost new books to each of the many needy LAUSD elementaries requesting them. Thanks to a web of volunteers and private donations, the books come absolutely free.

The only obstacle? LAUSD Central Library Services. It has capped Access Books donations to a maximum of 300 books a school (some with more than 1,000 students) because of an LAUSD cataloging cost of $18 a book!

Call me hormonal (what I actually call myself is a "Burning Mom"), but I believe the district's director of Instructional Media Services should be fired -- today! That would save taxpayers $119,724.84 a year, according to an L.A. Daily news website that allows you to check the salary of any LAUSD employee.

While we're at it, let's also right-size the budget by firing any LAUSD front office worker who is rude (do you, like me, suddenly see huge, huge savings?).

Call me crazy, but I don't think it is reasonable that it should cost $18 to catalogue a free book!

Prop 8 Ad Hits Back On Lies About Kids and Schools

Finally! The NO ON PROP 8 campaign has issued a new television ad refuting the misleading and blatantly false statements by the heterosexual supremacist proponents of the constitutional amendment to strip the right to marry for same-sex couples in California. They have been running television and radio ads saying that unless Proposition 8 passes, children as young as kindergartners will be taught about gay marriage in schools and parents will be powerless to do anything about it. Sounds scary? To some, yes, but it is simply not true.

The ad features California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, who is also an expected candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2010. Additionally, my former boss (as President of Occidental College), Ted Mitchell, who is now the Chairman of the State Board of Education has signed on to a statement pointing out the California law has no provisions which would require schools to teach about gay marriage or any kind of marriage!

"The Yes on 8 ads are alarming and irresponsible," O'Connell said. "Our public schools are not required to teach about marriage. And, in fact, curriculum involving health issues is chosen by local school governing boards.
No matter how you feel about marriage, we can all agree discrimination is wrong. That's why I'm voting no on 8."

"That ad is wrong. Not one person with any credibility has said otherwise," [former (Republican) State Superintendent of Public Education Delaine] Eastin said. "Prop. 8 is about one thing, pure and simple, and that's taking away civil rights. Prop. 8 isn't about reading school books or teaching, it's about treating people differently - that is the one and only thing on the ballot."

"Prop 8 has nothing to do with education, and the proponents know it," Eastin continued. "Not one word in Prop 8 mentions education and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to attend any health-related class. California law prohibits it."
President of the California State School Board, Ted Mitchell, said: "Let me be clear, there is nothing in California state law that would require the teaching of marriage and that will not change. These ads are ridiculous and they are an insult to California's voters."
Karen Getman, of Remcho, Johansen and Purcell, lawyer for the NO on Prop. 8 campaign and author of the legal brief that resulted in a Sacramento Superior Court Judge ruling that the Yes on 8 campaign's claims are "misleading and false," said: "Nothing in California law requires children to be taught about marriage in public schools. The current ad has the same 'false and misleading' statement about education that the judge rejected this summer."

"There's one thing educators agree on: nothing in Prop 8 has anything to do with schools or children," said Reed Hastings, former president of the California State Board of Education. "Prop 8 is about eliminating rights for our friends, families and colleagues, and that's why I urge all Californians to vote no on Prop 8."

The California Teachers Association and the California School Boards Association both maintain that Prop 8 has nothing to do with teaching in public schools. In addition, education leaders across the state have endorsed the NO on Prop. 8 campaign, including Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education President Monica Garcia, Davis Joint Unified School Board President Sheila Allen and San Francisco Board of Education Vice-President Kim-Shree Maufas.

As an educator myself I find it distressing that education is what the proponents of Proposition 8 have decided to lie about, instead of talking about why they want to enact this constitutional amendment they are simply making stuff up about what will happen if it fails.

CA Board of Ed Approves 8th Grade Algebra Testing Mandate

The State Board of Education by a vote of 8-1 has approved a policy by which every 8th grader will be tested on algebra whether they are ready or not.

Proponents say the new policy will push school districts to ensure that eighth-graders are ready for the demands of algebra. Critics say the anticipated three-year time frame is unrealistic. The new mandate, they contend, overlooks the real need to help school districts better prepare students.

[...]

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, more than half of eighth-graders, along with more than 2,000 seventh-graders, took algebra in 2007. But only 21% of eighth-graders tested proficient. About two-thirds of those who failed the class passed on their second try.

[...]

Statewide, only 24% of students, regardless of age or grade, scored proficient in algebra in 2007.

In eighth grade, 38% tested proficient -- a number virtually unchanged since 2003. But more students are taking algebra: less than a third in 2002 and more than half today.

Would You Sign This Pledge To Keep Your Job?

This story about a CSU East Bay math teacher who was fired for modifying the State of California loyalty oath now has a happy ending. According to the Los Angeles Times, all state, city, county, public school, community college and public university employees are required to sign the pledge as a condition of employment. Non-citizens are exempted.

The loyalty oath is found in Article XX, Section 3 of the California Constitution:

"I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support
and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Consti-
tution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign
and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the
Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the
State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without
any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will
well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about
to enter.
"And I do further swear (or affirm) that I do not advocate, nor
am I a member of any party or organization, political or other-
wise, that now advocates the overthrow of the Government of the
United States or of the State of California by force or violence
or other unlawful means; that within the five years immediately
preceding the taking of this oath (or affirmation) I have not
been a member of any party or organization, political or other-
wise, that advocated the overthrow of the Government of the
United States or of the State of California by force or violence
or other unlawful means except as follows:
________________________________________________________________

(If no affiliations, write in the words "No Exceptions")
and that during such time as I hold the office of ______________

________________________________ I will not advocate nor become
(name of office)
a member of any party or organization, political or otherwise,
that advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United
States or of the State of California by force or violence or
other unlawful means."

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a pacifist Quaker, took the oath seriously and inserted "nonviolently," crossed out "swear," and circled "affirm" in the version of the oath presented to her. Her employer was not amused and fired Kearney-Brown on February 28th. Her case became a cause celebre among the progressive blogosphere and yesterday's Times revealed that Attorney General Jerry Brown's office had been contacted and had produced a legal opinion that "signing the oath does not carry with it any obligation or requirement that public employees bear arms or otherwise engage in violence. This has been confirmed by both the United States Supreme Court . . . and the California attorney general's office."

With that document stapled to her copy of the oath, Kearney-Brown signed it, and was reinstated.

My point in re-telling all this is would you sign the following oath if your job depended on it? And, why when we have a California Legislature that can pass bills in favor of same-sex marriage and universal health care would we not have one that has put a repeal of this section of the California constitution on the ballot?

Openly Gay Student, 15, Fatally Wounded in Oxnard

Joe.My.God has been closely following the Tuesday shooting of an openly gay student named Lawrence King, a 15-year-old at E. O. Green Juior High School in Oxnard, CA. According to LAist, the shooter was 14-year-old classmate Brandon McInerney and the shooting occurred at 8:30am in a computer lab with 20 other students. On Wednesday, multiple media reports announced that King was declared brain dead at St. John's Regional Medical Center but his body was on a ventilator as the family was considering whether to allow organ donation.

King had been living at Casa Pacifica, a Ventura County foster care home for abused and neglected children.

The Los Angeles Times has some information on the motive:

Police have not determined a motive in the slaying but said it appeared to stem from a personal dispute between King and the suspect.

[...].

But several students at the south Oxnard campus said King and his alleged assailant had a falling out stemming from King's sexual orientation.

The teenager sometimes wore feminine clothing and makeup, and proclaimed he was gay, students said.

"He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails -- the whole thing," said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. "That was freaking the guys out."

Student Juan Sandoval, 14, said he shared a fourth-period algebra class with the suspect, whom he described as a calm, smart student who played on the basketball team. "I didn't think he was that kind of kid," Sandoval said. "I guess you never know. He made a big mistake."

"Their lives are both destroyed now," said student Hansley Rivera, 12.

Several students said that a day before the shooting, King and several boys had some kind of altercation during the lunch period.

If the suspect targeted King because of his sexual orientation, the case could rise to the level of a hate crime, authorities said.

Surprisingly, I haven't seen any quotes from State Senator Sheila Kuehl, who has probably done the most to promote the protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in California of any elected official in the state.

MadProfessah, like Joe.My.God, will also be following this story closely. Since I don't believe in the death penalty I disagree with others who are calling for retribution for the shooter, but I do believe that a 14-year-old can be tried as an adult, especially when the crime involves loss of life.

WGA Awards Announced: The Wire Wins

The Writer Guild Awards were announced the same day the word started to spread about the writers' strike coming to an end.

Yesterday The Wire won the WGA Award for Best TV Drama Series (beating out fellow HBO show The Sopranos) while No Country for Old Men and Juno won WGA Awards for Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay.

Heterosexual Supremacists File Federal Lawsuit Against LGBT Student Civil Rights Law

A little-known group called "Advocates for Faith and Freedom" together with the Northern California chapter of the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit in federal district court on Tuesday to overturn SB 777, the Student Civil Rights Act, which was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger October 12, 2007. The law, which would have gone into effect on January 11 if not for a parallel signature gathering effort to place a repeal referendum on the June 2008 primary ballot, "clarifies and reinforces existing protections currently in the state’s education code, including California’s definition of gender, which has been in place since 2000" according to its sponsor Equality California. SB 777 was written by openly gay State Senator Sheila James Kuehl, who also sponsored and wrote the original bill in 1999 which had initially placed protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in California schools with AB 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000.

In their lawsuit, the heterosexual supremacists claim (pdf):

The Governor of California recently signed into law Senate Bill 777, which will
take effect on January 11, 2008. Senate Bill 777, in conjunction with the California Penal Code, introduces a new definition of “gender” into the California Education Code and is part of an overall nondiscrimination scheme applicable to schools in California. Senate Bill 777 recklessly abandons the traditional understanding of biological sex in favor of an elusive definition that is unconstitutionally vague. This lawsuit facially challenges the redefinition of the term “gender” as it will be impossible for school administrators and educators to enforce this new definition.
Further, it will be impossible for administrators and educators to know whether they themselves are violating the nondiscrimination provisions of the Education Code or the Penal Code. Additionally, the special treatment intended for a select few students through the enforcement of Senate Bill 777 will result in the violation of the privacy rights of the remainder of students not targeted for special treatment under Senate Bill 777. For these reasons, Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit based upon the prohibition against vague enactments as established in the Federal Constitution and the right to privacy founded in the California Constitution.

Senator Kuehl (who happens to be a 1978 Harvard Law School graduate) responded by saying: "There's no change in the law; it was always the same. All of these truly silly claims that they make about what could happen could have been happening over the last eight years and never did," she said. "I think they know they don't have a case. I think it's purely a fundraising mechanism for them."

15-Year-Old Black Female Going To Ivy League

This story about 15-year-old Brittney Exline of Colorado Springs, CO who started school at University of Pennsylvania this week caught my eye. At first it was the headline which was noteworthy, but then the picture of Bruttney provided some more information not immediately offered in the wire report, namely that Brittney is African American.

Here is an excerpt of the standard wire report written by Kathy Matheson of Associated Preess that is running in many papers:

Brittney Exline is too young to drive a car or go to an R-rated movie, but the 15-year-old probably will not have much time for those things anyway now that she's starting her first year of college.

Despite the age difference with her 17- and 18-year-old peers, she said she doesn't really notice it - and neither do they.

"I didn't tell people right off the bat that I was 15," Exline said. "A lot of people were pretty surprised."

Exline grew up in Colorado Springs, where from an early age her intellect was evident and unexplainable. At 8 years old, she was in sixth grade; by 13, she had finished high school math. She turned 15 in February and graduated a few months later.

She is a high achiever in math and science, but is also interested in politics so she enrolled in a University of Pennsylvania program that will award her degrees from both the engineering and liberal arts schools when she graduates.

Interesting that the youth of Brittney and her academic interests make it into the first grafs of the news article but her race does not, especially when rates of college attendance by minorities is such a prominent and controversial national issue.

Research Shows Hand Movements Aid Learning Mathematics

Mad Professah was alerted to this interesting article about the impact that using hand gestures during the teaching of mathematics. Post-doctoral fellow Susan Wagner Cook at the University of Rochester has published an article in the latest issue of Cognition which indicates that students who use hand gestures while doing math are three times more likely to remember what they've learned.

"We've known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a
conversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relates
to what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral
fellow at the University. "We asked if the reverse could be true; if
actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information."

It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. In her
study, 90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using gestures
remembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students who
had learned the concept during instruction later retained the lesson. And
perhaps most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had learned by
gesture alone--no speech at all--recalled what they'd been taught.

Cook used a variation on a classic gesturing experiment. When third graders approach a two-sided algebra equation, such as "9+3+6=__+6" on a blackboard, they will likely try to solve it in the simple way they have always approached math
problems. They tend to think in terms of "the equal sign means put the answer
here," rather than thinking that the equal sign divides the problem into two
halves. As a result, children often completely ignore the final "+6."

The Algebra Project on PBS Tonight

The public television show Now will be airing a segment tonight on The Algebra Project, a non-profit group who is trying to improve the teaching of elementary and high school algebra in low-income and minority schools throughout America. Mad Professah met the founder of the group, Bob Moses, at a Math and Social Justice conference in Brooklyn, NY this past April.

Reason 562 Why 'Color Blindness' Is Wrong

Mad Professah saw this post by Angela Winters at The Moderate Voice blog alerting me to an article in the Washington Post on the success of African American students in Advanced Placement courses in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Fairfax, VA and Montgomery, MD. I immediately was reminded that if African American conservative Ward Connerly had his way, such race-specific data would not be available.

Connerly was a University of California Regent appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson who was the main spokesperson and force behind two racially divisive ballot measures, 1996's Proposition 209 (which eliminated affirmative action by the State of California based on race or sex) and 2003's Proposition 54 (which would have barred the State of California from collecting or using data based on race, color, ethnicity or national origin). The so-called Racial Privacy Act was an extreme manifestation of the conservative principle of "color blindness" which they claim is the best way to heal racial divisions in this country.
Tomorrow, we are likely to see another manifestation of this when the United States Supreme Court rules on two important school racial desegregation cases; most observers expect a 5-4 decision saying that race can not be taken into account even when it is argued that it being used to preserve racial and ethnic diversity.

The Post reviewed AP data from nine of the 10 school systems in the nation with the largest black populations, from New York City, with 115,963 African American students in grades 9 through 12, to Baltimore City, with 22,225. One of the 10, Detroit, declined to provide data. The analysis considered 20 other school systems, all among the 80 largest for black high school populations, that are known for their rigor. The smallest systems studied were Prince William and Anne Arundel, each with about 5,000 black high school students.

The analysis considered the number of passing exams by black students and weighed it against black student enrollment in grades 9 through 12. A score of 3 or higher on the five-point AP scale is considered passing because it is the typical cutoff for credit and advanced standing in college.

Outside the Washington region, no school system analyzed produced more than four passing AP tests for every 100 black high school students -- half the success rate of Montgomery and Fairfax.

Here's a graphic illustrating the results

California Set To Spend More on Prisons Than Higher Education

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the recently enacted comprehensive prison reform bill (AB 900) will lead to increased state expenditures in the prison-industrial complex that will exceed state spending on higher education in the foreseeable future.

As the costs for fixing the state's troubled corrections system rocket higher, California is headed for a dubious milestone -- for the first time the state will spend more on incarcerating inmates than on educating students in its public universities.

Based on current spending trends, California's prison budget will overtake spending on the state's universities in five years. No other big state in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.

[...]

Under a new state law, California will spend $7.4 billion to build 40,000 new prison beds, and that is over and above the current annual operating budget of more than $10 billion. Interest payments alone on the billions of dollars of bonds that will be sold to finance the new construction will amount to $330 million a year by 2011 -- all money that will not be available for higher education or other state priorities.

This is profoundly disturbing. Especially, since the politicians themselves know that this is bad public policy. "Asked if the prison spending accurately reflected the state's values and priorities, several politicians insisted it did not, and some suggested it was something of an embarrassment for a state that in other areas, such as environmental programs, likes to think of itself as a pioneer in smart policymaking."

In the Governor's proposed 2007-08 budget the state will spend $10 billion on prisons and $12 billion on higher education, but the Legislative Analyst estimates spending on universities will increase by 5% per year while spending on prisons will increase by 9%.

Super-Rich Person Does Something Good

Okay, so Mad Professah has been critical of the super-rich in the past for their miserly contributions as a class to philanthropic institutions so I did want to point out that recently a super rich person did something very nice.

John W. Kluge, who launched his media empire with an investment in a Washington-area radio station, has pledged $400 million from his estate to Columbia University.

The promised gift, one of the largest ever from an individual to a university, will be used exclusively for student financial aid.

Kluge, 92, an immigrant from Germany who graduated from Columbia 70 years ago, served in the military and went into business in the 1940s.

[...]

Philanthropy to higher education has been doubling every decade, [John] Lippincott [President of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education] said. "We're now at about $28 billion a year."

Of course, Columbia only gets the money after Kluge dies, and he gets the glory now while he is alive. But, hey, what's the point of giving away a bunch of money to higher education if no-one knows who you are.

Endorsements For Tuesday's City Election

There's an election tomorrow in the City of Los Angeles. Yes, THIS Tuesday. March 6.

MadProfessah lives in Mayor Antonio Villaraigoas's former City Council district, Council District 14, where Jose Huizar is now the incumbent. Huizar is being challenged by a former employee named Alvin Parra who has run for this seat a number of times before without success. Mad Professah's endorsement for this race is for the incumbent, Jose Huizar.

However, there are a number of other races which you may not be aware. There are 4 seats on the Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District up for election on Tuesday. The Los Angeles Times published an article on the fact the incumbents and the challengers are both running as slates of candidates last Friday. Mad Professah endorses the slate of incumbents with Sylvia Scott Hayes, Mona Field, Georgia Mercer and Warren Furutani.

Last (and least) there are two City of Los Angeles ballot measures: Measure L and Measure M.
Measure L is the controversial one. It is sponsored by Huizar and would "reform" school board elections by placing City Council-like limits on financial contributions and on terms (12 years). It would also establish a commission to study whether school board members should become full-time employees with commensurate pay. Although generally opposed to term limits the rest of measure sounded reasonable and thus Mad Professah endorses passage of both measures L and M.