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Who’s Behind the Big Money Takeover of San Diego County Schools?

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Rick Shea versus Walmart and Company  

By Dr. Gregg Robinson, President, San Diego County Board of Education,
Dr. Jim Miller, Vice President, American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931

Somebody is trying to buy control of San Diego’s education system and few in the local media seem to have noticed until Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune finally covered it. The Voice of San Diego has been quiet on this front, perhaps because, as the SDUT article reports, its co-founder Buzz Woolley is part of the action. He and his fellow corporate education reformers have San Diego in their crosshairs and are spending big money to drive their agenda.

As Jeff Bryant recently reported at OurFuture.org, there is a huge amount of money behind this new corporate effort to “disrupt” public education:

As education historian Diane Ravitch explains on her personal blog, “Public education in California is under siege by people and organizations who want to privatize the schools, remove them from democratic control, and hand them over to the charter industry.”   [Read more…]

Measure I Pits Balboa Park Advocates Against San Diego High’s Future

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Measure I started out as a seemingly non-controversial deal to maintain the status quo with two venerable San Diego institutions.

Now it has split the community between those who want to maintain the current location of the City’s oldest high school and those who say it should no longer occupy dedicated parkland.

The City Council placed Measure I on the ballot along with a package of reforms to the charter. It changes the language found in Section 55 of the foundational document governing the City’s use of dedicated parkland to allow a simple majority public vote to allow the existing use of that site to continue.   [Read more…]

Prop 58 – Righting a Wrong Thru Local Control of Bilingual Education

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When Proposition 227 Passed in 1998, Only Homosexuality Was Less Tolerated Than Bilingualism by Middle-Class Americans

California’s Proposition 58, being marketed as the LEARN Initiative, represents yet another step towards righting the wrongs growing out of a wave of anti-multicultural sentiment during the 1990s.

The nativist wing on the Republican Party eventually led that organization into irrelevance in California, and a generation of Latino political activists is now an ascendant force in state politics.

By allowing local public schools to decide on how best to teach English learners, this measure effectively undoes the statewide immersion-is-best mandate of the English Language in Public Schools Statute, also known as Proposition 227.   [Read more…]

Prop 55 – Keep On Funding Education in California

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Back in 2012 voters approved Proposition 30, which combined a one-fourth cent sales tax increase and a surcharge on incomes taxes for individuals earning more than $250,000 annually. The money raised went to fund education and healthcare agencies, both of which were severely impacted by budget cuts during the great recession.

The provisions of this measure expire at the end of 2018. Proposition 55 asks voters to extend the 1-3% increase on high-income earners through 2030. The sales tax increase would be allowed to sunset at the end of 2016.

The measure will keep money flowing to K-12 schools, community colleges, and (if the Gov. says ok) healthcare for low-income Californians, along with adding to the state’s rainy day fund. Even with the current level of funding, California still ranks near the bottom of the nation in per-pupil spending, class-size average and per-student ratio in nurses, librarians, and counselors.   [Read more…]

Prop 51 – Will Schools Get Fixed and Repaired?

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The California Public School Facility Bonds Initiative, better known as Proposition 51, proposes to refill the State of California’s money pot used for school construction and repair.

It has been ten years since the last statewide school bond, and proponents say there is a massive backlog of local school projects.

Everybody loves building and fixing schools, right?   [Read more…]

An Insider’s Story About Scams at Wells Fargo Bank & Ashford University

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By Anon / OB Rag

You’ve seen the new recently regarding for-profit education scandals (Corinthian, ITT Tech) and Wells Fargo sales scandal. The following is my account of my employment experiences at two San Diego companies: Ashford University and Wells Fargo.

I have always wanted to help people financially and help them achieve success in their endeavors. I assumed my good intentions would eventually lead me to actually helping people financially. How naïve and wrong I was.   [Read more…]

Happy Labor Day, California Style

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Last year my Labor Day column, “Happy Labor Day?: The Jury is Out,” began by starkly pondering the potentially devastating effects a bad Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association ruling at the Supreme Court might have had not just on public sector unions but on the labor movement as a whole. Later, in the same column, I looked more hopefully at the potential for organizing contingent workers, like those involved in the Fight for $15 movement.

The twelve months that followed that column brought good news for labor on multiple fronts. First, with the long, strange journey of the Friedrichs case that came to the Supreme Court with a good chance of passing before everything was turned upside down by Justice Scalia’s death, a 4-4 split decision that was a victory for unions, and finally the Court’s refusal to rehear the case.   [Read more…]

Black Breastfeeding Week 2016

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By South OB Girl / OB Rag

San Diego based photographer Vanessa Simmons has attracted quite a bit of attention nation wide with her “Normalize Breastfeeding Tour.” She has previously been featured in Vogue, The Huffington Post, and here at The OB Rag/San Diego Free Press.

Vanessa started Normalize Breastfeeding in 2014 – a project intended to bring awareness to breast-feeding through photography.

And August is National Breastfeeding Month (which many of us may not have known). And August 25 – 31st is Black Breastfeeding Week.   [Read more…]

Free Classes in San Diego

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One of the best kept secrets in San Diego is the free classes offered at San Diego Continuing Education. Under the umbrella of the San Diego Community College District, Continuing Education has six centers around town, including Cesar Chavez, ECC, Mid-City, CE Mesa, Miramar, North City and West City.

The largest English as a Second Language program in San Diego is offered at all the centers. Classes start at level 1, and some schools have beginning classes for both literate and non-literate students. The levels continue until level 7 which is the highest level.

Some of the ESL level 7 classes are Transition to College ESL courses in which students prepare to be successful in college. They learn about the college system in California and focus on improving their writing and oral presentation skills.   [Read more…]

Rising Costs of Living [With an Education] in California

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Tuition and fees for public colleges in the US rose 80 percent between 2000 and 2014 while American household income fell seven percent during the same period, according to recent data published by ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism outlet.

The data shows yearly tuition and public schools across the US rose $3,563 in adjusted 2014 dollars, and the median household income was $4,067 less in 2014 compared to 2000.

Using the online tool ProPublica provided, which allows users to obtain information specific to their state, we learn tuition and fees increased 162 percent in California, more than double the average. Students in California paid $5,327 more in 2014 than did an earlier generation of aspiring scholars back at the turn of the millennium. Those attending California colleges and universities paid $1,674 more in tuition and fees than the average American student in 2014.   [Read more…]

San Diego Unified Calls on Pension Funds to Divest from Fossil Fuels

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By Anne Marie Tipton / San Diego 350.org

The San Diego Unified School District’s (SDUSD) Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution on July 26th calling on the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (STRS) and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) to divest their investment portfolios of stocks in fossil fuel companies. Recognizing the threat of global warming, the resolution also supports last year’s state legislation, SB 185, which requires PERS and STRS to divest from coal stocks. Most of SDUSD’s employees belong to these huge retirement systems.
  [Read more…]

Why We Need to Pass Proposition 55 in November 2016

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As many of us in education circles remember, before the passage of Proposition 30 in 2012, the funding situation for schools and colleges in California was dire.

The question was not IF there were going to be cuts, but rather, how large they would be and how much damage they would do to our students, our profession, and to the communities we serve.

But fortunately, in the wake of the Great Recession and the Occupy movement, the questions of economic inequality and social justice were in the air and we in the California Federation of Teachers, along with our community allies, were able to muster a successful campaign first for the Millionaire’s Tax and then for the passage of Proposition 30, the compromise measure that was forged with Governor Brown.   [Read more…]

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