Posted on 05/29/2002 2:45:51 PM PDT by let freedom sing
Edited on 04/12/2004 5:37:01 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Legislation to make California the first state in the nation to prohibit public schools or mascots from being named after American Indian tribes was rejected Tuesday by the Assembly.
AB 2115 received support from 29 legislators and opposition from 35. Forty-one votes were needed for passage.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Can we sue Assemblymember Judy Chu for the lack of diversity found in her staff?
By my count she's got 7 asians, 3 latinos and a couple of unknowns.
|
Capitol Office Staff Chief of Staff Scheduler Legislative Director Legislative Aide Legislative Aide Office Assistant |
|
Monterey Park District Office Staff District Director Scheduler Field Representatives Assistant El Monte District Office Staff Field Representative |
Chinook Shin
Tell me you made this up!
Man: "Oh, don't be such a baby!"
"We're not dead yet," Goldberg said.
No, just brain dead.
|
She's Baaaaack! |
|||||||||||
|
The Duchess of Dumb, Jackie Goldberg, is up to her old tricks in Sacramento. |
|||||||||||
|
BY JILL STEWART |
|||||||||||
|
Last time I checked in on our embarrassing political progeny, the former Duchess of the 13th City Council District, Jackie Goldberg, hater of all that is middle class, and, officially, the stupidest well-spoken person I know, I was light of heart because she had gone to Sacramento. As a state assemblywoman with only one vote among 120 legislators, I reasoned, Jackie's hatred for and conspiring against those who disagree with her narrow worldview would have less negative effect than when she was one of 15 councilmembers. Now I pray that I was right, because Jackie's gestation period is over and she is spawning a troubling brood in the statehouse. Jackie is a human Jabba the Hutt who consumes the good while producing bad. She has authored a host of bills and ballot measures that would hand control over class curricula to anti-reform teacher's unions, forbid schools from using names like the Warriors, wipe out the highly effective cash awards given to failing schools that show big improvement, and gut California's small businesses -- perhaps even the economy -- by requiring a $10.50 minimum wage. But before we delve into her dealings in Sacramento, let's review some of the damage she inflicted in Los Angeles that seems almost impossible to undo. Years ago, Goldberg hammered the Los Angeles Unified School Board into accepting her idea to build schools on tainted industrial sites so that poor renters and homeowners wouldn't have to be relocated to make way for school construction. (Relocating residents for schools is a sad but inevitable practice in all congested cities. And, in every city, the school districts pay for those relocations.) But Goldberg, who always knows what is best for society and viciously goes after those who oppose her, stubbornly resisted warnings that industrial sites often cannot be cleaned. Her name rarely is mentioned in association with the tragic construction of the infamous Belmont Learning Complex. But it was Goldberg who came up with the plan to build a school on top of a seeping field of explosive methane gas. On another local front, Goldberg's idiotic deal with the Canadian developers TrizecHahn to create the new Egyptian-themed mall and Academy Awards hall at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue stands as the worst expenditure of city tax dollars in recent years. Two weeks ago, the L.A. City Council spent an hour commiserating over the money-hemorrhaging project, into which Goldberg, using her strong-arming, backroom style, persuaded the city council to pour $90 million into the parking structure. The money should have gone to more cops for Hollywood, or true redevelopment of its heavily barred storefronts and litter-strewn, filthy sidewalks and streets. I have long believed Goldberg to be a pathological liar. Most of the media forgive her because she so loves the downtrodden. She made a name for herself by belittling developers, an attitude the media loves. But then she quietly took more than $30,000 in campaign contributions from developers of the parking structure at Highland and Hollywood. Now the entire project is failing due to its absurd $10 parking fee and public disinterest in her beloved mall. Our bewildered new city council, only half of whom served with Goldberg, are complaining about the "corporate welfare" that may force city hall to bail out the parking structure with $5 million that had been set aside to fix up Hollywood. Hollywood councilman Eric Garcetti called the project "a patient dying in the field" and sensibly backed a plan to charge only $2 to park there. Nate Holden, whose warnings were ignored when Goldberg tearfully pouted for city backing of the TrizecHahn mall (her favorite post-feminist technique), called the developers "slick talkers who are ripping the community off." The council has dropped parking fees at the mall in the desperate hope that shoppers will come. Councilman Jack Weiss plaintively asked, "Who can we go after? Can we go after TrizecHahn, the CRA?" Miki Jackson, a gay activist and nonprofit organization leader in Hollywood, wants a public hearing about the project, noting that it cost more than $600 million, while the far nicer Grove in the Fairfax District cost only $160 million. As Jackson told me, "Jackie, who turned all the groups against one another in Hollywood as part of her awful divide-and-control style, is a negative force in Hollywood long after she's gone." Goldberg's legacy drew sharp comments by former mayor Richard Riordan on a recent TV special about secession. Riordan said, "Everything she touched has turned into a disaster." (His comments were edited out of the show, but made the rounds anyway.) Riordan later told me Goldberg's approach is to make things "too painful for the people who want to challenge her ideas, and I am sure she is employing that strategy in Sacramento." Which helps explain why Democrats in various legislative committees are signing off on her horrible bills, AB 2160, AB 2347 and AB 2115. Take her dual assaults, AB 2160 and AB 2347, on California's nascent education reforms. Goldberg is livid about the sustained gains in literacy and student achievement, reported all over California, following a return two years ago to stricter academics. She despises the traditional teaching of reading and math, enforcement of higher academic expectations, tests that compare student achievement at similar schools to each other, cash awards made to the most improved bad schools, and many other great reforms. The plain fact is, Goldberg cannot accept that these big academic improvements, shown by test scores at many of the worst schools, are disproving her own unbending beliefs about what causes student failure. You see, Goldberg is a former L.A. principal who put student "self-esteem" far ahead of academics. She embraced grade inflation, minimal testing, social promotion and little homework. She believed that the foremost need was to make poor students and their parents feel better. That these poor, functionally illiterate students later failed as adults was not the fault of schools, Goldberg has long argued, but the fault of poverty. It's a sly and nifty argument, widely employed by teacher's unions, that freed California school districts to continue their incompetent approach to education. After all, since poverty has proved virtually impossible to stamp out, nobody can expect any major improvements in bad schools. Now, rather suddenly, thousands of poor schools across California are experiencing major gains in literacy and math. This is happening even though the kids are just as poor today as they were last year and the year before. Goldberg, with the help of the California Teacher's Association, which also hates the reforms, is fighting back by insisting that Sacramento Democrats agree with her that poverty trumps all. In the litmus test she has created for her Democratic colleagues, those who question her wisdom on education and the poor are heaped with suspicion. What unmitigated bullshit. What a complete creep this woman is. Goldberg's bills would give teacher unions power in choosing curricula, ban crucial literacy tests in second grade and put teachers in charge of creating the tests that measure teachers. Goldberg wrongly claims these rollbacks to reform are needed because, under the current reforms, teachers are being held accountable for socioeconomic factors they can't control. In truth, teachers are not being held accountable anywhere in California. Ineffective teachers, horrible teachers, good teachers in bad situations, burned out teachers who mean well -- all are equally protected from negative consequences. Indeed, the California Teacher's Association and other teacher lobbying groups made sure that we, the public, can never find out how any particular teacher is doing in addressing the illiteracy or other academic troubles of his or her students. Few people realize that test results by classroom are not public information in California. "No, the public or media or parents cannot compare teachers to one another and cannot get that individual classroom data," LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer confirmed to me recently. "The unions would not allow that, and we have agreed in our negotiations not to release that information. Only myself and a few others in the district have access to individual classroom scores." Moreover, Romer does not hold accountable the bad teachers, nor the good teachers in bad situations. Neither does any superintendent in any other district, so far as I know. Teachers are fired for only a handful of reasons, including when they commit crimes, go crazy, or refuse to come to work for months on end. However, the teachers who do fail to show improved test scores when their colleagues down the hall are rapidly improving are today expected to attend training, learn their subject matter and use books that work. God, how horrible for them. Jackie feels their pain. If the Democrats pass AB 2160 and AB 2347 and they are signed by Governor Gray Davis, even in watered-down forms, most of the moderate but effective teaching reforms in use for the past two years will vanish. Finally, I must mention the details of AB 2115, which would ban school team names that Wacky Jackie claims offend American Indians. Not long ago, Sports Illustrated polled American Indians nationwide and found that an incredible 81 percent of Indians do not want schools to stop using Indian nicknames like the Braves, Chiefs, Apaches and even Redskins. Why? It's something Goldberg could never understand, so wrapped is she in complicated neuroses, which makes her see the world as a horrible place she must save. The vast majority of Indians feel the nicknames acknowledge a respect for their history, for the toughness they showed and for their survival today. Jackie would sooner die than accept such a positive spin. After all, American Indians are oppressed people who, along with poor schoolchildren, downtrodden teachers, minimum-wage workers and tattered neighborhoods, Jackie Goldberg alone understands how to defend. |
|||||||||||
|
newtimesla.com | originally published: May 16, 2002 |
|||||||||||
"We're not dead yet," Goldberg said.
See, the liberal mindset doesn't take no for an answer.
Just like the gun haters they will advance to the point of the bayonette just like their socialist teachers taught them.
This happened:
Each side cited surveys bolstering its position.
looks like a draw.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
