The Gray Rat [Pinko-left LA Weekly all but endorses Simon on education]

Dissonance
The Gray Rat
Blame the governor for no books, no desks, no toilet paper
by Marc Cooper

NOW THAT SUMMER VACATION HAS BEGUN, YOU can bet students from Jefferson High in South-Central L.A. are pleased to be back home. No more prolonged stints of sitting on counters or standing in classrooms without enough chairs. No more humiliating "service classes" -- doing menial work for teachers who show up (and not being able to take necessary academic classes because so many teachers do not). And while we're on humiliation, no more having to crowd into too few bathrooms regularly devoid of soap, toilet-seat covers and, yes, toilet paper.

But Jefferson isn't much of an exception when it comes to California's poorer public schools. Four years after Gray Davis made education his "first, second and third priorities," many of our schools remain in an appalling and embarrassing state. From now until November, Davis is going to spend millions trying to convince us that if he's beaten by Bill Simon, the world will come to an end and the apocalypse will first consume our schools.

I've got no confidence in Simon to do anything -- the man has a hard enough time just reading his stump script. But, when it comes to schools, he could hardly do worse than our current governor. Two years ago the ACLU initiated a class-action lawsuit on behalf of poor and minority students against the state for its refusal to provide adequate textbooks and teachers and to repair the decrepit, overheated and undercooled, rat-infested classrooms that too many of our kids must endure.

The suit really stands the beloved political issue of "accountability" back on its feet. It asked the state of California and its governor to be accountable to its schoolchildren, rather than continuing to hold the kids and schools accountable to them. Davis' school reforms have imposed a slew of meaningless and burdensome standardized tests on the schools while the governor publicly gloats over this or that 2 percent fluctuation upward in achievement scores.

But on the moral test of his own administration, the governor simply flunks out. Davis' response to the lawsuit has been to stonewall the issue, prolong the case, run up a gigantic legal tab to the benefit of some of his powerhouse campaign contributors, and allow little Johnny to twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

For anyone who doubts the state of our schools, I recommend a review of a recent Harris survey of California public school teachers, which can be found on the Web at www.publicadvocates.org. Of 6 million public school students in the state, 19 percent attend schools where at least a fifth of the teachers are uncredentialed, 32 percent go to schools without enough textbooks to be taken home for study, and 32 percent find classrooms either uncomfortably hot or cold. A million students deal with closed or non-working bathrooms, and nearly 2 million California students share classrooms with roaches, mice or rats.

Let's be clear. Gray Davis didn't create this situation. California schools began to sink 20 years ago when the same nimrods who now want to chop up L.A. brought us Proposition 13, thinking money is better spent on kitchen remodeling than on public education.

What is Davis' fault is his refusal to remedy this mess. Frankly, the sort of civil rights suit the ACLU is pressing is not intended to ever really get to trial. Rather, it's a pointed invitation to the state to sit down and settle the complaint. Davis could easily find money to at least fix the toilets, install air conditioning, fumigate the classrooms and buy the textbooks. Somehow, the state found $95 million for software it didn't need from the gov's pals over at Oracle.

BUT THE GOVERNOR IS MUCH MORE A putz than a mensch. Instead of working this problem out, the notoriously vindictive Gray Davis actually countersued local school districts, trying to scapegoat them (a strategy thrown out by the judge). Worse, Davis overruled the advice of his own attorney general, who offered to thriftily represent the state, and instead hired his overpaid hack cronies over at O'Melveny & Myers -- a rest home for retired and failed Democrats (from Warren Christopher on down to Kathleen Brown) and a firm that has pumped thousands of bucks over the years into Davis' political campaigns.

Charging $345 an hour for its attorneys and $140 for its paralegals, O'Melveny's crew ran up $6 million in legal fees by the beginning of this year (when Davis' office stopped publicly reporting the scandalous costs of their services). By my calculation, if Davis had spent the $6 million on textbooks alone, he would have reduced the shortage by 50 percent. Some legal experts predict that when this is all over, the state will have spent "tens of millions" of taxpayer funds on these private lawyers to defend itself against the indefensible.

And what have "we the people" gotten for our millions? A classic corporate legal strategy nakedly aimed at dragging out the legal battle until 2006, when Davis will be safely gone from the governor's chair and some other chump can inherit the problem. Indeed, the lead lawyer representing Davis is the noble soul who flacked for Exxon Corp. after it blackened Alaska's coastline in the Valdez disaster.

A brief rush of new stories last fall detailed the delaying and thuggish tactics used by the governor's contract consigliere. A gaggle of young students -- all of them plaintiffs against the state -- were dragged into intimidating depositions with the governor's hired lawyers. Most dramatic was the case of 11-year-old Carlos Ramirez of the Bay Area. The ACLU included him in the case because he had once passed out in a classroom where the temperature had risen above 90 degrees.

Carlos then became one of 13 students who, over a mind-boggling period of 24 days, were further roasted in browbeating depositions by Governor Davis' gentlemen lawyers. Carlos had asked to be excused from this ordeal because his mother had been killed a few weeks earlier in a drive-by shooting. But no dice. Some guy named Michael Rosenthal subjected Carlos to four days of questioning and -- according to the San Francisco Chronicle -- at one point asked the child some 20 questions just about the school-cafeteria milk. When another teenage student witness told attorney Rosenthal of the pestilence in her classroom, he asked sarcastically, "Did the mouse droppings you saw on the floor affect your ability to learn in U.S. history?"

The student answered, "No." She should have added: "No, sir. Just the way a brain, a heart and a soul apparently didn't affect your ability to become a scumbag attorney." (Memo to Mr. Rosenthal: Please write a protest letter to the editor so I can get another chance to trash you in my reply. Pretty please.)

Davis took some heat over this episode of nauseating gangsterism carried out at extravagant public expense. The Northern California papers -- which tend to pay more attention to Sacramento -- skewered him. The L.A. Times, meanwhile, mildly chided Davis on this issue nine months ago and then briefly mentioned the ACLU suit in a December article but has since, for some reason, decided this issue is no longer newsworthy (even though the now-campaigning Davis blabbers on about education almost daily).

Currently, both sides in the lawsuit are engaged in routine pretrial mediation. But sources familiar with the talks say the Governor's Office remains intransigent. It doesn't have to be that way. Davis has myriad resources and recourses available to him to reach an honorable settlement and even capitalize on it for his own electoral benefit. But it seems his first, second and third priorities are to continue to delay while further enriching the besuited goons over at O'Melveny & Myers.

When the kids come back to school in September, chances are there still won't be enough textbooks to go around. But not to worry. Those curious few who wish to learn more about the inner workings of state government will require no special readings. It'll be enough to look at the rat droppings on the classroom floor to drive home the lesson of -- when it comes to the poor and the powerful -- just who is accountable to whom.

Look at this!

I've got no confidence in Simon to do anything -- the man has a hard enough time just reading his stump script. But, when it comes to schools, he could hardly do worse than our current governor.

Coming from the Weekly, a publication that hates Republicans with a passion, this is an endorsement of Simon!

Just the thing to get their base pumped in November, no?

Even the Weekly can't stand the governor!

I'm not sure why they hate Simon so much, but it doesn't look like they have much reason to care whether Simon or Davis takes the governor's chair, which I'd count as a big win for us.

Apparently Simon was unprepared for some of his encounters with the press, and that has the Weekly lathered up. From what I've heard, he's getting increasingly comfortable on the stump, so maybe he can make a better impression on them soon. Not that it matters since they would endorse Davis even if he was the Devil Incarnate. But even the Devil might make a better governor than Davis!

Not totally. Note **THIS** quote. . .

They still think that budgets are for the "little people", and living within your means is a unwarranted limitation of government power. . .

But then the author contradicts himself in the very next paragraph...

Davis could easily find money to at least fix the toilets, install air conditioning, fumigate the classrooms and buy the textbooks.

...which was the very argument made by the "nimrods" over 20 years ago during the Prop. 13 campaign. The money is there; greedy politicians like Davis have refused to spend it on schools.

Gray Davis should not spend money on lawyers to fight lawsuits instead of spending it to help fix the problem. That's just plain dumb, and the Weekly is right to slam the governor on it.

But ...

Wasn't Proposition 98 supposed to solve this problem?

Aren't we spending tons of money on schools?

The real question is not how much we spend, but where it goes and what it does. I seem to remember multi-billion dollar school bonds, cheerfully passed by voters, that made not the tiniest difference in our decrepid schools.

Where is this money going?

These are valid questions, and I think we need answers.

Gray's certainly not the person to give them to us. I think the shoddiest thing about Davis is not the narrow question of spending money on lawyers instead of schools, vile though that is. The shoddy thing is that he apparently considers the governor's office as a way to dispense favours through spending. Once the money's spent, he doesn't seem to care in the slightest whether it actually advances us towards a goal. He brags about spending, not about he's actually accomplished.

This is no way to run a government.

Getting hot and smelly in Sacramento!

Need to remove the manure!

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As I recall, CA has the highest (or nearly the highest) spending per student in the Union. Prop. 98, the lottery, and the like were supposed to make that amount even higher. Of course, any increase goes towards feeding administrators and take a guess as to which political party they are beholden to. Since they pay their "dues" to the Governor, they aren't pressured to improve the schools one iota.

Dump Davis!

Let's indeed be clear. If these 'nimrods' hadn't acted, I'd be paying $2000-3000 a month just for property tax right now. People were getting priced out of their own homes by these taxes, wich is why the voters passed Prop 13 handily. And the dweeb who wrote this ought to be ripping the Sacramento legislature a new one, because after Prop 13 passed, they created any shortfall situation by appropriating local property taxes to cover their own budgetary wants. They dole some of it back out (disproportionately to where it came from, by the way. So San Francisco gets more than its share for example. Thank you Willy Brown) , but they keep lots for their own programs. Local government is forced to rely on sales tax, which is why you see so many shopping centers and "big box" retail establishments going up: local government wants more revenue and creating more retailers is the only way they can get it. The idiots griping about "urban sprawl" and "big faceless corporations pushing out the little guys" have the Democrats in the legislature to thank.

This author is either ill-informed or deliberately obscuring the facts regarding Prop 13.

How, how did Davis get re-elected? I've asked people at my college and work and I haven't found anyone who will own up to it. If they didn't vote for Simon then they claim to vote for the Green or Libertarian candidate.
Sure would be nice to have Gov. Jesse Ventura visit and body-slam the living stink out of Davis.

Anyway, I can't quite agree on Howard Jarvis' Prop 13. Having a limit set on how much property tax can be squeezed out of homebuyers/homeowners by Sacramento is really a good thing. Prop 13 gets blamed for many services, non-profit groups, and private agencies not getting a cut of the state budget.
When it comes to the schools, we still have the California Lottery that claims to have given schools approximately $13 billion since 1984.
Of course, one good idea that would help the schools is to apply a head tax on the children who attend the schools. Each family would be taxed for each child in school. It's fair for those who don't have any children and for those homeowners who don't have children in school anymore--and yes, there are still big families even in urban areas so even in Los Angeles, the shortfall won't be that significant.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I sound like a "racist".

I agree on the property tax; you're confusing me with the writer of the article :-). I post many articles because I find them interesting, not necessarily because I agree with them.

Davis won because there is a significant number of Democrats whose jobs depend on him. Davis voters recognized that he would play the game with the Teachers' Union, Firefighters' Union, and so on, and those people are organized and get out the vote well.

Simon didn't help his cause, unfortunately, by giving in to some of his advisors by following their advice to emphasize political corruption. As it happens, voters are aware of his corruption, believe all political candidates are corrupt, and therefore ignore it as an issue. To be fair, though, the press, while not liking Davis, never gave Simon a fair shot. He was pegged as a loser from the start, and as a result did badly in fund-raising, but he still got within 5% of Grayout. This is pretty good for a state that's supposed to be solidly Democratic.

Hope that helps understanding.

D

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