California Superintendent of Public Schools Tom Torlakson will participate in an Internet town hall on education starting at 7 p.m. tonight.

Torlakson, a former state senator and assemblyman from Antioch, will join state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and California Community College Chanceller Jack Scott in a live, online discussion of the state’s severe financial crisis and it will hit schools unless voters approve tax extensions.

To submit questions and watch the town hall, click here.

Read on for the full news release. Read the rest of this entry »

Gov. Jerry Brown today announced the appointments of two Bay Area women to posts in the state’s community college system.

Natalie Berg, 75, of San Francisco, has been appointed to the Community Colleges Board of Governors. She has served as an elected member on the board of trustees for the City College of San Francisco since 1997; she also has worked as an independent consultant with her own firm, NKB Strategies. Earlier, Berg served with the City College of San Francisco in a variety of instruction and administrative positions from 1967 to 1997, retiring as dean of the School of Health on the John Adams Campus. Berg is a member of the Bay Area Council, and current president of Jewish Vocational Services. This position requires Senate confirmation and the compensation is $100 per diem. Berg is a Democrat.

Van Ton-Quinlivan, 42, of Burlingame, has been appointed as the Community College Vice Chancellor of Economic and Workforce Development. Ton-Quinlivan has been serving as the director of workforce development for PG&E since 2006; earlier, she served as an adjunct faculty member for De Anza Community College from 2002 to 2004, as vice president for internet marketing at Knowledge Universe from 1999 to 2001, and as director for strategic marketing at Digital Island. Ton-Quinlivan also served as a corporate strategist for Pacific Bell from 1995 to 1997. This position does not require Senate confirmation and the compensation is $116,508. Ton-Quinlivan is a Democrat.

I co-authored a story in last Friday’s Tribune about how “tough on crime” – a phrase always subject to interpretation, but well-worn enough in modern politics almost to be considered cliché – is in a state of flux as fiscal conservatives start to say that locking them up and throwing away the key doesn’t make sense anymore.

Today, I see more evidence that this is so, and more strange bedfellows as a result. Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, Bush Administration Education Secretary Rod Paige and former American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene will join NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous on Thursday to launch a campaign to influence state budgets and federal policy in order to reduce incarceration.

“We need to be ‘smart on crime’ rather than ‘tough on crime’ and address soaring incarceration rates in this country,” Jealous said in a news release. “Failing schools, college tuition hikes and shrinking state education budgets are narrowing the promise of education for young people all across the country. Meanwhile, allocations for our incarceration system continue to increase, sending our youth the wrong message about their future.”

Thursday’s rollout of the NAACP’s report entitled “Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate” will take place at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a pair of bills into law yesterday that he says will fundamentally change California’s correctional system to halt the costly and inefficient “revolving door” of low-level offenders and parole violators through state prisons.

“For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving door for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months—often before they are even transferred out of a reception center,” Brown said in his AB 109 signing message. “Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation, and impedes local law enforcement supervision.”

AB 109 changes the law to realign certain responsibilities for lower level offenders, adult parolees and juvenile offenders from state to local jurisdictions; the governor’s office says it will give local law enforcement the right and the ability to manage offenders in smarter and cost-effective ways. It won’t go into effect until a community corrections grant program is created by statute and funding is appropriated. “I will not sign any legislation that would seek to implement this legislation without the necessary funding,” Brown said.

No strange bedfellows here, however: GOP lawmakers have opposed Brown’s effort to secure funding for this realignment. “In the coming weeks, and for as long as it takes, I will vigorously pursue my plan to balance the state’s budget and prevent reductions to public safety through a constitutional guarantee,” Brown said.

Brown’s office was careful to note that when AB 109 is implemented, no inmates currently in state prison will be released early; all felons sent to state prison will continue to serve their entire sentence; all felons who are convicted of a serious or violent offense — including sex offenders and child molesters — will still go to state prison; and felons who are not eligible for state prison can serve their sentence at the local level.

UPDATE @ 1:47 P.M.: Assembly Budget Committee Vice Chairman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, underscored his caucus’ opposition to this bill with a news release today.

“Governor Brown signed AB 109 after sunset yesterday the so-called Public Safety bill, which is everything but that. It was appropriate that he chose to sign this abominable legislation as dark descended on California.

“This legislation turns California’s Criminal Justice System profoundly, in favor of criminals, and unarguably places all of us and our families at vastly greater risk to become victims of crime.

“Upwards of 68,000 un-rehabilitated, unremorseful criminals will be in our communities, largely unsupervised, without even bare minimum rehabilitative opportunities and greatly diminished, if any, consequences for their continued victimization of Californians.

“The governor signed the bill even though there is no funding to pay local government for the burden being dumped on them.

“It would appear to be a cynical ploy to coerce Legislators and the people of California to support tax increases. In fact, AB109 is now the most compelling reason to oppose these taxes – starving this beast of a bill before it’s unleashed.

“I urge all Californians to speak loudly and long against this ill-conceived travesty of justice.”

But prison-reform advocates aren’t crazy about the bill either.

“This plan is a shell game that would simply shift corrections costs from the state to the counties without addressing the real problem: California is locking up too many people for low-level offenses for too long,” Allen Hopper, police practices director with the ACLU of Northern California, said in a news release. “The massive cost of incarceration is robbing the people of California of vitally needed services, including education and healthcare. What we need is real sentencing reform, such as shortening the sentences for simple possession drug crimes. It’s time for California to stop wasting hundreds of millions of dollars incarcerating people who pose no threat to public safety.”

“This plan would allow people to be locked up in local jails for up to three years, triple the current limit. Research consistently shows that longer sentences do not produce better outcomes. In fact, shorter sentences coupled with re-entry and prevention tactics are both more effective and more cost-effective,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director in Southern California for the Drug Policy Alliance. “We’re talking about people convicted of low-level offenses, like drug possession, prostitution and petty theft, often related to a drug problem. But the plan doesn’t include a dime for drug treatment or mental health care. In fact, the governor has proposed reducing funds for those services.”

“Any California corrections reform must include sentencing reform,” said Kris Lev-Twombly, director of programs at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “A felony conviction is a life-long sentence that should not be applied to low-level offenses. No matter how old the conviction, people with a felony on their record will face significantly diminished employment opportunities and much lower lifetime earnings. They may also be prohibited from accessing student loans, food stamps and other public assistance. This works against individual, family and community wellbeing and public safety.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today appointed two Bay Area figures to co-chair a national Equity and Excellence Commission that will examine how school finance impacts educational opportunity and recommend ways to make funding fairer.

Named as co-chairs were University of California, Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Also named to serve on the 28-member panel were Stanford University professors Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Linda Darling-Hammond and Eric Hanushek.

The Department formed the commission in response to a congressional request included in the fiscal year 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act. Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, had helped lead the fight for that request.

“All our children should have an equal opportunity to achieve prosperity, not just those at the top,” Honda said in a news release today. “Closing our achievement gap, however, is not just about those at the bottom. It is about making sure that every working and middle class neighborhood has a world-class school. The Equity Commission represents an important opportunity to reframe the issue of education equity and raise its profile in the national debate.”

“We have known for years that equal opportunity is a fallacy in our public schools. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which shows the U.S. lagging badly behind most of the developed world in reading, math and science, highlights how equity/inequity in education correlates directly with global competitiveness or lack thereof,” Honda continued. “As poverty increases in our schools, our scores steadily decrease. This finding should make our goal simple: To make every school as good as the schools in our wealthiest communities.”

The commission will meet for the first time in public session next Tuesday, Feb. 22 in Washington to discuss the scope of its work, outreach efforts, and the timetable for completion of its report.

Edley, Berkeley’s law dean since 2004, cofounded the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, where he taught law for 23 years; and Berkeley’s Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity; he held White House policy positions under Presidents Carter and Clinton, served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and – after having had Barack Obama among his Harvard Law students – advised the current President’s transition team.

Hastings co-founded his DVD-rental-by-mail company in 1997, has been an actiive educational philanthropist and board member of many nonprofits, and served as president of the California State Board of Education from 2000 to 2004; he has led successful statewide political campaigns for more charter public schools and easier passage of local school bonds.

Cuéllar is Professor of Law and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, focusing on administrative law, immigration and citizenship, and international and national security. From early 2009 through last summer, he was on leave from Stanford to serving as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House; President Obama named him last July to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.

Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has launched the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the School Redesign Network and served as faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program. She’s a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the National Academy of Education. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.

Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues, and his work on efficiency, resource usage, and economic outcomes of schools has frequently entered into the design of both national and international educational policy. His research covers areas such as the impacts of teacher quality, high stakes accountability, and class size reduction on achievement along with the role of cognitive skills in international growth and development.

Other commission members include NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous; Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund President and General Counsel Thomas Saenz; National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel; and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and her husband, Daniel Mulhern, will teach interdisciplinary courses on energy, leadership, state budgets and the economy at the University of California, Berkeley’s schools of law, business and public policy, the university announced this morning.

The academic appointments will be part time this semester and full time in the fall.

The Democrat served as Michigan’s first woman governor from 2003 through the start of this month. The automotive and manufacturing sectors plummeted during this time, forcing Granholm to work to diversify the state’s economy – including an emphasis on clean energy – while shoring up the vastly changed automotive industry.

“We are simply delighted that a governor of this caliber and expertise with such a strong legacy has agreed to teach here,” Berkeley Law Dean Christopher Edley said in a news release. “We teach our students how to apply their studies to solve the most intractable real world problems. Governor Granholm is a role model in this arena. She’s a distinguished policy expert who’s charted a new course for Michigan through hard work and innovation.”

Granholm, 51, will teach several courses while working closely with several UC Berkeley’s think tanks. At the Goldman School of Public Policy this spring, she will teach about state budgets, clean energy jobs, diversifying the economy, and leadership; in the fall, she will add a course on state budgeting and governing in times of fiscal crisis.

She also is scheduled to speak in Cal’s Chevron Auditorium at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 2 on “Cracking the Code: Creating Jobs in America (in the wake of globalization).”

“In these times of tough budget choices and increasing demands on government to solve problems, no one is better equipped to teach about leadership and policy-making than Governor Granholm,” Goldman School Dean Henry Brady said in the releasel. “We are thrilled to have her at the Goldman School of Public Policy to continue our tradition of teaching students how to face tough problems directly, analytically and imaginatively.”

Granholm graduated from Cal in 1984 with B.A. in both political science and French, and from Harvard Law School in 1987. She said returning to her alma mater is “a terrific opportunity to offer students an insider’s look at the challenges of running state government during fiscal crisis. It also gives Dan and me a forum to debate public policy with the university’s stellar thinkers and scholars.”

Granholm, who also is scheduled to be a regular contributor to NBC’s “Meet the Press with David Gregory,” became a federal prosecutor in Detroit in 1990 and was elected Michigan’s first female attorney general in 1998. She was then elected governor in 2002 and re-elected in 2006.

While in office, she signed into law a college prep curriculum for every high school student in the state and some of the toughest turnaround requirements in the nation for low-performing schools. In 2007, she launched a “No Worker Left Behind” program for displaced adults, in which the state pays the community college or technical school tuition of any unemployed and underemployed citizen seeking training for a high-demand job. Michigan under her leadership won recognition by the Pew Center on the States as being one of the best managed states in the country and one of the top states for adding new business expansions.

Mulhern is a leadership coach; the host of “Everyday Leadership,” a radio show on the Michigan Talk Network; and the author of two books: “Everyday Leadership: Getting Results in Business, Politics and Life” (2007); and “Be Real: Inspiring Stories for Leading at Home and Work” (2010). He’ll teach two courses in this year’s fall semester: one on gender, work and leadership to be offered jointly by the Goldman School and Berkeley Law, and another at the Haas School of Business on leadership.

Mulhern also will join faculty affiliated with Berkeley Law’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute and its project on health, economic and family security. He graduated from Yale University in 1980 with a degree in religious studies and from Harvard Law School in 1986.

UPDATE @ 3:50 P.M.: University spokeswoman Susan Gluss, whom I’d contacted earlier to find out how much Granholm and Mulhern will be paid, just e-mailed me to say I should contact the campus public records office, presumably with a formal California Public Records Act information request. I’ve just left a voice mail for the public records coordinator, and e-mailed him a formal written request.

UPDATE @ 5:32 P.M.: My esteemed colleague, Matt Krupnick, just heard back from Gluss that Granholm and Mulhern each will receive a salary of $150,000, which she said is “somewhat below the average Berkeley salary for starting assistant professors in law or business.”

I was on KQED’s “This Week in Northern California” last night to discuss the plan to sell and then lease back state buildings in order to raise quick cash to help close our budget gap. Other topics included UC tuition hikes and San Francisco’s governmental tumult, and Belva Davis interviewed Oakland Mayor-Elect Jean Quan.

Aceves

Torlakson

CORRECTION 9/10/2010: Mt. Diablo Unified School District Superintendent Steve Lawrence was incorrectly listed in the news release among the names of those that endorse Aceves, per Contra Costa Superintendent of Schools Joe Ovick.

Contra Costa County Superintendent of Schools Joe Ovick and more than a dozen other area school superintendents have endorsed Larry Aceves for state Superintendent of Public Instruction over local candidate and state Assemblyman Tom Torlakson.

The list includes top executives at the Mt. Diablo, Acalanes, San Ramon Valley and Walnut Creek school districts.

The local superintendents said they wanted an experienced superintendent at the post. Aceves is a retired school superintendent while Torlakson was a high school before he began a long career as a county and state lawmaker. He has also worked as a community college teacher during his legislative term.

Read full release below:

Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was crowing last week that the $26 billion aid package for cash-strapped states includes $1.2 billion for California that would “keep 16,500 teachers on the job.”

This morning, the campaign of Republican senatorial nominee Carly Fiorina sent out a news release saying California Democrats had other plans for the money: “Another day, another broken promise from Barbara Boxer.”

The Fiorina release pointed to a Sacramento Bee blog item in which state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said this new federal money could help plug part of the state budget’s gaping deficit. It also says that the federal money won’t be available before districts must plan their budgets and school starts, and that the money won’t flow through to schools under the Legislature passes a budget, so jobs will be lost at least in the interim.

Both Steinberg’s and Boxer’s offices shot back later this morning.

“The education jobs law and the guidance from the Department of Education could not be more clear: This funding can only be used to save education jobs that serve our children in public schools – and nothing else,” Boxer said in her statement.

And Nathan Barankin, Steinberg’s communications director, said Fiorina “fails to grasp the basic fundamentals of budgeting.”

“News flash to Fiorina: keeping teachers on the job does help the state balance its budget,” he wrote. “Governor Schwarzenegger’s budget proposes to slash school funding by billions, which would result in thousands of teacher layoffs throughout the state. This is an outcome that Senator Boxer and Senator Steinberg want to avoid. The federal money will ensure our schools can afford to keep teachers on the job and our children receive a quality education.”

Then there’s the issue of timing: whether the federal money would arrive and the state budget would be enacted in time to save teachers’ jobs.

Districts already have budgeted for this coming school year; when there’s uncertainty about the budget, they peg their budgets to the Governor’s May budget revision. The state Education Code dictates timing of budget-related layoffs, with a June deadline, so districts already have issued their pink slips for this coming year.

California applied for the federal funding last Friday, Aug. 13, the first day it was possible to make the request, so the governor’s office clearly was wasting no time. Secretary Arne Duncan told governors that day that the U.S. Department of Education anticipates awarding the money within two weeks of receiving approvable applications – in our case, that would be by Aug. 27; he also urged states to give districts an estimate of how much they’ll receive as soon as possible so they can plan accordingly.

The state need not wait for a budget to be passed and signed into law before passing the federal dollars through to the districts; the state Department of Finance can send a letter to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, the caucuses can sign off on it and the money can go out. The hope is that districts would get it in time to choose whether to bring pink-slipped teachers back right away and staff up for this school year, or to save the money as a bulwark against further layoffs next year.

As California Watch’s Louis Freedberg noted last week, that won’t be possible everywhere. Some districts have started school already, and most others will do so around the end of this month. And local school boards would have to ratify whatever decisions are made on how the funds will be spent.

As Freedberg concluded, all levels of government – federal, state and local – are going to have to work very quickly and efficiently with clear communications if teachers will be re-hired and paid in time to greet most students returning to school this year. That said, I’d bet there’s not a school district in the state that won’t gratefully accept the money, whenever it arrives.

A higher education nonprofit organization, The Campaign for College Opportunity, is asking California’s 2010 gubernatorial candidates to sign a pledge of support for improved access to higher education and higher graduation rates.

The Los Angeles-based organization, led by California Business Roundtable president and California State University system trustee Bill Hauck, has a goal to boost by 1 million the number of college graduates by 2025.

That’s the year when the state will have 1 million fewer grads that it needs to supply the workforce, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The Campaign for College Opportunity advocates for higher education legislation. (Correction: Per the organization’s spokesman Marty Trujillo, the organization has not taken a position on Democratic Assembly Speaker John Perez’ jobs bill, which would fully fund the state’s higher education system and cut recent tuition fee hikes.)

It’s all part of the brewing public relations convergence between the battle over the state’s crumbling budget and the fight between Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Met Whitman over the governor’s seat.  The governor is one of the three approvals — Assembly and Senate are the other two — required to pass a state budget and everybody knows it.

The Commonwealth Club of California held a fascinating and sobering panel discussion last week on the future of higher education in California, featuring University of California President Mark Yudof, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, moderated by club President and CEO Gloria Duffy.

The club’s blurb for the event was as follows:

Has California’s beacon of educational hope burned out? 50 years ago, our state produced A Master Plan for Higher Education in California. This plan was to guide the state in successfully creating a public higher education system that was the envy of the world. But with budget crises, pay cuts, furlough days and more students than ever being denied acceptance into our UC, state and community college systems, what can we do to climb out of this dark hole and back to the top of the educational hierarchy? Join us for a unique discussion among all three top leaders of the state’s public higher education system.

See it here: