Flood at the Gates

I was not one to join the chorus of applause, pot banging, horn honking or any other expression of gratitude or hero acknowledgement to any health care professional; however, I do feel that UPS, USPS, Transit professionals, Grocery clerks and others such as dry cleaners, laundry’s and the Amazon warehouse workers do. None of the non-professional blue collar individuals who stayed working during the lockdown signed up for a pandemic, had no idea that they would be at a significant risk as they commuted to work and employers failed to provide necessary PPE, health care, paid time leave or had an established protocol for safety and well being for both staff and customers. I shopped at Whole Foods during it all, prior to mask mandates, prior to any screens erected and sheer confusion as to what, where and how we were to get through this. I traveled on public ferries going out of my way to avoid subways and paths but did so with masks, gloves, and other clothing to obscure my face to prevent virus transmission. I stripped down immediately after coming home, showered, did laundry and not one single food item went into the frig or cupboards without wiping them down, transferring them into my own containers if possible. I kept physically distant the entire time and still do, getting off PATH if the train is too crowded and just one single person is unmasked. I have limited the subways to 15 minutes or less and I move again if necessary to quickly limit exposure. Where is my applause? 

The reality is that we somehow did a Jesus complex on these people and in reality their employers, the owners and investors in many hosptials (some they closed before Covid which led to further problems), that the lack of centralized communication and transport, the failure of private medical care to open the doors, leaving public hospitals overwhelmed after years of under-funding and in turn the simple lack of again a coordinated and comprehensive effort by the Trump Administration to ensure all facilities had what they needed to effectively treat the virus and the patients appropriately. And in turn this lead to many deaths that need not be and also contributed to the spread as over 7% (the last estimate I read) of the infections were health care professionals. Most deaths were in facilites that housed and treated the elderly and in turn most of the infections again were attributed to warehouses that process food. So while you sit home ordering your sofas online the persons putting that in boxes, the dudes cutting up your chicken for your Seamless delivery were getting infected, taking it into the community and dying. They were unable to access health care nor was it made available to them with proper testing, time off and of course insurance to pay for it all. So where is their applause? As for the deaths and infection rates among health care workers has a lot to do with the failure of the boards, the directors and of course the local and state agencies for not funding them, maintaining and managing the faciliites to run on a daily basis well let alone in a situation of emergency that Covid wrought. Some did as they looked to major events from natural disasters to terrorists attacks or mass shootings to change their protocol in crisis but few to none were ready for a highly infectioous virus to arrive on the shores with little warning and little direction from the Federal Government. Again we have learned that all this no to low government thing doesn’t actually work, does it? And when you put the national care of eduacation, health and justice in the hands of private enterprise you get what we got, shitty health care, workers getting sicker and of course failure to handle a crisis.

  Hospitals for Years Banked on Lean Staffing. The Pandemic Overwhelmed Them. 

Russell Gold, Melanie Evans| The Wall Street Journal. June 18 2020

Banner Health had figured out how to get ahead in the modern health-care industry. The Phoenix-based nonprofit hospital system relentlessly focused on costs. It trimmed labor, the largest expense for any hospital. Last year, it carried 2.1% fewer employees for every bed filled, compared with the year before. It also moved away from pricey hospital settings. Visits at free-standing clinics and surgery centers grew 12% in 2019, while its hospital emergency rooms were flat. The result was a financial powerhouse with $6.2 billion in cash and investments and a bond rating that is the envy of corporate financial officers. But when the pandemic hit, the strategies that had helped it become a model for other hospital systems suddenly became weaknesses. In early June, as Arizona’s count of Covid-19 cases began to rise by 1,000 a day, Banner’s hospitals filled with very sick patients needing one-on-one help from critical-care nurses. There weren’t enough. Banner and other well-funded hospitals muddled through, but in doing so they overtaxed existing nurses, had to train others on the fly and relied heavily on rapidly hiring temporary staff, including more than 1,000 nurses and respiratory therapists on expensive short-term contracts. Those moves helped drive up prices for traveling nurses, putting them out of the reach of neighboring hospitals. Nurse pay for contracts signed by the state, which eventually did much of the hiring, rose to $145 an hour from $85 for intensive-care specialists. Draining that limited pool meant that poorer hospitals were unable to find help when they needed it. Medical research concludes that being short-staffed at any time leads to worse outcomes and higher hospital death rates. 

The staffing pain in Arizona is emblematic of what took place in hospitals across the country during the pandemic, according to dozens of interviews with hospital executives and workers, public-health officials and industry experts. Hospitals by design were supposed to be lean and efficient, pushed that way by the market and government policies. But that left the U.S. dangerously unprepared. 

 “You’re looking at a private-sector entity that suddenly has to take on the world’s largest public-sector response,” said John Hick, medical director of emergency preparedness for Hennepin Healthcare, a public hospital system in Minneapolis. “They’re not prepared for it because there’s no incentive to do that.” 

 Banner Health said it acted prudently in keeping its pre-pandemic nursing staff lean. It said it had a cross-trained staff and that the system successfully expanded capacity during the worst of the pandemic, in part because of its financial strength. “You’re never going to sit there with 500 more nurses if they don’t have the patients,” said Peter Fine, the longtime CEO of Banner. “It’s this balancing act that literally goes on in every health-care organization around the country, all the time, in projecting what their business activity is [and] what staffing they need to support that business activity.” The health-care system has faced pressure over decades to improve financial performance, even as per capita spending has soared.

 Hospitals are pushed by Medicare and insurance companies to trim waste, and by bondholders and shareholders to boost income. Health-care systems have spent the past decade tightly managing staff and pursuing scale through acquisitions to better negotiate terms with health-insurance companies. Deal making across the hospital sector picked up with passage of the Affordable Care Act and has largely remained strong in the past decade, with an average of 84 combinations a year among general, surgical, specialty and long-term care hospitals, according to Irving Levin Associates, a research firm. Labor is typically the largest expense at any hospital, and nurses make up 42.7% of hospital payrolls, according to federal labor department data.

 In 2016, as an improving economy drove higher wages and signing bonuses for nurses, labor expenses grew faster than the median hospital’s overall operating expense, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Median operating expenses overtook hospital revenue that year and the next, squeezing margins and forcing hospitals to take a tighter grip on labor costs. In recent years, hospitals have shifted resources to outpatient settings for a growing number of lucrative, high-volume procedures such as knee replacements, bolstering staff outside hospitals where the sickest patients get care. For the past decade, the amount Medicare has spent per beneficiary on inpatient hospital services has grown 0.4% a year, compared with an average 7.9% growth in spending on outpatients, according to federal data. 

The upshot is fewer hospitals, with less capacity for intensive services. There has been a 12% decrease in the number of hospitals between 1975 and 2018, American Hospital Association data show—even as the U.S. population has grown about 50%. Even large nonprofit hospitals, which receive federal and local tax breaks and treat two of every three patients in the U.S., according to federal data, have adopted similar financial models. 

 “They are not the ‘Little Sisters of the Poor’ charitable institutions that hospitals once were back in the 19th century,” said Martin Gaynor, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies the health industry. “These are big businesses.” 

 The global crisis exposed weaknesses in the “just-in-time inventory” of nursing staff in the same way it did for personal protective equipment, ventilators and other vital supplies. More than 5,300 Arizonans died of Covid-19, more than half in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located. Strapped hospitals in the state’s smaller cities tried to move patients into Tucson and Phoenix. 

Arizona created a statewide transfer system and moved 2,451 patients, sometimes hundreds of miles. But some hospitals rejected transfer requests, despite reporting open beds. It “wasn’t due to lack of space or stuff, it was staff,” said state health official Lisa Villarroel. No hospital could fully prepare for a surge on the scale of the coronavirus pandemic, said disaster experts, but boosting nurse staffing outside a pandemic and routinely training staff to swap roles would better prepare them for sudden waves of patients. The goal is to avoid a having to deploy a “crisis standard of care,” a method of triaging who gets medical care when a system runs out of critical resources—including health-care practitioners. Arizona activated its crisis standard in late June. 

Banner postponed certain needed surgeries as it redeployed operating room nurses and technicians to help elsewhere in the hospital. Other Phoenix hospitals did the same. Banner said the state’s crisis standards didn’t influence its decision. Banner, Arizona’s largest private employer, was formed in 1999 in a merger and has a 43.5% market share of Phoenix’s inpatient hospitalization, more than the next two largest chains combined. Mr. Fine, the CEO, is one of the highest paid executives in the industry. His 2018 compensation was $10.3 million; a year earlier, his $25.5 million compensation was the highest of any nonprofit health executive that year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of filings.

A Banner spokeswoman said he received several years of deferred compensation, inflating his annual salary figure. Over the past five years, Banner Health has reported a combined $941 million in operating income and another $1.09 billion from its investments, according to Banner financial disclosures. Banner expanded into urgent care, building and buying 51 locations since 2016, and has a joint venture to expand from nine to 34 ambulatory surgery centers over the next three years, continuing its goal of shifting patients away from hospitals. It also plowed income back into existing facilities. It recently spent $857 million expanding and modernizing its two largest hospitals, in Phoenix and Tucson. To attract bond buyers and maintain high ratings, Banner expanded its cash reserve, which helps keep its cost of capital low. 

Banner Health finances about one-third of its investment in technology, property and equipment with debt, which now totals about $4.1 billion, said Dennis Laraway, chief financial officer for the system. “The stronger the credit, the cheaper the capital, the better the price,” Mr. Laraway said. Early in the pandemic, Arizona wasn’t as hard hit as some parts of the country. But the state’s new daily cases soared 10-fold between late April and late June. The state’s governor in late March ordered hospitals to be ready within a month to increase their available beds by as much as 50%, which Banner and other hospitals did. But they didn’t also ensure there would be enough skilled nurses to handle the possible crush of sick patients. “They needed to come up with a staffing plan,” Arizona Department of Health Services Director Cara Christ said. 

“They didn’t have to staff those plans.” Banner said it employs 11 full-time emergency-preparedness staff and first drafted its pandemic response plan a decade ago, which it activated in March. In June, as patients poured in from Northern Arizona, Banner halted transfers to Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, one of its premier facilities, according to a spokeswoman. It shifted patients to Banner’s other area hospitals to manage the strain on its hospitals, including its staff. Brittany Schilling, a 27-year-old ICU nurse at Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, said her hospital reached capacity several times in June. She recalls hearing several “Code Purple” announcements, an indication that her unit was at its capacity. Nurses at some of Banner’s Phoenix hospitals went from working three shifts a week to five. “I do feel like it has taken a toll, for sure. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally,” said Ms. Schilling. 

 

 Banner pulled staff from its ambulatory centers to help its ICUs. Lacking needed qualification, they were often paired with ICU-certified nurses. “We put them through very quick training programs to upskill their capabilities,” Mr. Fine said. It eventually trained and reassigned 700 employees. It also hired 898 nurses and 113 respiratory therapists on short-term contracts. By shuffling patients across its hospitals and hiring more staff, Banner ultimately denied only 13 transfer requests from the state and accepted 870 patients through the state-coordinated transfer center, a spokeswoman said. Less financially strong hospitals, which tend to be public or rural, were more vulnerable. Well-funded hospitals across the country soaked up much of the available supply of traveling nurses, leaving the rest priced out of the market. “Demand is through the roof,” said Alan Braynin, chief executive of Aya Healthcare Inc., a health-care staffing agency. Aya had 506 requests for ICU-registered nurses in June. By mid-July, the number of job requests was up to 2,870. In the early summer, Maya Jones’s phone began to buzz several times a day with recruiters. 

An ICU nurse on a three-month assignment at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she said the offers kept rising. “I don’t know how they got my number, but once these people have your number, they don’t lose it,” she said. The 26-year-old Virginia native signed a two-month contract beginning in August at the Chandler Regional Medical Center in the Phoenix area. It pays nearly three times what a contract she signed in January pays. By mid-June, the staff at Valleywise Health, a large public hospital in Phoenix, was worn down from pulling extra shifts. Sherry Stotler, the chief nursing officer, tried to hire 20 to 30 traveling nurses. “We needed to let people take time off,” she said. She was able to hire only six. “We weren’t getting a lot of bites because everyone was competing for the travelers,” she said. Valleywise, usually the hospital of last resort in the Phoenix region, began to turn down transfer requests from rural hospitals that wanted to send their sick patients to a better-equipped urban hospital.

 The situation was also chaotic at Yuma Regional Medical Center, a three-hour drive southwest of Phoenix on the Mexican border. The hospital had struggled to recruit to its remote location even before the pandemic, said Diane Poirot, the hospital’s chief human resources officer. During the crisis, the hospital paid top prices for temporary staff, only to have them recruited for better-paying jobs, Ms. Poirot said. 

Yuma Regional pulled nurses from its operating rooms, canceling surgery to free up staff. But on peak days in June, it was transferring as many as 11 or 12 patients a day on helicopters and airplanes, because it didn’t have enough nurses. Normally patients would be moved to Phoenix hospitals, but as that city strained under the surge, Yuma patients were moved elsewhere, said Glenn Kasprzyk, regional chief operating officer for Global Medical Response Inc., which handles about 60% of the state’s ambulance traffic. 

As Covid-19 cases climbed, nurse Yasmin Salazar said she was overwhelmed as the Yuma Regional emergency room flooded with patients gasping for air. “We weren’t used to how fast they were crashing,” said Ms. Salazar, who has worked in the emergency room for six years. Staff from other parts of the hospital were brought in to care for less-critical patients, but despite the reinforcements, nurses in the emergency room were stretched too thin for the number of critically ill who needed their help, Ms. Salazar said. She couldn’t leave one dangerously sick patient to help when an emergency code sounded in the room next door. “I couldn’t go,” she said. “We all had a critical patient.”

 Yuma Regional’s ICU also filled up. Typically, an intensive-care nurse is assigned to one or two patients. That increased to three to four patients for each nurse as the surge took off, said Gail Galate, one of Yuma Regional’s intensive-care nurses who works overnight in the hospital. “You spend all night figuring out, ‘What am I going to do for the next emergency?’ ” she said. “ ‘What am I going to do for the next person that crashes?’ It’s just nonstop.” Even though Banner was able to increase staffing, nurses at its hospitals were still stretched at the peak of Arizona’s surge. 

Charles Krebbs was taken by ambulance to Banner Thunderbird Medical Center on July 11, less than a week after his 75th birthday and after experiencing a fever and shortness of breath. It could be hard to get nurses on the phone, his daughter, Tara Swanigan, said. When Mr. Krebbs’s breathing worsened, he was moved to the ICU and placed on a ventilator. By Aug. 7, Mr. Krebbs’s health had declined and his daughter was allowed to visit for one hour to say her goodbyes. A night nurse with whom Ms. Swanigan had bonded on the phone switched shifts to be there to comfort her. Afterward, she watched through a window as they removed his ventilator. He died a few minutes later.

“They were overwhelmed, but we know that they did everything they could to treat my father.” she said. In early July, the state health department’s Dr. Christ took the uncommon step of saying the state would hire traveling nurses on behalf of hospitals who could not, even with bonus offers. 

 It contracted with Vizient Inc. to recruit nearly 600 intensive-care and medical-surgical nurses, all of whom had to come from outside Arizona to prevent intrastate poaching. By the time the contract was signed and nurses began to be placed in smaller cities such as Yuma and Flagstaff, it was the end of July, according to Vizient. 

By Aug. 7, half of the contracted nurses were on the job. But Arizona’s patient count was half its July peak and falling. The cavalry arrived, but after the battle was over.

Heads Up!

The wave of promise that Pre-K was the new latest and greatest obsession with Seattle voting to establish a bevy of Pre-k schools with both space and funding unclear but this is good and stuff so we will figure the rest out later, or not.

A recent study by a Nobel laureate claims pre-k begins at birth and somewhere a right-to-lifer is co-opting that to lobby for another law to prevent women’s right to choose.

Life begins at birth a big duh there and I have no Nobel to validate my belief on that one. But as you read the article below the reality is most of American children, 50% or more are born in poverty. The definition of poverty is loosely defined in my world and using the government barometer is actually low balling the reality of most American families living on substandard wages.

As a result of having a family struggle from the moment a child enters a home means that a child will struggle. I see in the schools, the inability to focus, to adapt, to have humor and behavior control. I see vision and hearing and speech problems, problems with health and of course disability that often goes undiagnosed or ignored to the point where it is obvious that the child is in need of an individual ed program or some type of academic intervention all again which costs money and fool and to use an overused expression I hear constantly, “Whose gonna pay for that?” And when you confront these idiots over the fact that WE will in one way or another and on the front end vs the back one its cheaper and more effective, the response you will hear is: “I don’t know anything about that.” Clearly and that only serves to make my point.

States are not equal, they use gerrymandering and other ways to block funds, votes and force segregation by unequal access to housing, employment and of course education. Shocking, I know. And without a strong central government we are going to have more not less. Welcome to the red sea.

We have not funded K-12 Education for decades, we have underfunded and ignored most post secondary Colleges and Universities that have led to a focus on sports and endowments to fund education there unequally. So what is knew with regards to Head Start?

The state of the union is bleak and if I was President Obama I would just say that a drop mic like he did at the Correspondent’s dinner and walk off. Do you really think anything he says will matter? The last eight years are going to be erased with white out.

Head Start is underfunded and unequal, according to a new study

By Joe Heim
The Washington Post
December 14 at 12:01 AM 

Head Start, the federal program that provides education, nutrition and health services to low-income children and their families, is not adequately funded and is administered so differently from state to state that children do not benefit equally, according to a new report from the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The 478-page report, “State(s) of Head Start,” released Wednesday, calls for a near tripling of the program’s budget — to more than $20 billion — to fully meet its goals for serving 3- and 4-year-old children living in poverty. It also points to wide gaps in Head Start programs related to quality of instruction, amount of instruction, access to programs and levels of funding.

“Despite decades of bipartisan support for Head Start, we conclude that the program suffers from inadequate overall public investment,” the report’s authors wrote. “Simply put, the program is not funded at a level that would make it possible to provide child development services of sufficient quality and duration to achieve its goals while serving all eligible children even at ages 3 and 4, much less for those under age 3.”

The report, which compiled program data from 50 states, the District of Columbia and six territories, provides a deeper understanding of who Head Start serves and where it operates best, said Steven Barnett, executive director of NIEER and one of the study’s authors. But it also makes clear, he says, how and where the program has fallen short.

“The percentage of poor kids that Head Start serves nationally could be as low as a quarter, meaning that 75 percent of the children in poverty are not getting Head Start,” Barnett said in an interview. “I don’t think people understand that. And then if you say that the intended population is not just kids who are poor, but kids who are near-poor, then I think people don’t understand that that’s half the children in the country.”

The report arrives as Donald Trump prepares to step into the White House amid uncertainty about funding priorities in the new administration. The Health and Human Services Department, which is expected to be led by Trump’s nominee, Tom Price (R-Georgia), runs Head Start.

Barnett said that while there are questions about the new administration’s plans, he believes there is reason to be optimistic.

“Head Start has been moving in the right direction,” Barnett said. “Certainly there are some folks who are worried that the new administration might not recognize that. But I also think this is an administration that’s willing to take bold steps and see if you could go beyond staying the course and really trying to figure out how do we get all of those local, state and federal programs together to serve the same population of low-income kids and make sure we deliver higher quality with more equal access.”

The report calls for a bipartisan commission of policymakers, researchers and educators to look at how Head Start, which President Lyndon Johnson established in 1965 as part of his “War on Poverty,” can meet its mandate to serve children in poverty.

“We feel everybody is going to have to come to the table,” Barnett said. “This is not an easy problem. It’s not just a matter of saying you should just appropriate $14 billion more. I don’t think anyone thinks that’s going to happen.”

But the report does make clear that additional investments are necessary to ensure that “every eligible child has an equal opportunity to attend a high-quality, effective Head Start program.”

Zero is Cold

I have been long predicting the flying unicorns crash and fall for quite some time. This I suspect is the first of many.

The heralded Theranos with its black turtleneck clad blonde Hitchcock siren has now a zero valuation according to Forbes.

Forbes just cut its estimate of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ net worth from $4.5 billion to zero

Oliver Staley Quartz June 1, 2016

Not long ago, Elizabeth Holmes was regarded as one of the US’s most successful female entrepreneurs, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, Forbes estimated.

Today Forbes cut that figure to zero.

Holmes’s wealth is entirely wrapped up in her 50% stake in Theranos, the medical testing start-up she founded in 2003. The privately-held company in Palo Alto became a standout for its bold attempts to revolutionize the diagnostic industry—it claimed it could test for 240 diseases from a few drops of blood—and for A-listers like Henry Kissinger and Bill Frist on its advisory board.

Last year, Forbes pegged its value at $9 billion, based on the sale of stakes to investors. Since that lofty estimate, Theranos has been battered by bad news, starting with reports in the Wall Street Journal in October that its tests were inaccurate. That triggered an inquiry from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which proposed banning Holmes from the industry.

Forbes went back to its slide rule and, after talking to venture capitalists and industry experts, recalculated Theranos’ value at $900 million, based on its intellectual property and money it has already raised. “At such a low valuation, Holmes’s stake is essentially worth nothing,” Matt Herper writes.

That’s because Theranos’s other investors own preferred shares, and since Holmes owns common shares, they would get paid first if the company were forced to liquidate.

Theranos didn’t provide a comment to Forbes and has yet to respond to an email from Quartz sent before the start of business hours in California today.

I have been looking at economic trends and as this is a major election year and coupled with European, Middle East and China in some type of crisis be it economic or social, I cannot think we are entering a period of recession. There are big building boons in major cities and Seattle and Portland are now the highest cost of housing prices nationally. Irony that we are facing layoffs at Boeing, Microsoft and Nordstrom which crosses all economic sectors. And we have funding problems in schools across the nation with respective State Supreme Courts demanding adequate funding for K-12 schools, which are also bursting at the seams, as this story from Kansas elaborates. 

There are other indicators that we are heading to a type of recession regardless of who wins the crown, whoops I mean the White House, as either of the two presumptive candidates do have a regal disposition.

Eduardo Porter of The New York Times has an excellent interview with some of the current to past players with regards to ways to mitigate a prospective recession.

And businesses are now looking outside the conventional box to fund their business model and many of them are in fact in manufacturing and production versus online app media the love child of VC.

Jobs are created by people creating real products for real people to buy, to sell, to eat, to live and to use. As our economy is now largely a service sector economy we need to evaluate how people earn, what they earn and the ratio of income it costs to live in our increasingly large urban sectors that are driving population and migration.

But why when we have pretty girls selling us bullshit? It makes us feel less cold.

Elizabeth Holmes, Founder of Theranos, Falls From Highest Perch Off Forbes List

By REED ABELSON THE NEW YORK TIMES JUNE 1, 2016

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing company Theranos, lost her place on Forbes’s list of America’s richest self-made women. Credit Kimberly White/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood testing company Theranos, was a rare breed, something more rare than even the Silicon Valley unicorn she created: a self-made female billionaire. Forbes, the business publication that has made a franchise of cataloging the rich, had put Ms. Holmes on the top of its list last year of America’s richest self-made women.

The magazine’s new estimated tally of her wealth? It went from $4.5 billion to $0.

Ms. Holmes’s unusual status, as a young woman who created and controlled a company seemingly valued at about $9 billion, captivated the media: She graced countless magazine covers, including T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Theranos, she said, would revolutionize the lab industry by offering blood tests from a single finger prick at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing.

But over the last year, Theranos became the subject of a series of hard-hitting Wall Street Journal articles and intense regulatory scrutiny from an array of federal agencies.

The media is now mesmerized by Ms. Holmes’s fall. Truth be told, the half of the $9 billion valuation ascribed to Theranos and previously listed as Ms. Holmes’s wealth was nothing more than an estimate based on investors’ best guesses. Taking into account all the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the value of the company’s top-secret technology, Forbes is now guessing that the company is worth more like $800 million. While Ms. Holmes still owns at least half of the company, much of that value would be tied up with outside investors.

But, as an article in Forbes on Wednesday about Ms. Holmes is quick to acknowledge, no one really knows. Theranos has not let anyone really kick the tires. Ms. Holmes, 32, who has repeatedly vowed to reveal all, is now expected to present some data to the public in August at the annual meeting of the AACC, formerly the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. Even then, it may be impossible to come up with a better estimate of what her company is worth.

Not surprisingly, Theranos refused to shed any light on the matter, except to dispute Forbes’s analysis.

“As a privately held company, we declined to share confidential information with Forbes,” Brooke Buchanan, a company spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. “As a result, the article was based exclusively on speculation and press reports.”

The Light is On No One’s Home

 When I read the below story I took a look at the Detroit Free Press and their original expose on the issue. I had already wondered why a Detroit Business man had donated a scholarship fund for a local K-8 school here in Seattle after reading about the professional men standing outside the school one day greeting the students.  He was so impressed with that he donated money to fund future educational endeavors for those that went onto college.  How and when this money will actually avail itself is not specified and it was odd given what I knew about Detroit.  Clearly I had no idea how bad it was. 

Where the story begins is not on the Ellen Show but earlier with an “acclaimed” Principal being the first to tumble down the wall. Yes we have them here as well. The story of K.C. Snapp is not one thta is new in any sense of the words and in cities like Detroit, New Orleans and yes Seattle, the history of fraud and corruption with regards to public money is not shocking, nor surprising.  Patronage is always in fashion when it comes to schools and the money in the system.  No wonder ed reformers want a piece of that action it is a 75 Billion dollar industry.

I have many thoughts on the subject and have seen over the years the lack of oversight, the sheer level of idiocy and games played by school Administrators, be they in the head office or directly in the schools. They are accountable to no one, not the board, the public, the city they live in and that is largely why the push to have Mayor’s be accountable or States take over schools as a way of circumventing or stopping it; the story of Newark schools shows that no it can in some ways make it worse.

But are charters or private schools and voucher programs the answer? They are just as corrupt and just as idiotic with charters suspending students of color and/or disabilities at equal rates (if not more) than their public counterparts, they too have testing and teaching scandals, and in turn financial improprieties.  Yes welcome to the world of education.  Will the last one out turn out the broken lights.

As Detroit schools went broke, principals allegedly took nearly $1 million in bribes and kickbacks

By Yanan Wang

The Washingon Post

  March 30 2015

When Ronald Alexander appeared via video conference on the “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” last month, he was described as “the most amazing man.” Alexander, 60, was the principal of Charles L. Spain Elementary-Middle School, a Detroit public school that became the recipient of a $500,000 donation facilitated by the show.

The episode, which aired in early February, played footage of the school’s crumbling roof and dilapidated gym. Virtually none of the school’s technology worked, DeGeneres told her audience, and the students were forced to take P.E. classes in the hallways. Before a crowd of students and staff in the cafeteria, DeGeneres announced a slate of donations totaling half a million dollars from Lowe’s, the home improvement company, amid raucous cheers.

Then, the grand finale came in the form of Justin Bieber emerging from a box beside DeGeneres. The pop star announced that $1 of every ticket sold for an upcoming concert in the area would be given to Spain Elementary.

“Of all the people in the whole world, I am the happiest principal on Earth,” Alexander said into the camera with a wide grin. “I love you! I love you again! This is the best.” His mood may have since changed, as Alexander was named on Tuesday as one of 12 current and former Detroit principals charged with taking bribes and kickbacks from a school supplies vendor and fabricating invoices from the city’s beleaguered public schools. The alleged scheme began in 2002 and continued until January 2015. “A case like this is a real punch in the gut for those who are trying to do the right thing,” Detroit’s U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said at a press conference. “Public corruption never comes at a good time.”

 A statement from McQuade’s office accuses Norman Shy, the owner of school supplies vendor Allstate Sales, of conspiring with Clara Flowers, the assistant superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools’ Office of Specialized Student Services. Shy and Flowers are also charged with tax evasion for failing to report income. Flowers allegedly received $324,785 in kickbacks from Shy in return for using him as the district’s vendor. According to charging documents cited by the Detroit Free Press, these came in the form of cash, gift cards and payments to contractors who renovated Flowers’s house.

 Flowers and Shy allegedly met regularly to discuss the favors that Flowers was owed, amounts which were carefully tabulated on a ledger that Shy maintained.  The arrangements with principals allegedly unfolded in a similar manner, but in return for kickbacks and bribes, the principals submitted fraudulent invoices — claiming costs for auditorium chairs, lined paper and supplemental teaching materials that were never delivered. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the financial compensation received by the principals ranged from a low of $4,000 to a high of $194,000.

In all, the alleged payments from Shy to school officials totaled $908,518. In return, Shy and his company allegedly received approximately $2.7 million from the public school system through payments for fraudulent invoices. Alexander, the principal who appeared on “Ellen,” allegedly took $23,000 in kickbacks and bribes. The charges are not related to donations the school received from the show. Just one lawyer for the officials has thus far offered comment. Doraid Elder, who is representing Stanley Johnson, told the Detroit Free Press that the public should not rush to judgment.

 “These are merely allegations,” Elder said. “I don’t want people to forget that he’s put over two decades of his heart and soul into giving kids the best education possible.” The current principals charged in the scheme have been placed on unpaid leave, the Associated Press reported, and business with Shy and his companies has been suspended.

The conspiracy allegations add insult to injury for the Detroit public school system, which suffers from a debt exceeding $3 billion. The system’s financial troubles have only worsened under a series of state-appointed emergency managers over the last six years, prompting teachers to stage a “sickout” in January in protest of the poor conditions district-wide.

 On the same day the bribery allegations were announced, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed into law $48.7 million in emergency funding for the ailing schools. “The odorous smell of mold and mildew hits you like a brick wall when you step through the front doors at Spain Elementary-Middle School in Detroit,” school counselor Lakia Wilson wrote on PBS Newshour’s education blog in January. Wilson started working at the school 19 years ago, she said, when it was an institution “any city would be proud to have in its district.”

Things have since changed: Today, it’s the poster child for neglect and indifference to a quality teaching and learning environment for our 500 students. The gym is closed because half of the floor is buckled and the other half suffered so much rainwater damage from the dripping ceiling that it became covered with toxic black mold. […] Exposed wires hang from missing ceiling tiles. Watermarks from leaks abound. Kids sit either in freezing classrooms with coats on or strip layers because of stifling heat. Wilson lamented: “How can you teach or learn in conditions like these?”

The Children Shall Lead Us

I read about this case (article below) that Texas Student’s filed on behalf of their own education. And this was after reading the most self serving pathetic article in the New York Times  about some poor sad white male executive and his struggle to open his very pretentious charter school in New York.  I thought had he put that much time and effort into his children’s school that he complained was not educating them properly he would have found way more bang for his buck.

The sad dismissal of public education and Teachers by the elite make me laugh.  There are private schools so go there and just walk away, making a fake public/private school serves only those whom you “pick and choose” and that in and of itself is not public.

Texas students ask state Supreme Court to force adequate funding of public schools

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post
 September 13 2015

Two Texas teenagers representing a group of students in the Houston Independent School District have taken an unusual action: They wrote and submitted to the Texas Supreme Court a 35-page brief siding with more than 600 school districts suing the state for underfunding public education in violation of the Texas constitution.

The court justices recently held a hearing about the suit, which the state is seeking to have dropped. The school districts — about two-thirds of the total in Texas — are arguing that state authorities rely on an outdated funding mechanism that does not provide schools with enough resources to meet the needs of the growing number of high-needs students in the state and provide an adequate education as required by the constitution.

The suit was originally filed in 2011 after the state legislature cut nearly $5.5 billion from public education, and though most of it has since been restored, the districts still say they are being underfunded. A year ago, a Texas district judge agreed and threw out the state school funding system as unconstitutional.

The two students who filed the brief  on behalf of the HISD Student Congress, an organization that represents about 215,000 students in the district, are Zaakir Tameez, a member of the 2015 class of Carnegie Vanguard High School, and Amy Fan, a member of the 2016 class of Bellaire High School.

Their brief explores the ways that many schools for students who live in poverty are inadequately funded and details the consequences, noting that students have a unique view of the case:

Many adults base their knowledge of public education on what they see on paper. Oftentimes, these adults don’t have kids who attend public schools and don’t really know what’s going on. As high school teenagers, we have a unique perspective. While we don’t always understand the political, economic, and legal origins of what we witness as students, we really know the issues inside the school and classroom; we experience them every day.

And here’s what they say they are experiencing:

School districts lack the necessary resources to correct the deficiencies in education that we face. With more funding, our schools would be able to provide their students with adequate resources, decrease class sizes, enhance enrichment programs, improve teacher quality, and innovate college and career readiness programs. Many consider these educational inputs “extras”, but we argue that these five objectives are vitally necessary in Texas, especially for our classmates who are English Language Learners or in poverty. In the following pages, we demonstrate why.

The entire brief is below, but here is one of the descriptions of what some districts are facing in Texas regarding funding:

Robert E. Lee High School is located at the cross streets of Richmond Ave. and Beverly Hill Blvd. in Southwest Houston. The surrounding neighborhood consists of dense enclaves of low income apartments, convenience stores, Mexican and Halal groceries, food trucks, and bus stops. The service industry dominates this part of Houston. There is high demand for unskilled labor and high availability of low cost apartments. Combined with Houston’s position as a primary destination for immigrants to the United States, this neighborhood and many others attract large numbers of immigrants and their families who often speak solely their native language.

A. As students, we know that class sizes matter.

In the 2013-14 school year, Lee was about 75% Hispanic and nearly 100% economically disadvantaged. One-third of the approximately 1,400 students were English Language Learners[3]. Many students were recent immigrants and did not speak English at all. Presented with these extra challenges, Lee did not receive the funding it needed to provide its students the chance they need to succeed in America. We spoke with Principal Jonathan Trinh about the struggles Lee High School faces as a consequence of the Texas formula funding that does not provide ELL students with sufficient resources:

“Our ELL students need more support in term of smaller class size to have more interaction and face time with their teachers. They need even more time in English classes with double and triple blocks requiring additional ESL trained English Language Arts, Reading, and Intervention teachers. [All of this requires funding.]”

Decreasing class sizes is especially important for our ELL peers, because language classes require much more individualized attention, and for ELL students, every class feels like a language class.

B. As Texans, our naïve lack of appreciation for enrichment programs is both morally wrong and economically impractical.

In order to provide students extra assistance in English, Principal Trinh has had to cut language, art, and extracurricular programs at Lee. The school only offers Spanish because a large proportion of their students can test out, meaning he can hire fewer teachers. The principal would love to offer Mandarin, Hindi, or French, but there simply isn’t enough money for these languages, increasingly important in the 21st century economy to be part of the curriculum. Lee doesn’t have a band, orchestra or any sort of other musical outlet for students. Many students at Lee in fact have a passion for music yet have no way to express this passion, as the school can’t afford the instruments or the extra teacher. Others would love to become a mathlete or chess aficionado, but again, the money isn’t there. As a result, many funnel their boredom, frustration, and stress into alcohol, drugs, and gangs.

All high school students possess ambition, optimism, creativity, and grit. But at Lee, their aspirations are stunted due to lack of funding. ELL students not only lack the opportunity to participate in enrichment programs but also often a serious chance at learning English and avoiding exploitation in the workforce after graduation. While Lee is working hard and concentrating its limited budget on providing what it can for its ELL students, these same students still have difficulty overcoming the language barrier because of large class sizes, a lack of enrichment programs, and a limited teacher hiring pool. Committed to providing ESL assistance to ELL students in all subjects, in 2014 Lee began hiring only ESL certified teachers. Unfortunately, these teachers are hard to find even right here in Texas.

C. Many teachers in Texas are alternatively certified in their subject, and lack the academic experience necessary to be truly qualified to teach us.

Mr. Edgardo Figueroa teaches English for Newcomers at Lee. All of Mr. Figueroa’s students come to him having never spoken English, and some unable to read or write in their native language. He accommodates them as much as he can, but with 220 students and about 32 per class, there’s only so much he can do. What has helped, he says, is the training he received through his ESL certification program. ESL trained teachers employ strategies such as the use of pictures to help students connect key words or concepts in English to their native language, in addition to many others. Teacher certification, however, is expensive and grossly underfunded in Texas.

D. All students should have the opportunity to succeed via higher education or vocational schooling.

Students’ struggles are not for lack of trying. In our conversation with Mr. Edgardo Figueroa, we learned a story of his to illustrate this point:

“In one class I had a Mexican student and a Chinese student who became very good friends. In order to communicate with each other they had to use the little English they had learned, always practicing the skills they learned in class. When they didn’t know English words for what they had to say, they used Google Translate.”

These students deserve to dream big and have a fighting chance. Although some may not be the best academically, often due to English skills and difficult home lives, all should have access to vocational and technical schooling. Those who are capable of college-level work should be encouraged to apply and be assisted in the application process by college readiness programs. Many of our peers, who did not grow up in stable family environments and lacked access to quality counseling, were never introduced to four year residential colleges, two year associates degree programs, or even summer internships and academic camps. Texas children are being deprived of this information because of the State’s dismal effort in providing school districts the funding to build quality college and career readiness programs. These programs are essential in building an educated citizenry for the preservation of freedom and democracy as the Texas constitution prescribes[4].
=================

This case is massively different when the front group of Venture Capitalists under the name Students Matter  funded the Vergara vs. California suit which was primarily to bust unions with a focus on tenure as their reasoning education was impeded.  Yet this brief praises their Teachers but acknowledges it is a lack of training and the cost of said training that impedes their education. No mention of unions or tenure.

I wonder who funded the kids as the brief submitted is here and it is submitted pro se but it is not illegal to receive assistance from an Attorney or Paralegal to draft a brief which I suspect happened here.

Funny in every state that has found itself being challenged in their Supreme Court, the issue was funding by the state and the failure of the legislature to do so appropriately with regards to the imperatives in their existing States constitution.

When Venture Capital speaks usually legislatures listen and for over 30 years education has been sorely underfunded. One due to immense tax breaks and cuts to draw industry and when the jobs and businesses did not actually materialize then we see a slight problem with regards to a tax base and revenue so then the cuts began. Social services and that includes education has been the wood that got the axe to the detriment of society as an educated workforce is employable one. So more toadying an genuflecting by the great electorate to the great funders of campaigns and they were told it was the wrong type of Education and that it must be work based so STEM became the mantra. Funny how the computer industry was built without any such curriculum and that for decades that workforce was trained and the same industry blossomed and yet still no workers from American schools were good enough so we must import workers from schools that we have no idea how they are educated or trained but we do know they will do the work for less so that is all that matters.

In the Texas suit it is even mentioned how foreign students could not communicate so they used Google translate yet how many times are we told that our own students cannot write nor demonstrate appropriate communication skills to be effective on the job so hence Bill Gates arrives with a large check and the Common Core pedagogy in which to teach children how to write three facts not opinions when reading well opinions as well that is what most writing is. But also doing so by keeping writing to a 150 or so character slot as who has time for reading with all that work that needs to be done.

The charter schools here in Washington State had to demand the legislature have a special session to resolve our current Supreme Courts decision that Charters are in violation of the Constitution and the Governor refused but demanded that a commission be dedicated to resolve the other issue our Court decided the lack of funding via the McCleary decision.

This is partially the issue in the strike here and the idea that we are asking teachers to do more with less. The needs of kids regardless of their level of learning and capabilities should be funded appropriately and yes discriminatory, as some kids just need more but that doesn’t mean they are worth less.

I would teach a kid if they brought him in an iron lung to a class as for that brief moment in time that child can belong, feel normal, be a member of a community. And to the haters of which I speak of daily (my laundromat man is one) they cannot understand why they must be in school.  Well clearly you were and we failed there so lets see if we can get one right this time.

This man was much like the nut fuck I had coffee with who screamed about these same children and the point of it all – and my laundromat man said the same.  He asked after the kids can no longer go to schools where do they go? I told them many do get into programs, homes and have families that care for them. Some do not make it and I suspect that is some of those we see in the streets.  And then he proceeded to say if an autistic kid was screaming at him or acting odd when he had a gun on him he was not responsible for killing him.    All of this while we watched a fire crew, EMT and ambulance come to pick up another of our many casualties who had passed out in the parking lot.   It was all sad and frustrating and a daily occurrence.  And he had nothing good to say about that and “those” people who are ruining our lives and costing money and they do nothing for society. He did not mention killing them off.  But like the garbage I had coffee with a few weeks ago I did not need to ask him what was his “final solution.”  He actually wants Donald Trump to be elected as he thinks then our allies yes our allies will nuke Washington D.C. as that is the final solution for the government and its idiocy. Okay then.

Yes I live in Seattle and these are the idiots I speak to.  I will never speak to him again and if I do it will be brief.  I have never had any more loathing for an individual in my life.  And for the record I don’t believe a word of it but I suspect many hear that same kind of bullshit  from people and then they see and hear differently one day.  I don’t wan to be one of those people.   Its just another reason for me to get the fuck out of here.

My hope is that there are more children like those in Texas and they shall lead us.

Small Checks for Small Hands

I wrote in the last blog post, School Starts Soon, about the severe funding in education across the nation in many States with their respective Supreme Courts weighing in regarding adequate funding and class sizes in their state schools. Much of it began focusing on those with special needs, and that is a large spectrum, which includes learning and physically disabled to those whose aptitude/achievement tests (I loathe IQ as they are truly a measure of a moment in time.. but overall intelligence that determines one over a lifespan no) who need more academic stimulation or as they are called “highly capable.” Then we have the second language learners who are also part of this equation.

Add to this we have varying trends and focus in academics, we have STEM, APP, we have International Baccalaureate, we have language immersion, and even voc-tech that includes the old school auto to professional cooking, to marine and biotech. That is a lot of stuff for one school to cram in along with the conventional sports programs that are equal for both genders, music and drama programs and other extracurricular activities that enable student’s opportunities for being well rounded, socially adept and academically proficient.

And more extensions to budgets with the push to add pre-k and the need to find both adequate facilities, staff and of course monies to support this push. So a lot of hands are outreached for a single check.

The reformers are the testers. They advocate a spoon fed highly structured curriculum that is easily adaptable to be online with a facilitator versus an actual certified teacher to administer and monitor the student’s progress. The online lessons are allowed to be tailored and progressive as a student reaches certain metrics. I have been in those classrooms and a few percentile actually succeed, and by that I mean few. I love that art history is actually a lesson plan. As for art well graphics online count. Music? Garage Band. Drama? You Tube. Newspapers? Blogs.

And in today’s modern world some of this is fine. The costs to produce a physical newspaper is expensive to allow for an online paper akin to any modern equivalent would still offer the requisite skill set but as for yearbooks or student magazines that print art and word should still be a part of our world. Or will that too become an app.

The reality is that sports are expensive. They are already in most districts requiring kids to pay for it. This of course seriously penalizes those who cannot afford it and they are the largest enrollment in public education. The same with band and other specialized groups that have field trips and other expenses that simply are not able to be supported by the already over extended PTA’s that do most of the fund raising to supplement schools.

We want a skilled and prepared work force, we want children well prepared for life and further education and we have a ton of rich folks who send their children to private academies, who they themselves went to, sure they have the answer to enable children whom they have never met, know or lived in their communities to understand their needs and wants let alone how to reconcile with their own absurdly inappropriate needs and wants.

They want robots, or simple folks who will do simple jobs for simple wages. That is it. Jeff Bezos is the example of this and I note he seems utterly disengaged and disinterested in ed reform and that is because he believes technology will replace people. The other billionaire in Seattle, Bill Gates is sadly less inclined and frankly I don’t think he actually gives a flying fuck but his wife does and that is what white privilege is – rich white folks telling poor folks, largely of color, that they know what is best for them. Hmm where have I heard that before.

The story below marks the reality of education today and there is a desperate necessity to rethink the modern school and what it can offer both intellectually, socially and holistically. That requires heavy lifting, diligence and a willingness to at least try. We don’t do any of that well.

So let’s just get the rich dude to write a check and we will do what he says. That Common Core is working out great thanks to Bill Gates, right?

Could one of the nation’s largest school districts go without sports, activities?

The Washington Post
By Moriah Balingit
August 4 2015

A task force looking to cut as much as $100 million from the budget of one of the nation’s largest school systems has suggested that major savings could come from getting rid of all school sports, limiting extracurricular activities and increasing class sizes.

School administrators in Virginia’s Fairfax County, which educates about 187,000 students, say they are again facing tough choices about what to keep and what to sacrifice as funding fails to keep pace with surging enrollment. Officials are projecting a shortfall of $50 million to $100 million next year, meaning significant programming changes would need to be implemented, schools officials said.

School district officials calculated the shortfall assuming a salary increase for teachers, a growth in enrollment and a nearly $20 million drop in state funding, though some numbers will not be determined for months. The school system also is required to put an additional $46 million into teacher retirement and health benefits next year. If the county holds firm on its commitment to give the school system a 3 percent revenue bump, the maximum shortfall is estimated at $80 million.

The 36-member citizen task force was charged with finding $100 million in savings. On Monday night, the district released an early draft of potential cuts, but they are far from official, and it is early in the budget process. Some of the task force’s ideas are sure to be controversial, such as saving nearly $11 million by eliminating high school sports and more than $12 million by axing activities such as yearbook and student newspapers, curtailing music and drama programs, and reducing middle school after-school activities.

Fairfax Superintendent Karen Garza has sounded budget alarms in previous years but has largely ended up with what the school system has requested, while adding initiatives. The school system spent millions of dollars moving to later high school start times, citing evidence of health and emotional benefits, and eliminating half-day Mondays in the county’s elementary schools — both popular with parents.

But Garza pointed out Tuesday that the school system also has cut millions from its proposals before going to the county and that the district has in recent years raised class sizes. With enrollment surging, Garza said the school system is going to have a hard time providing necessary services.

“We’re going to have some very painful decisions to make, because funding has not kept up with just the basic demands,” Garza said.

Cutting high school sports in one of the nation’s largest school districts would be a shocking move, and it appeared to be a dramatic opening salvo in what are often politically charged discussions about the Fairfax schools budget. Many families and companies have chosen Fairfax, the largest Washington area suburb, as their home because of the county’s top-tier schools.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova (D) said she doubts that the school system would seriously consider getting rid of high school sports, a move that would prove deeply unpopular and detrimental to the traditional public school experience.

“Eliminating high school athletics is just not going to happen,” Bulova said. “I think that the rhetoric is alarmist, and I think that cut list is something that is guaranteed to generate speakers, but I think that they probably will not be things that the school board chooses to reduce.”

For athletes, eliminating sports is unthinkable. Kyle Richbourg, 18, who will be a senior at Centreville High School, plays lacrosse and football and said that sports teach him discipline and make him a better student. After graduating next year, he plans to head to the Air Force Academy, where he was recruited to play lacrosse, something he said wouldn’t be happening without school sports.

“I don’t think I’d be going to a military academy for school,” Richbourg said. “I don’t think I’d be fit for that kind of lifestyle if I didn’t have sports in my life.”

His football coach, Chris Haddock, said sports are an essential part of education for many students, teaching them discipline and a work ethic. Some athletes said their teammates might not show up to school were it not for sports.

“Sports are part of the well-rounded person that Fairfax County is trying to produce,” Haddock said. “It’s an invaluable proving ground and teaching ground for young people.”

Fairfax County schools are facing some of the same tough choices as districts across Northern Virginia. This year, Prince William County schools, dealing with a potential cut in revenue, weighed cuts to all school services not required by law — including full-day kindergarten, bus service and athletics. Ultimately, most of the budget was funded.

This year, Fairfax County had nearly all of its budget request funded — about $2.6 billion — but Garza still warned that the district would come up short next year. In a budget presentation, district officials said that per-student spending has failed to keep pace with inflation. The school system also has struggled to keep its teacher salaries on par with neighboring jurisdictions.

“We’re losing candidates to other systems,” Garza told The Washington Post in a recent meeting with reporters and editors. “It is very concerning to us.”

Garza said the task force has been focusing on ways to take a sizable bite out of the budget while making the smallest dent possible in academic opportunities for students.

The task force suggestions also included adding one student to K-12 classes and increasing preschool class sizes, a move that could yield savings of $26.2 million. Another proposal, to cut preschool for all children except those who require special education, could save the district $9 million. Other suggested cuts would hit high-poverty schools and teachers of English language learners. The district, which includes high-performing magnet high schools, also has seen an explosion in immigrant and low-income students who require extra support.

School Board Chairman Pat Hynes (Hunter Mill) said she hopes the financial picture will be rosier when it comes time to draw up an official budget proposal.

“What I hope happens is that we don’t have to find that much in cuts and we don’t have to do something as awful as cutting athletics,” Hynes said. “I have hope that our funders will do the right thing and maintain the quality of the schools system.”

Stress Test

As the school year ends I want to remind all those pro reform, future teachers, those who live and work in a community who may not have children, those who do but live in suburbs or send their kids to private schools on the note we end.

And we wind up another year of testing that has begun to rise in dismay as more parents are moving towards opting out and the endless need for data mining has begun to even the most resilient of ed reformers, as even Nick Kristof of the New York Times and Frank Bruni are relenting (well not totally but they are addressing the poverty issue at least).

I am in schools where instructions to flush toilets are posted in stalls, bathrooms locked due to vandalism including wiping excrement on the walls, lesson plans with notations that respect is an issue, the lack of boundaries with regards to personal items and teacher property (many have signs above desks and have configured no go zones – one says just keep the office locked at all times) and the relentless doors locked and skills centers which are ostensibly a type of social worker chill out space for kids whose coping skills lack. The alternative schools have PC’s in which they work all day almost eliminating any type of personal interaction or connection as they earn credits but gain no time management or people skills what so ever. The new school, the PC one.

I see this every day. I am in another city when I cross into this area of my city. Two legislators wanted to split the district into two as a way of trying to resolve the disparity that our district currently has with regards to the south and north. Irony or pun? And maybe that would work to have strong advocates and a smaller district in which to allocate resources. I have no idea as frankly there are so many problems plaguing the schools in the area I live I am not sure anyone has the skills, talents and where-with-all to do this. It will all be perceived as racist and elitist and utterly rejected as a result. The African American Academy was closed on a black Superintendent’s reign of terror and she ended the notion of “busing” with the idea of building neighborhood schools and here we are several scandals later with a 4th Superintendent, a Mayoral threat to take over the district or appoint board members and the walkout over funding as we simultaneously have both ends of the spectrum – SPED and Gifted – being shoved from pillar to post, all to the frustrations and anger of parents who cannot afford private education.

And people wonder why I sub.

Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty

By Lyndsey Layton
The Washington Post
January 16

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

“We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”

The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the needy children who arrive at school each day.

“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes.

Romero-Smith, 40, who has been a teacher for 19 years, became a foster mother in November to two girls, sisters who attend her school. They had been homeless, their father living on the streets and their mother in jail, she said. When she brought the girls home, she was shocked by the disarray of their young lives.

“Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food, flushing a toilet and washing hands, it took us a little while,” she said. “You spend some time with little ones like this and it’s gut wrenching. . . . These kids aren’t thinking, ‘Am I going to take a test today?’ They’re thinking, ‘Am I going to be okay?’ ”

The job of teacher has expanded to “counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, attorney,” she said.

Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers.

“This is a watershed moment when you look at that map,” said Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education philanthropy, referring to a large swath of the country filled with high-poverty schools.

“The fact is, we’ve had growing inequality in the country for many years,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight, but it’s steadily been happening. Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we’re a country disinclined to invest in our young people.”

The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches — ranging from Mississippi, where more than 70 percent of students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one of every two students was low-income.

Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, said quality preschool is the key to helping poor children.

“That’s huge,” she said. “These children can learn at the highest levels, but you have to provide for them. You can’t assume they have books at home, or they visit the library or go on vacations. You have to think about what you’re doing across the state and ensuring they’re getting what other children get.”

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was born in a charity hospital in 1959 to a single mother. Federal programs helped shrink the obstacles he faced, first by providing him with Head Start, the early-childhood education program, and later, Pell grants to help pay tuition at the University of Texas, he said.

The country needs to make that same commitment today to help poor children, he said.

“Even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that America wanted me to succeed,” he said. “What we know is that the mobility escalator has simply stopped for some Americans. I was able to ride that mobility escalator in part because there were so many people, and parts of our society, cheering me on.”

“We need to fix the escalator,” he said. “We fix it by recommitting ourselves to the idea of public education. We have the capacity. The question is, do we have the will?”

The new report raises questions among educators and officials about whether states and the federal government are devoting enough money — and using it effectively — to meet the complex needs of poor children.

The Obama administration wants Congress to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion it spends annually to help states educate poor children. It also wants Congress to fund preschool for those from low-income families. Collectively, the states and the federal government spend about $500 billion annually on primary and secondary schools, about $79 billion of it from Washington.

The amount spent on each student can vary wildly from state to state. States with high student-poverty rates tend to spend less per student: Of the 27 states with the highest percentages of student poverty, all but five spent less than the national average of $10,938 per student.

Republicans in Congress have been wary of new spending programs, arguing that more money is not necessarily the answer and that federal dollars could be more effective if redundant programs were streamlined and more power was given to states.

Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools.

GOP leaders in Congress have rebuffed President Obama’s calls to fund preschool for low-income families, although a number of Republican and Democratic governors have initiated state programs in the past several years.

The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country’s main federal education law, first passed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and designed to help states educate poor children. The most recent version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, has emphasized accountability and outcomes, measuring whether schools met benchmarks and sanctioning them when they fell short.

That federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrong­headed, Rebell said.

“We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education,” he said. “We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we’re serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages­ of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They’re not. They’re imperative.”

I work in those schools. Today I am in a “middle class” school where there are few on reduced lunches and even if there were kids who qualify few would be admitting it. Poverty often comes attached with guilt. But this school has changed the last year as the re-districted and the poor kids were shipped to a new school along with others who were not so poor but they needed to round out numbers. It was done by address and that has a large affect even by one block you can have a stunning million dollar property and the block over dire poverty.

I have “a” typical student teacher. A young white woman who has barely spoken to me. Nothing new there. I have one next week in this school. I quit engaging with this lot awhile ago and I have extended this philosophy to my larger community as I find few conversations that are not about 4 subjects here – price of rent/real estate/traffic, weather and of course the 12th Man. So why bother. When you are working your ass off to pay for your home, taking hours to get there, in weather than changes hourly you only have time for sports. Reading, being informed, having hobbies or something of interest is down on the priority scale. And that includes children, the wealthy have a different type of stress they inflict on children as we know when in an adjacent suburb a kid plotted to kill himself at school and stated that as the primary reason.

Poverty, abuse, incarceration, deaths, violence, lack of medical care to the point even vision is badly neglected and something I see quite a bit in school are all part of the problems.

I read this story today where once again the only hope for a black kid is sports or music but the hands of abuse left that former one an impossibility. It is clear he has no idea what he will do with his life how sad and how this is the normal for many kids of poverty who are often the largest majority of the poor.

Seattle is in big denial about what is going on here. The Teacher walk out over funding was yesterday and like many of the efforts at this issue nothing will change it will all be the same. I have pledged my last year here to simply doing my job with the least amount of conflict as possible, which means speaking as little as possible. My blood pressure is down already and I am only a couple of weeks into this. Hopefully sleeping and weight loss will follow. This is my new normal.

But for teachers the reality is that poverty and all that it encompasses is the new normal. And until that is addressed and education, schools are funded to ensure that there are enough resources to resolve or at least enable children and their families an opportunity to function for a few hours a day, consider the constant expulsion and discipline issues around largely minority kids to continue, the violence and in fact the issue around bullying to not abate and the lack of true education to go ignored.

Poverty, family stress are thwarting student success, top teachers

Lyndsey Layton
The Washington Post
May 19, 2015

The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.

Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam.

The survey, to be released Wednesday by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., polled the 56 Teachers of the Year, a small but elite group of educators considered among the country’s best, on a range of issues affecting public education.

[Read the survey ]
Asked to identify the greatest barriers to student academic success, the teachers ranked family stress highest, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.

Teachers believe non-academic reasons bar success

The 2015 state Teachers of the Year, an elite group of top K-12 educators from around the country, were asked about barriers to student success as part of a broad survey of their views on public education. All but 10 of the 56 teachers responded to the survey, which was conducted by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc.

“Those three factors in many ways are the white elephant in the living room for us in education,” said Jennifer Dorman, Maine’s 2015 Teacher of the Year who teaches special-education classes for seventh- and eighth-graders. “As teachers, we know those factors present huge barriers to our students’ success. Helping students cope with those three factors is probably the most important part of my job. But on a national level, those problems are not being recognized as the primary obstacles.”

The survey comes at a time when studies show a large percentage of U.S. public school students come from low-income families.

Asked to identify three top school funding priorities, the teachers ranked “anti-poverty initiatives” as their top choice, followed by early learning and “reducing barriers to learning” such as providing health care and other services to poor children.

Few thought access to technology needed more investment and none thought funding should be devoted to research. And funding for testing and accountability had little support, ranking near the bottom.

Maggie Mabery, California’s Teacher of the Year, teaches science at Manhattan Beach Middle School in an affluent suburb outside Los Angeles. Her students are navigating family stress of a different kind, she said.

“In a rich-kid neighborhood, there’s a completely different set of stresses,”said Mabery, who has been teaching for 15 years. “The role of the teacher has become so much more than student learning. I teach about 50 percent of the time. The rest is coaching kids how to be responsible, how to be a great adolescent.”

The teachers overwhelmingly said they drew the most satisfaction from working in small groups or one-on-one with students, teaching a lesson to their class and collaborating with other teachers. The least satisfying activities were filling out paperwork, grading, applying discipline, communicating with parents and analyzing data.

The unpopularity of data is surprising in an era when schools and teachers are urged to adopt data-driven instruction.

Mark Mautone, New Jersey’s Teacher of the Year, relies heavily on data to fine-tune his work with autistic students at an elementary school in Hoboken.

“At the same time, there are other things that do drive instruction — poverty, family stress, all those multiple measures that could affect the outcome,” Mautone said. “Data is important, but if a kid doesn’t have clothes to wear or a pencil to do their homework, the main concern becomes the well-being of the child.”

Labs are for Experiments

And soon in schools they will be gone replaced by a PC. That is what the ed “reformers” dream. The kids sit on Ipods, Pads, Laptops or some tech and they then learn the subject, test on it and those who do well learn to write it for the next generation. All students now are massive experiments, they are the lab rats.

But when it comes to Education the bizarre world never ends as it is the entire mantra of the political chattering class. Bust unions and improve teachers and in turn cut funding to then cut teachers. In Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, in Louisiana (where in NOLA there are no public schools) and in Kansas the great experiment of them all. It is not really a curve it is more of a circle as in jerk when I hear another scheme, plot and plan to fix schools and in turn fix student. They used to say I need a fix when it came to drugs, maybe some of these people need them.

And I too am seeing this policy in action. It started with the students-at-risk. Our alternative ed schools here have them sit in in a PC “bank” they then occasionally review with them the credits they need to graduate and then they leave. This is really serving them well or not as I finally quit going to them as it is appalling to be a part of. And yet there is not one person in our City who does not defend or support it as then they feel better. Yet I have met no one who has actually volunteered, observed or visited said schools. I have heard people say their child succeeded and then I ask when was that and of course it was decades ago. Okay then, its all about you as that is how we view and see everything through me colored glasses.

I recounted a student in a “regular” school where they have now implemented the program to keep students enrolled and they are then part of a larger student body that includes PE, Art, Music, Sport, dances, tech classes and well school “stuff” that is both challenge and in fact a part of normal life for the young.

Yes kids dropout and why? Well it is not always due to the rigors or lack thereof of public school. Some kids need help that cannot always be provided and we have to pick and choose and how do you do that.

We come from some ancient puritan mythical unicorn nonsense that all families have two parents, mother is home Betty Crocker and the husband John Galt. They attend Church although in Randian philosophy he would not but he would sit at the lap of Ayn and lap up her bullshit like a cat milk. But regardless, I visualize a more Mad Men style home and all that coolness and dysfunction it offers.

And after the illusion or in this case delusion ends the reality sets in. There are no cleavers other than for meat and with the never ending cuts to budgets due to the endless push and believe in the mythical Laffer curve that money will fall from trees when the rich become richer kind of sort of did not happen.

We are watching the fallout across the country. I live in a “liberal” state and there have already been lawsuits reagarding to public funding for education specifically about funding for/to special needs kids, which also include not just learning or physically disabled but the highly capable as well. There is a big spectrum that is not just the one used in Autism when it comes to kids and educating them. And recently it has been revealed that the ELL or bi-lingual education is also failing. Whoops!

Add to this a recent law demanding reduction of class sizes, the new laws regarding how to manage kids who are behaviorally disruptive, meaning no lock downs or isolation a largely used tool as well other than a stun gun what do you do? Oh wait medicate the hell out of them. Do they have epi-pen tranquilizers? Stun gun them? Or we could just call the cops and they could shoot them. It’s all good!

And then let us turn to the criminal justice system when all else fails. We saw what the testing regimen does as the Ricco case in Atlanta. The Judge apparently has calmed down there and reduced the insane sentences for the convicted as they await their appeals. Well I really saw the Unions there in action, no wait I didn’t. Even the Lawyers, undoubtedly paid for by the Unions should give you an idea of how good the Attorneys they hire (if they did as I am unsure but again with a Teacher/Admin salary you get what you pay for) miserably failed to allow these sentences in the first place, let alone convictions on a racketeering charge is so egregious that none of it makes sense. And again shows the utter kangaroo court system at its finest. How much this cost the taxpayers of Atlanta for that is money that could have been actually used to help the kids learn and advance authentically and meaningfully, isn’t losing ones professional license and jobs enough?

I am not sure if this is misdirected anger or just greed. The reality of Education is that it is a massive industrial complex like Medicine with immense data and money that it provides. The testing and publishing companies along with the data miners and other industries that can track you from the womb to the tomb. It is not about kids, teachers or unions it is about money.

As we already know much of the curriculum nonsense was attached to checks and money without any substantiation or proof it was superior which shows that schools are giant labs and the kids are the rats. Well you know what they say about rats and sinking ships.

Kansas shows us what could happen if Republicans win in 2016
By Catherine Rampell Opinion writer
The Washington Post
April 30 2015

No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.

Usually this is an anthem of celebration, of respite from the angst-inducing strictures of K-12 schooling. But this year, across Kansas, the jingle is coming a little sooner than expected, and with mournful undertones.

At least eight Kansas school districts recently announced that they’re starting summer break early this year, and not because kids have already learned so much that they deserve a few extra days off. It’s because these schools ran out of money, thanks to state leaders’ decision to ax education spending midyear to plug an ever-widening hole in their budget.

In at least one district, Twin Valley, children are being kicked out two weeks earlier than planned. Haven School District is closing five days early to save an expected $4,000 per day, said Superintendent Rick White, but next year the district will likely shave off 10 days. White told me that members of the school board are also looking for other creative ways to absorb the $750,000 in cuts handed down by the legislature for this year and next. They, and their educators, must continue to find new and innovative ways to do less with less.

In balancing the budget on the backs of children, Kansas politicians are behaving shamefully. But they may also be doing the rest of the country a favor, by giving us a preview of what might happen if Republicans control the White House and Congress after the 2016 ­election.

The consequences in Kansas, after all, are a result of fulfilling the great Laffer Curve dream that has Republican presidential hopefuls such as Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Chris Christie all salivating: dramatic tax cuts, concentrated among those at the top, coupled with the promise that such action will, through trickle-down voodoo, increase tax revenue and boost economic growth.

In the real world, politicians rarely get to carry out that budget plan in a big way. Then Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) came along and, with a Republican legislature on his side, passed sweeping tax cuts in 2012. Despite faith-based forecasts promising bountiful revenue, tax receipts have come in, again and again, hundreds of million dollars below projections. The latest estimates leave the state with a $422 million shortfall for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

But rather than acknowledging that this tax “experiment,” as it’s been white-washed, has failed and needs to be reversed, Brownback and Republican legislators have mostly doubled down. To make up for the shortfalls, the state has hacked away at core services, from roads to welfare.

Education turned out to be a particularly plum target. Kansas’s elected officals have a decades-long history of shortchanging students, and the state has been subjected to multiple lawsuits over whether its funding levels violated the state constitution’s requirements for adequate and equitable public education spending. The most recent major case was filed in 2010 — that is, before Brownback took office. And although last year the state’s Supreme Court found school funding levels indeed to be unconstitutional, the state appealed the decision and has since cut funding further.

The most recent reductions, announced in March, required districts to absorb an additional $51 million in cuts by the time this fiscal year ends June 30. This time, the cuts were cloaked in a new funding formula called “block grants,” which, as I have explained , are just a cowardly tactic for forcing painful funding decisions down the totem pole under the guise of “flexibility.” That way school boards, rather than legislators, have to take the heat for making unpopular cuts.

For districts, that has meant permanently closing a school here, expanding class sizes there, eliminating a math and science teacher here, maybe instituting pay-to-play athletics there. Teachers in the schools that are closing early are hustling to revamp their curricula so they can still cover all the material the state requires. Students are feeling the heat, too.

“There’s a level of frustration about all the material we have to cram in now,” Haeli Maas, a 17-year-old junior at Smoky Valley High School in Lindsborg, told me. Maas recently penned an open letter to Brownback pleading with him not to “write off” her generation. She didn’t mention tax hikes specifically — almost none of the students, parents and educators I spoke with volunteered this as a solution without my probing them — but she said their necessity is clear.

So far, she said, Brownback has not responded.

Bars vs Books

As I work in Education and see first hand the way the system spends money, the odd lack of accountability, transparency and parity in education this article did.not.surprise.me.in.the.least.

We here in Washington State have absurd problems as many other states have with their respective Supreme Courts demanding state legisilators appropriately fund education and to the do gooders, the naysayers and the reformers it all seems to focus on test scores and teacher evaluations. Dig deeper and spend a month substituting, volunteering or simply visiting the schools.. yes plural, the schools in your neighborhood from elementary to high school. Then go into one or two outside your safety zone. Let me know what you see or more importantly what you don’t in comparison.

 By Zeeshan Aleem January 28, 2015
Policy.Mic

(click the link to see the gif that models each state and their comparative spending on schools vs jails)

Hardly a day goes by without a member of the media or policy world pronouncing that America’s education system is in dire straits.

There are constant laments over how poorly the U.S. fares by international standards, its failure to produce literate students and its unsightly levels of racial segregation. There’s a massive debate over how to overcome these problems, but there’s no doubt that at least one factor would help: more money.

But where would the money come from? America’s broken and bloated prison system might be a good start.

Keeping someone alive in prison is expensive — much more so than educating them. The GIF below uses data from the Vera Institute of Justice’s 2012 “Price of Prisons” report and 2012 U.S. Census data on public school costs. (Several states did not complete the survey, and thus are missing from this chart.) You can see that average resources devoted to prisoners annually easily outpace resources for students:

Housing a prisoner costs roughly five times as much as educating a student in California, Washington and Utah. In dozens of other states, the cost of imprisoning someone is far more than double or triple the cost of educating a student.

Mass incarceration is costly — and it doesn’t work: Comparing the housing of prisoners to the education of students might seem like comparing apples and oranges. After all, a student is spending about a third of a day at school, while a prisoner is being kept alive 24/7.

In light of that fact, there are two points worth noting:

First, the U.S. should simply not be spending any money on incarcerating many of the millions in prison all over the country. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has built a system of mass incarceration that is unrivaled the world over: About 25% of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America, even though it hosts only 5% of the world’s population. Brutal sentencing practices — lengthy minimum sentences, harsh penalties for minor drug possession, three strikes laws — have filled up our prisons at rates that outpace Russia and China. In other words, every state is spending huge sums of money on people who should either not be incarcerated in the first place or should at least be serving far shorter sentences.

Second, the U.S. incarceration system is basically an inversion of its education system. As flawed as the public school system is in this country, children routinely emerge with knowledge and skills that allow them to contribute more effectively to society. By contrast, the voracious prison system systematically fails to rehabilitate its inmates. Nearly two-thirds of the inmates released every year return to prison. Those that manage to remain outside of it are often far worse off than before they were incarcerated, as they endure discrimination in housing, employment and political participation.

Perhaps if more money were spent on creating and sustaining an education system that met all of its students’ needs, we wouldn’t need to spend so much money on putting people behind bars.

Step on a Crack

Earlier this week I read the below article about the infrastructure of Los Angeles. But this could be any major city in America.  We have had a series of major problems and devastation that has lead to dangerous conditions and unsafe ones as we go to work, go to school, ride our public transport or just live in our homes as nature seems to also take its course or maybe its revenge. Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned and mother nature might be a tad pissed about how we treat her.

Towns and municipalities are stretched to the limit, since much federal funding is matching or in fact extorted or bribed by issuing tickets for Drunk Driving or other strange caveats usually associated with booze or drugs  that are used by the National Highway and Safety Commission to determine monies given to roads. Ironic that those are the primary funding issues over general safety and use but there are many other issues that are linked to grants each with their own bizarre qualifications and expectations and in turn they get delayed,as in the case of the high speed train in California,  it becomes an issue for voters and it all starts over again.  Or others that are like the bridge to nowhere only exist with endless monies and no oversight, such as the Ohio River Project. 

There is a need and a sense of urgency with each crisis comes a new myriad of problems. This discussion in the New York Times from March addresses this. And this week they expose that the King Bloomberg plan of restoring homes post Sandy was a disaster in and of itself and the new Mayor with his agenda has let the dunes slip away as well.  While also touting building affordable housing in the countries least affordable city.  Pick or choose you can’t have it all.

Then we have the issue of fuel taxes (note the date) which have not been raised in decades which also plays a significant role in funding our aging roads and highways.  And undoubtedly the American Petroleum Society would have a role in that issue.  God help us getting out of cars and needing less of their product.

Coming to a town near you – a bridge collapse, a highway buckling, a cracked and damaged sidewalk, a public school rotting.  Better get the cops writing more tickets it is a great way to balance the budget on the backs of the poors.

Infrastructure Cracks as Los Angeles Defers Repairs

 by ADAM NAGOURNEY
SEPT. 1, 2014

LOS ANGELES — The scene was apocalyptic: a torrent of water from a ruptured pipe valve bursting through Sunset Boulevard, hurling chunks of asphalt 40 feet into the air as it closed down the celebrated thoroughfare and inundated the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. By the time emergency crews patched the pipe, 20 million gallons of water had cascaded across the college grounds.

the midst of a historic drought, no less, was hardly an isolated episode for Los Angeles. Instead, it was the latest sign of what officials here described as a continuing breakdown of the public works skeleton of the second-largest city in the nation: its roads, sidewalks and water system.

With each day, it seems, another accident illustrates the cost of deferred maintenance on public works, while offering a frustrating reminder to this cash-strained municipality of the daunting task it faces in dealing with the estimated $8.1 billion it would take to do the necessary repairs. The city’s total annual

“It’s part of a pattern of failing to provide for the future,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A. “Our roads used to be better than the East Coast; now they are worse. I grew up here. Things are dramatically different now than they used to be.”
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There are constant reminders of the day-to-day burdens that the dilapidating infrastructure poses here.

The city is battling a class-action lawsuit from advocates for disabled people because of broken sidewalks that are almost impossible to navigate in a wheelchair, and challenging for all pedestrians trying simply to make it home. The average car owner here spends $832 a year for repairs related to the bad roads, the highest in the nation, according to a study by TRIP, a nonprofit transportation research group based in Washington. Families here routinely spring for expensive strollers to handle treacherous sidewalks.

City officials estimate that it would cost at least $3.6 billion to fix the worst roads, $1.5 billion to repair the sidewalks and $3 billion to replace aging water pipes.

“From a ratepayer’s point of view, it can appear overwhelming,” said H. David Nahai, an environmental lawyer and the former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “We need increases for the streets and the sidewalks. We need increases for the water structure. Pretty much right now we are in a time of transition. That can be frightening.”

The problem is exacerbated by cutbacks in federal spending on public works. “The sense is that more and more, we are going to be doing things alone,” said the mayor, Eric Garcetti.

Close to 40 percent of the region’s 6,500 miles of roads and highways are graded D or F, meaning they are in such bad shape that for now city officials are concentrating maintenance efforts on roads that are in better shape, and thus less costly to fix. More than 4,000 of the 10,750 miles of sidewalks are in severe disrepair, according to Los Angeles city officials.

More than 10 percent of the 7,200 miles of water pipes were built 90 years ago. The average age of a city pipe is 58, compared with an optimal life span of 100 years. While that may not sound so bad, at the current level of funding it would take the Department of Water and Power 315 years to replace them.

Marcie L. Edwards, the general manager of the department, said that the pipes were not in as dire shape as those in some other cities, and that the department had spent more on replacing pipes. Even with more money, she said, there are limits on how fast her department can move.

“Our system is by no means falling apart,” Ms. Edwards said. “We live in a very densely populated environment. These are big jobs that are incredibly impactful on neighborhoods and congested streets.”

Still, the water main break was unsettling because, unlike the war-zone-like patches of streets and sidewalks that have been cast asunder by tree roots in some neighborhoods here, this was a hidden problem until it was revealed in a geyser to motorists waiting at a traffic light. As such, it has become a symbol of the larger problem.

“People don’t think about the fact that there are pipes under the ground that are 100 years old until one blows,” said Mike Eveloff, a leader of Fix the City, a civic group pushing for repairs. “You don’t hear a politician say, ‘I’m going to make your pipes work.
< And here, as in other cities, the demand for public works comes as the costs of municipal pension plans are shooting up — a confluence that has alarmed business leaders. “Once those payments are made, there’s not much money left, if any, to invest in infrastructure,” said Gary L. Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

The challenge also coincides with a push by city leaders to move Los Angeles away from its historic reliance on cars, with heavy investment in its expanding mass-transit system and bicycle lanes. In an interview, Mayor Garcetti said that any public works campaign would have to factor in that change.

“We have to build a city that people can be happy to walk in and drive in, but we also have to account for the transit revolution that’s coming,” he said. “If we spend billions and billions on car-only infrastructure — ignoring pedestrian, bicycle and transit users — we may look back 10 years from now and say, ‘Whoops, maybe we should have tied all those things together.

California is also known for being averse to taxes. Earlier this year, city officials debated asking voters to approve a plan to add half a cent to the 9-cent city sales tax. That would raise enough for the $3.6 billion in road reconstruction but just $640 million of the $1.5 billion needed for sidewalk repairs.

City Council leaders and Mr. Garcetti decided against putting anything before voters, probably until November 2016, to give the city more time to come up with a plan that has a chance of winning.

“I think people quite frankly are paying enough taxes right now,” said Mitchell Englander, a Republican councilman and leader of the repair effort. “We’ve got to do things differently. They don’t trust politicians.”

“A lot of people are going to say they feel overtaxed,” Mr. James said. “I’m not saying we’re not. But it means going to the voters, as I am prepared to do on behalf of Mayor Garcetti, to make the economic argument that $26 a year, which is what you would spend on a half-cent sales tax increase, is a lot better than $830 a year to fix your car.”

Funds to replace water pipes would come, presumably, if the Department of Water and Power gained approval from the City Council to increase water rates. Because of the drought, the typical city resident’s monthly bill for water has risen to $60, from $34.85 in the fall of 2011, reflecting the higher cost the department had to pay to purchase water.<

“The longer we wait, the more expensive it’s all going to be.” said Mr. Nahai, the former head of the Department of Water and Power.