The Assembly yesterday voted to allow students who were unable to take the state’s exit exam to graduate anyway, as long as they had completed other requirements. The legislation comes in response to a situation in which some students missed their window to take the exam because the Department of Education did not have a contract in place to have the exams administered. Jeremy White, Sacramento Bee:
“Students who tried this summer to take a required high school exit exam found the test was no longer available because a state contract to administer the test had expired.
“’We know that approximately 5,000 California high school students are in limbo,’ said Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach. ‘Students cannot take a test that does not exist.’
“Under Senate Bill 725, which passed the Assembly on a 69-1 vote, students graduating this year can get their diplomas without taking the expired test as long as they’ve fulfilled other graduation requirements. The bill heads next to the Senate for a final vote before going to Gov. Jerry Brown….
“’It is an absolute failure of the California Department of Education, of this Legislature,’ said Assembly Minority Leader Kristin Olsen, R-Riverbank. ‘There is no logical reason we couldn’t have been prepared.’”
In a first, a landmark study has declared outright that climate change played a significant role in accelerating California’s current drought – the only question is how much. Louis Sahugan, Los Angeles Times:
“A growing number of scientists have made the claim that climate change is at least partly responsible for California's crippling drought. Now researchers have estimated the extent to which humans are to blame: between 8% and 27%...
"’By knowing how much global warming has contributed to the trend in California drought conditions over the past century, we can reliably predict how the future will play out,’ said A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the study…
“Kevin Anchukaitis, a professor of geography at the University of Arizona who wasn't involved in the research, said the study was the first to quantify the degree to which human activity has contributed to the drought.
"’This is the point from which future research on this issue will pivot,’ he said.”
Google and another digital tech company, Targeted Victory, have released a report quantifying what many political pros already know: most of the campaign dollars spent on TV ads go to waste. John Myers has the story at KQED:
“Congressional districts, drawn in California by an independent commission and in other states by legislators, rarely align nicely with the broadcast footprint of television stations. And it presents candidates and their supporters with a quandary: How do you get the eyeballs we need for those 30-second ads?
“The answer, say the analysts behind the report, is to overspend. In fact, their report concludes that a whopping 75 percent of the money spent on the typical congressional campaign in the U.S. is wasted by reaching out to voters who don’t even live in the district.
“’You’d never buy a tool that only works 25 percent of the time,’ said Targeted Victory’s Michael Beach in a news release. ‘The waste in the average broadcast television buy should make any campaign think long and hard about how and where to apply their media budget.’”
Just the other day we were saying ‘whatever happened to Rocky Chavez?’ given that the candidate for Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat has had a relatively low profile compared to the month immediately following his announcement. Today he was back in the spotlight, speaking with the Contra Costa County Republican Party – but he may wish he’d stayed home. Josh Richman, Political Blotter:
“2016 U.S. Senate candidate and Assemblyman Rocky Chavez was in Walnut Creek on Thursday evening to take questions from the Contra Costa County Republican Party – and many in the crowd didn’t like some of his answers….
“Asked about illegal immigration overwhelming California’s schools, Chavez replied that illegal immigration is happening all over the world, most notably now from Africa to Europe and from southeast Asia to Australia. Mexican immigration to California has tapered off in recent years to the point that there’s more net migration southward, he said, but all such movement is due to the same forces that drove settlers westward across North America to California in the 19th century.
“’If you want to deal with immigration, deal with the economic and social distress in the world,’ he said, adding that immigrants should learn English in order to succeed but need not abandon their native languages entirely within their own families and communities. The woman who had asked the question was visibly dissatisfied with his answer…
“Then Chavez was asked his opinion on global warming.
“’There’s no doubt in my mind that we are having climate change in the world,’ he replied, noting U.S. military leaders have concluded that the greatest threat facing the nation in the Pacific is sea-level rise. ‘This is not an issue of politics, this is an issue of science.’”
Well, that didn’t take long. Reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle dug into the data dump from hacked adultery website Ashley Madison and discovered information leading to plenty of state and local government employees who had used the site from their work email. From Melody Gutierrez and Emily Green:
“A Chronicle review of the data dump found that scores of California residents used e-mail accounts issued to them by city, county and state agencies as well as public schools and universities. There are prison guards, professors, safety regulators, court employees and cops. At least two people appear to have used their San Francisco city government e-mail to log on.”
In the feel-good department, AB147, Assemblyman Matt Dababneh’s (D-Woodland Hills) bill to require universities to offer retired research dogs and cats up for adoption rather than euthanizing them passed the Senate today. Back to the Assembly for concurrence.
As the battle over SB350, a landmark bill to combat climate change, goes into the final clinch, both sides are spending big for the win. Laurel Rosenhall has the story at CALmatters:
“The oil industry helped Democrat Jim Cooper win his first election to the Legislature last year. Now it’s seeking his help fighting Democratic leaders in the state Capitol.
“Cooper is one of a handful of potential swing votes the oil industry is targeting as it tries to kill a controversial proposal to cut in half the amount of petroleum California vehicles use by 2030….
In recent weeks, Cooper’s face has appeared on Internet ads asking voters to sign a petition to “help” him vote against Senate Bill 350, a high-stakes attempt by Gov. Jerry Brown and Senate President pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) to put California at the global forefront in fighting climate change. Though the bill has passed the state Senate, it faces a tougher challenge in the Assembly, where the oil industry is applying considerable pressure on a handful of legislators like Cooper who will vote on the bill by Sept. 11…
“Pressure is also coming from the other side. A group backed by billionaire climate change activist Tom Steyer has run ads in key markets thanking legislators who voted “yes” when the Senate passed the measure. Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, paid Univision to host a special half-hour program about the dangers of climate change. Other environmental groups that support the bill have joined the publicity campaign.”
And speaking of Tom Steyer… we’re thinking that he really wishes that AP’s Julia Horowitz hadn’t picked this week to run her story profiling the failings of Proposition 39, the 2012 Steyer-backed Clean Energy initiative that promised to create 11,000 clean energy jobs per year – but which has, so far, failed spectacularly to deliver.
“Money is trickling in at a slower-than-anticipated rate, and more than half of the $297 million given to schools so far has gone to consultants and energy auditors. The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has never met, according to a review by The Associated Press.
“Voters in 2012 approved the Clean Energy Jobs Act by a large margin, closing a tax loophole for multistate corporations. The Legislature decided to send half the money to fund clean energy projects in schools, promising to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year.
“Instead, only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years..,”
Ouch.
The story had legs, with follow up reports running in all the major California papers and even the Wall Street Journal.
We were really holding out on our #WorstWeekinCA pick to see if any statewide officeholders showed up in the Ashley Madison hack, but thus far we’ve got nothing. So, given the timing, Steyer gets the right to sing the blues this week.
All things considered, it isn’t that bad. After all, he’s still got a billion dollars and a friend in the Pro Tem’s office. And, even more impressive: Dan Walters came out swinging for the defense. Not the best week, but it could have been worse.
