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Admissions Scandal Followup

Wednesday, March 13th, 2019

The reverberations from yesterday’s admissions scandal continue to sound.

First, it turns out that a major “ethical investment” venture capitalist was caught up in the scandal:

One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent private equity investors — and one of the tech sector’s leading proponents of how to invest ethically and for social impact — has been charged in an explosive college admissions scandal that was revealed Tuesday, March 12.

Prosecutors charged Bill McGlashan, a founder and managing partner at TPG Growth — which has made landmark investments in companies like Uber and Airbnb — on fraud allegations for trying to engineer the admission of his son to the University of Southern California.

What is particularly damaging for TPG is that McGlashan has positioned himself as a leading voice in Silicon Valley for social responsibility. In addition to overseeing TPG’s late-stage growth investing arm, McGlashan has partnered with other conscious leaders like Bono and Laurene Powell Jobs at The Rise Fund, a TPG investing arm that tries to make the world a better place through investments in things like dairy farms in India.

Want to guess what political party McGlashan donates to? That’s right: Democrats. He gave the maximum amount to Obama in 2007, as well as various other Democratic candidates nationwide.

Pretty much the same giving pattern as indicted actress Felicity Huffman:

Bill Clinton once said that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to get ahead. It turns out that there are certain people who, having already gotten ahead, no longer feel a need to play by the rules anymore. These people seem to think that all else is secondary to merely getting their spawn into the strata of the elite by any means necessary.

Jim Geragthy:

In 2014, former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick wrote in Time magazine, “whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.”

Whether or not Bernick’s assessment is accurate, many Americans parents believe otherwise, as demonstrated by yesterday’s terrifically bizarre scandal involving a couple of Hollywood celebrities and a slew of lesser-known wealthy parents who bought their children admission to schools like Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest, Georgetown, and others — Including UCLA, the example of prestige Bernick selected.

As many suspected, just about every part of the college admissions process can be rigged to provide a leg up to those who are wealthy and unethical: bribing athletics coaches, faked learning disabilities, sending students copies of the SAT or ACT ahead of time, proctors correcting answers for students before submitting them for scoring, made-up honors and awards, “staged photographs of their children engaged in athletic activity” and falsifying students’ ethnicities and other biographical details to take advantage of affirmative action. (Elizabeth Warren was just ahead of her time, apparently.) This has been going on since at least 2011. Every single one of these students who had their admission obtained through bribes took away an opportunity that could have gone to better, harder-working student with more honest but poorer parents.

The full description is an epic portrait of graft, corruption, elitism, and sleaze that will leave you wanting to burn down the Ivory Tower. The cherry on top? The whole enterprise was granted tax-exempt nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Status since 2013. Those Tea Party groups couldn’t get nonprofit status, but these crooks could.

If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!

Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?

We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

New York Times writer Amy Chozick shared yesterday, “I was literally told early in my career – by a top magazine editor – ‘Your clips are great, but we really want someone who went to Harvard.’” The replies to her indicate her story is not all that rare. Lots of folks have observed that many big-name journalism institutions run unpaid internship programs that are considered “How to get your foot in the door” — which automatically rules out anyone who can’t afford to provide anywhere from 15 to 40 hours of free labor each week.

Said one mom I know: “I’d get pilloried for saying publicly, but my kids are at a serious disadvantage- straight, white males, middle class income. Colleges want ‘diversity.’ Scholarships for everything but us. Admissions for better schools are limited. It’s so frustrating. Admissions scandal really hits home.”

Part of the realignment that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016 had to do with ordinary Americans who felt they were being left behind by a game rigged against them. How do you think this scandal plays among average voters?

Reason‘s Robby Soave suggests that the whole system should be scraped:

The best remedy to this problem might be to admit that college is, to some degree, a scam. Note that these parents were evidently unconcerned that their kids—who were often coached to fake learning disabilities so they could get more time on the ACT and SAT—might struggle with their course loads. It’s because college is a joke, and it’s easy enough for an academically disinclined grifter—an Olivia Jade, if you will—to get by studying nonsense subjects. They’re paying for the experience and the diploma, not the actual education.

This is a point that Bryan Caplan raises in his excellent book The Case Against Education. Caplan argues that most of the value of a college education is signaling rather than skills. Students don’t learn very much that will be useful to them in the job world, and even if they do, they quickly forget it. But a diploma signals to employers that the diploma-holder is competent in some abstract way—they jumped through a bunch of impressive-looking hoops, and are thus more worthy of a job than people who didn’t. The implication of Caplan’s research is that public funding of higher education is therefore a waste: It doesn’t actually benefit society to subsidize a signaling mechanism if there’s little relevant skill-gaining along the way. It just punishes everybody who, for whatever reason, doesn’t have access to the right hoops.

If we are going to continue to publicly fund higher education, taxpayers might rightly ask whether institutions that receive federal dollars should be permitted to privilege the wealthy, the donor class, the athletes (both faux and actual), and certain racial groups (resulting in abject discrimination against Asians) over applicants who might actually be interested in checking a book out of the library. But if higher education is really just about celebrity scions pretending to play water polo in order to gain admittance to an exclusive partying club, maybe it’s long past time to hit the defund button.

Now some related tweets:

Finally, Rolling Stone offers nine WTF details about the scandal. My favorite:

The fake profiles were so extreme that CW-1 would literally alter applicants’ height. In one case, CW-1 asked an employee to create a basketball profile for a boy who wanted to be admitted to USC. Although the boy was 5’5″ (a fact he referenced in an original draft of his personal statement), his final athletic profile stated that he was 6’1″. Though it’s unclear how, exactly, the young man was expected to justify the discrepancy between his stated height and his actual height when he arrived on campus, he was admitted to USC nonetheless.

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

BREAKING: Another University Admissions Scandal, UT Coach Implicated

Tuesday, March 12th, 2019

The feds just busted a huge university admissions scandal today.

Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were among more than four dozen people charged in a nationwide college admissions cheating scandal that involved wealthy individuals paying up to $6.5 million to place their children into elite universities, according to court records revealed Tuesday.

The alleged scam — which involved students being placed into top colleges such as Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, University of Southern California, UCLA and the University of Texas — was run by a man in California, William Rick Singer, who helped parents get their children into the schools through bribes, court documents unsealed in Boston showed.

Singer, who authorities said will plead guilty to racketeering, ran the charity, Key Worldwide Foundation, which received $25 million in total to guarantee the admissions, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said during a Tuesday news conference.

Most of the students did not know their admission to the school was due to a bribe, authorities said.

The children’s parents would pay a specified amount of money fully aware it would be used to gain college admission. The money would then go toward an SAT or ACT administrator or a college athletic coach who would fake a profile for the prospective student — regardless of their athletic ability, according to the charging documents.

There was a live broadcast covering more details, including the fact that one of the crooked SAT sites was in Houston.

The list of those indicted. The names include a Michael Center in the Western District of Texas and a John Wilson of the Southern District of Texas. According to KXAN, that Michael Center is UT’s tennis coach. Wilson may be the person involved in the Houston SAT cheating portion.

This comes right after the death of former UT President Bill Powers, who was up to his ears in a completely different UT admissions scandal, but one that also involved admitting unqualified students with wealthy, well-connected parents.

Developing…

Update: This is the longest video I could find of the FBI press conference:

Update 2: Implicating UT tennis coach Michael Center has been placed on administrative leave:

Center, who is in his 19th year at UT, has an annual salary of $232,338. He agreed to accept $100,000 as a bribe in exchange for designating a student as a Longhorn tennis recruit, according to investigators. The applicant, according to the FBI affidavit, “did not play competitive tennis.” Center has been arrested and will appear before a federal magistrate judge at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

Three more people in Houston also arrested in the case:

At least three Houstonians were indicted in the scheme: Martin Fox, who is the president of a private tennis academy in Houston; Niki Williams, an assistant teacher at a Houston high school and test administrator for the College Board and ACT; and John Wilson, a founder and CEO of a private equity and real estate development firm.

Williams, Fox, and Wilson were taken into custody and later released on bond. Williams was released on a $20,000 unsecured bond, while Fox was freed on a $50,000 secured bond. Fox was also restricted travel outside of the Southern District of Texas other than court appearance in Massachusetts.

Wilson was later released on $100,000 bond.

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas, video, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

Former UT President Bill Powers RIP

Sunday, March 10th, 2019

Former University of Texas President and Law School Dean Bill Powers has died at age 72.

Powers is probably most famous to BattleSwarm readers for his central role in the UT admissions scandal, in which well-connected students were admitted to the University of Texas despite not having the necessary grade averages or test scores. Powers eventually resigned over the scandal.

The UT admissions scandal was not only real, but several of the state’s most powerful politicians (including then-speaker Joe Straus) and media outlets conspired to bury the story. And there’s no guarantee that the problem has actually been fixed, especially since Wallace Hall is no longer serving on the UT board of regents. That Statesman obituary notes that “It’s an open secret that leaders of public and private colleges put a thumb on the admissions scale from time to time,” as though this is just something we should calmly accept as the way of the world.

I guess handling college admissions by admitting students based on objective criteria is just too hard a concept for some people to grasp.

There’s a saying that the good men do is often buried with them, but the evil they did often lives on after they’re gone…

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Posted in Austin, Texas | No Comments »

Hard Education Truths From A Veteran Teacher

Tuesday, February 12th, 2019

This Quilette piece from a veteran high school teacher is a real eye-opener, and not in a good way, about the decay in several big city high schools:

As the weeks dragged painfully into months, it became apparent that the students wouldn’t learn anything. It was dumbfounding. It was all I could do to keep them quiet; that is, seated and talking among themselves. Sometimes I had to stop girls from grooming themselves or each other. A few brave souls tried to keep up with instruction. A particularly good history teacher once told me that she interrupted a conversation between two girls, asking them to pay attention to the lesson. One of them looked up at her scornfully and sneered, “I don’t talk to teachers,” turning her back to resume their chat. She told me that the best school she ever worked at was in Texas, where her principal managed not only to suspend the most disruptive students for long periods, he also made sure they were not admitted during that time to any other school in the district. It worked; they got good results.

This was unthinkable in New York, where “in-house suspension” was the only punitive measure. It would be “discriminatory” to keep the students at home. The appropriate paperwork being filed, the most outrageously disruptive students went for a day or two to a room with other serious offenders. The anti-discrimination laws under which we worked took all power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students.

Throughout Washington Irving there was an ethos of hostile resistance. Those who wanted to learn were prevented from doing so. Anyone who “cooperated with the system” was bullied. No homework was done. Students said they couldn’t do it because if textbooks were found in their backpacks, the offending students would be beaten up. This did not appear to be an idle threat. Too many students told their teachers the same thing. There were certainly precious few books being brought home.

I tried everything imaginable to overcome student resistance. Nothing worked. At one point I rearranged the seating to enable the students who wanted to engage to come to the front of the classroom. The principal was informed and I was reprimanded. This was “discriminatory.” The students went back to their chosen seats near their friends.

Snip.

Although the school was always on the verge of hysteria and violence, it had all the trappings of the typical American high school. There were class trips and talent shows, rings and year books—even caps and gowns and graduation. High school diplomas were among the trappings, handed out to countless 12th graders with, from my observation, a 7th grade education. The elementary schools had a better record. But everyone knew that once the kids hit puberty, it became virtually impossible under the laws in force to teach those who were steeped in ghetto and gangster culture, and those—the majority—who were bullied into succumbing to it.

Students came to school for their social life. The system had to be resisted. It was never made explicit that it was a “white” system that was being rejected, but it was implicit in oft-made remarks. Youngsters would say things like, “You can’t say that word, that be a WHITE word!” It did no good to remind students that some of the finest oratory in America came from black leaders like Martin Luther King and some of the best writing from authors like James Baldwin. I would tell them that there was nothing wrong with speaking one’s own dialect; dialects in whatever language tend to be colorful and expressive, but it was important to learn standard English as well. It opens minds and doors. Every new word learned adds to one’s wealth, and there’s nothing like grammar for organizing one’s thoughts.

It all fell on deaf ears. It was impossible to dispel the students’ delusions. Astonishingly, they believed that they would do just fine and have great futures once they got to college! They didn’t seem to know that they had very little chance of getting into anything but a community college, if that. Sadly, the kids were convinced of one thing: As one girl put it, “I don’t need an 85 average to get into Hunter; I’m black, I can get in with a 75.” They were actually encouraged to be intellectually lazy.

Snip.

It would be repetitive to go over the plentiful examples of the abuse teachers suffered at the hands of the students. Suffice it to say, it was Washington Irving all over again, but in miniature. The principal talked a good game, believing that giving “shout-outs” and being a pal to the students were accomplishing great things, but he actually had precious little control over them. What made matters worse, the teaching corps was a young, idealistic group, largely recruited from the non-profit Teach For America, not the leathery veterans who constituted a majority at the two previous schools. I was a weird anomaly to these youngsters. What? I didn’t feel pity for these poor children? I didn’t take it for granted that they would abuse us? The new teachers were fervent believers in the prevailing ideology that the students’ bad behavior was to be expected, and that we should educate them without question according to the hip attitudes reflected in the total absence of good literature or grammar, and a sense of history that emphasized grievance.

One example of the “literature” we were expected to teach was as racist as it was obscene. The main character was an obese, pregnant 14 year-old dropout. The argot in which it was written was probably not all that familiar to many of the students. Appalled, I asked an English teacher why the students had to read this rubbish. She was shocked at the question: we have to teach “literature the kids can relate to.” Why on earth did the school system believe that such a depraved environment as depicted in this book was representative of the very mixed group of families that inhabited the area, many of whom were led by middle-class professionals from the Caribbean? The “language arts” department (the word “English” was too Euro-centric) made one obligatory bow to Shakespeare—a version of “Romeo and Juliet” reduced to a few hundred words. It was common knowledge that the Bard was “overrated.”

Read the whole thing.

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HISD School Board: “A Step Below Hell”

Tuesday, February 5th, 2019

Sometimes you link piece because you read it and go “What the hell?” Such is the case with this piece on the Houston Independent School District School Board:

Three days after the stunning ouster of Houston ISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan in mid-October, an unexpected move that further divided the already-fractured school board, district leaders gathered for training on how to govern.

Instead, HISD leaders spent four straight hours lobbing blistering accusations of disingenuous, duplicitous and dismissive behavior by their colleagues. Through raised voices and tears, they bemoaned the disintegration of trust and productivity on the board, with one trustee describing his service as “a step below hell” and another likening her experience to “an abusive relationship.”

The intervention-style airing of grievances, captured on video and reported here for the first time, culminated with Trustee Wanda Adams standing up and yelling at Trustee Elizabeth Santos, angry that board members did not defend her after she received threats while serving as board president in 2017.

Well, there’s one problem. You’re supposed to hold off of the Festivus Airing of Grievances until December 23.

“Did y’all come to my defense? Hell no,” Adams shouted as she slowly walked toward Santos, prompting a top Texas Education Agency official in the room to position himself between the two trustees. “So, you want to know how I felt last year? I was quiet the whole year. So, don’t come up here crying ‘woe is me’ when people came to my house, attacked me.”

Houston ISD Trustee Wanda Adams shouted at fellow board member Elizabeth Santos for about 90 seconds during a mid-October board meeting, slowly walking toward her until Texas Education Agency Deputy Commissioner of Governance AJ Crabill stepped between them. The exchange marked the highest point of tension during a heated meeting in the aftermath of Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan’s unexpected ouster, which was later reversed.

The remarkably candid meeting laid bare the dysfunction that critics say has weakened the Houston school board’s ability to serve the district’s 213,000 children and prompted calls for major state intervention over the past several months. The turmoil has stalled efforts to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the district, including poor academic performance among many low-income students, inequities in funding between campuses and unstable administrative leadership. Houston ISD leaders also suspect the board’s disharmony has contributed to the district’s largest enrollment decline in 12 years.

“I have felt like this year (in 2018), there’s been no productive work done by the board,” Trustee Anne Sung said during the October meeting.

Details of the seven-hour mid-October meeting have not been publicly disclosed until now, largely because it was not attended by local media and HISD officials did not post video of the meeting online. The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the video through a public records request.

The video depicts a beaten-down board compromised by grudges, clashing personalities and heightened suspicions. Some trustees have said they were unaware they were being recorded during the meeting, resulting in an unfiltered look at the fragmented board.

Houston ISD Trustee Anne Sung explained to colleagues the frustration she felt in 2018 while serving on the school board, as well as part of her rationale for voting to replace Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan.

“There’s so much back-biting and back-stabbing and all of these little freaking agendas,” then-Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones said during the meeting. “Every single freaking person here contributed to that. And until we take responsibility for that, it’s not going to change. And the public sees that. They see right through us.”

The articles portrays a school board at each other’s throats, with the biggest battles about personal respect rather than what’s best for students. It’s like an episode of one of those reality talk shows where poor people scream at each other for an hour. Except these people oversee the eighth largest school district in the country.

The relative inaction does not bode well for HISD’s prospects of maintaining local control over the district. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath has had legal authority to replace the district’s school board since September 2017, the result of HISD’s inability to prove strong governance practices and improve academics at long-struggling schools. Morath has not exercised that option, but Gov. Greg Abbott’s blistering comments about the district’s leadership last month — a “disaster,” he tweeted — and a fresh state investigation into potential Open Meetings Act violations by several trustees raises the stakes for HISD.

Even if Morath resists pulling the takeover trigger, chronically low performance at four campuses could prompt a legally required state takeover of the board later this year.

Snip.

The school board has been riddled with distrust and in-fighting for years, often cutting across the class, ethnic and racial lines that cleave the diverse district. The interpersonal grievances frequently are well known in local education circles but less visible to the public.

The mid-October meeting, however, illustrates how the current iteration of the board — three new members were seated to begin 2018 — became Houston’s most maligned governing group.

One by one, trustees voiced frustration with fellow board members or the district administration, accusing colleagues of undermining them, distorting the truth or offering inadequate support.

Skillern-Jones, for example, spent several minutes criticizing nearly all of the trustees for failing to defend her leadership in 2018, noting that she reluctantly assumed the presidency after Trustee Jolanda Jones scuttled Sung’s candidacy. Skillern-Jones drew flak in April when she ordered HISD police to clear the audience from the room during a raucous board meeting, which precipitated the arrests of two women.

Me me me me me.

I believe in subsidiarity, the idea that power should devolve to the lowest level of government possible, but it may very well be time for the state to take over HISD.

(Hat tip: Holly Hansen’s Twitter feed. I also noticed that Holly has a new blog that wasn’t on the blogroll, a situation I’ve now rectified.)

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Posted in Texas | 2 Comments »

Texas News Roundup For August 16, 2018

Thursday, August 16th, 2018

Here’s a basket of Texas and local news of note:

  • Back in the dim mists of time, Democrats used to nominate swing district candidates who could at least pretend to be moderates. This year? Not so much.

    Today, I’m highlighting another extremist Democrat in Texas, Gina Ortiz Jones, who finished first in a five-way primary, with 42% of the vote and then defeated Rick Trevino in the May runoff, to challenge Republican Rep. Will Hurd in the 23rd District.

    This is one of the most competitive districts in the country, and has changed hands five times between Republicans and Democrats in the past 25 years. Hurd, a former CIA officer and the only black Republican member of Congress from Texas, won the seat in 2014 with only a 2,500-vote margin over the Democrat incumbent, and was re-elected in 2016 with a margin of only 3,000 votes. In a mid-term where Democrats are energized by anti-Trump mania, Hurd faces a tough fight, and Democrats have poured more than $1 million into the Jones campaign.

    Fortunately for Republicans, however, Jones is way out of step with the values of this largely rural district, which stretches all the way from the suburbs of San Antonio in the east to El Paso in the west. The district is 55% Hispanic, and Jones has made a point of using her mother’s maiden name, with the slogan “One of Us, Fighting For Us” in her campaign.

    Except she’s not Hispanic. Her mother immigrated from the Philippines and her father (who never married her mother) was a white drug addict. While she’s using “Ortiz” to play the identity-politics game with Texas voters, however, she’s using a lesbian-feminist message to solicit support nationally from Trump-haters, promising to become the “first Filipina-American and first out-lesbian to represent Texas in Congress, and she’ll be the first woman to represent her district.“ She has been endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. Her agenda includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other issue you might expect from someone who attended elite Boston University.

  • Missed this earlier: San Antonio Dr. Jorge Zamora-Quezada was arrested for committing over $240 million in Medicare and other government fraud in a scheme that stretched back over two decades.
  • “ICE arrests 45 in Houston area during 5-day operation targeting criminal aliens, immigration fugitives.”
  • There were also 110 illegal aliens arrested in the Rio Grande valley over two days.
  • “In what appears to have been a last-ditch move to sway a tax ratification election in their favor, South San Antonio ISD officials likely violated state law on Tuesday by paying district employees to go vote for the tax increase. But for those at home wondering, crime doesn’t pay. Despite their fourth-quarter efforts, voters defeated the tax hike by a 57–43 margin.”
  • The University of Texas “diversity coordinator” thinks that “The Eyes of Texas” is racist. (Hat tip: Mark Pulliam, on Twitter.)
  • How well did your local public school rank? TPPF has more on how to read the scores. (But also keep in mind Iowahawk’s illuminating essay on how demographics affect test scores.)
  • Muslim immigrant from Jordan sentenced to death for two honor killings.
  • The Idiots on the Austin City Council voted to subsidize a professional soccer team on city land. Because subsidizing a sport Texans actually like just wasn’t insulting enough. (More background here.)
  • “100% Renewable Isn’t Doable.” No matter what Georgetown says…
  • When is an interest rate swap a secret stealth tax increase? This piece walks you through how tiny Azle ISD’s machinations amount to a form of regulatory arbitrage to do just that.
  • “Woman shoots masturbating bicyclist trying to break into her SE Houston home.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Jihad, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    More of Bill De Blasio’s “Genius”

    Sunday, March 11th, 2018

    Problem: Parents are worried about random school shootings.

    Bill De Blasio’s Solution: Remove NYPD cops from schools:

    The last NYPD cops assigned full-time to New York City public schools are being moved out — despite nationwide calls for heightened security in the wake of last month’s Florida shootings.

    As the nation mourned the 17 victims of the school massacre at Parkland, Fla., the NYPD was removing Sgt. Raul Espinet from his post at Francis Lewis HS in Fresh Meadows, Queens — where he had worked for more than a dozen years. Parents, teachers and students are livid over the beloved cop’s departure.

    “My colleagues think it’s outrageous — and really stupid,” teacher Arthur Goldstein said. “We’re not enthusiastic about arming teachers, but we liked having a cop around.”

    Espinet’s position was eliminated because cops in Mayor de Blasio’s new community policing units will visit schools while patrolling the neighborhood, according to the NYPD. School safety agents are stationed at all schools, but are not armed.

    The once-common practice of putting an armed cop in schools waned in the 1990s. All were gradually eliminated, but Francis Lewis, one of the biggest high schools, slipped by. Bayside and Benjamin Cardozo high schools also recently lost their full-time NYPD officers, according to parents.

    Espinet is one of the last — if not the last — school cop to go.

    “I’m not aware of any other school with a full-time police officer assigned to it,” said Lt. John Grimpel, an NYPD spokesman.

    Parents at the overcrowded Queens school, crammed with more than 4,400 students, are protesting the change.

    “The community officer is in no way an acceptable replacement,” says a PTA petition launched last week.

    The PTA is demanding that the NYPD and city Department of Education bring back an armed cop to Francis Lewis. It has collected more than 1,000 signatures in just two days, according to co-president Linda Lovett.

    “It’s ridiculous,” Lovett said. “All over the country they are telling you ‘arm the teachers, get an officer in your school.’ New York City had a designated officer and they are actually cutting the program . . . they are making us less secure.

    “You are talking about 5,000 people in a one-block radius, and you’re telling me you can’t designate one officer?”

    Cop were originally put into New York City schools not to prevent school shootings, but to curb the overall criminality of students that broke out in epidemic proportions in the 1960s, including one infamous incident where a student set a teacher on fire.

    Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and De Blasio seems hellbent on repeating all the mistakes of sixties radicals.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats | 1 Comment »

    UT’s Fenves Chooses Settling Over Testifying

    Wednesday, November 29th, 2017

    The University of Texas reversed course, deciding that maybe having President Greg Fenves reverse a hearing examiner’s finding in order to find a student guilty of sexual harassment for consensual sex probably wasn’t the greatest idea, settling the case and reinstating the student. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)

    Could Fenves have reversed the ruling after receiving a large donation from the accuser’s father, as “John Doe’s” lawsuit attests? Whatever the case, UT seemed willing to settle rather than risk having their President testify on the record in court.

    This is probably a good time to remind people that just because Wallace Hall is no longer on the UT Board of Regents does not mean that the numerous problems of cronyism and favoritism in admissions (and very possibly elsewhere) he uncovered were solved just because Hall is no longer there to expose them.

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    Texas vs. California Update for July 11, 2017

    Tuesday, July 11th, 2017

    Long time no Texas vs. California update. I’ve been busy.

  • California’s descent into socialism:

    In the end, we are witnessing the continuation of an evolving class war, pitting the oligarchs and their political allies against the state’s diminished middle and working classes. It might work politically, as the California electorate itself becomes more dependent on government largesse, but it’s hard to see how the state makes ends meet in the longer run without confiscating the billions now held by the ruling tech oligarchs.

  • Lots of comparisons between California and the rest of the nation. Like: “California has a nasty anti-small business $800 minimum corporate income tax, even if no profit is earned, and even for many nonprofits.” And “CA public school teachers the 3rd highest paid in the nation. CA students rank 48th in math achievement, 49th in reading.”
  • All across California, higher pensions equal fewer government services:

    Across California, many local governments have raised taxes while cutting services. Local officials desperate for union support have made irresponsible deals with public employee unions, creating staggering employee costs. Taxpayer money meant to provide essential services to the least well-off instead goes directly to higher salaries and benefits.

    In Santa Barbara County, the 2017-2018 budget calls for laying off nearly 70 employees while dipping into reserve funds. The biggest cuts are to the Department of Social Services, which works to aid low-income families and senior citizens. Meanwhile, $546 million of needed infrastructure improvements go unfunded as Santa Barbara County struggles to pay off $700 million in unfunded pension liabilities. County officials estimate that increasing pension costs may cause hundreds of future layoffs.

    Unfortunately, Santa Barbara County is far from alone. Tuolumne County is issuing layoffs in the face of rising labor and pension costs from previous agreements. In Kern County, a budget shortfall spurred by increased pension costs has led to public safety layoffs, teacher shortages, budget cuts, and the elimination of the Parks and Recreation department, even as Kern County’s unfunded pension liability surpasses $2 billion. In the Santa Ana Unified School District, nearly 300 teachers have been laid off after years of receiving pay raises that made them unaffordable, including a 10% raise in 2015.

    In Riverside County, non-union county employees took the blow for the county’s irresponsible pension deals, as all but one of the 32 employees the county laid off this June were non-union members. This came after contract negotiations granted union employees hundreds of millions of dollars in raises. The Riverside County DA said these raises caused public safety cuts. In addition, Riverside County imposed an extra 1% sales tax to pay for these benefits. Across California, citizens suffer as local governments give away their money while cutting their services.

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • That Awkward Moment When Saudi Arabia Is More Pro-American Than California:

    Don’t think I’m going soft on the Saudis. I’ve just not seen a recent image from California where there were this many American flags and none of them were on fire.

    But let’s not forget that we are dealing with a corrupt, degenerate, autocratic state where there is no free speech, where universities are run by fanatics who indoctrinate students with radical ideology; where street thugs aligned with the ruling party freely commit acts of violence against opposing views, and whose ruling elite routinely violates the basic rights of Christians and other minorities. Also, Saudi Arabia is pretty bad too.

  • A piece on California banning public employees from traveling to Texas over various social justice warrior causes. I haven’t met anyone in Texas who doesn’t count that as a win/win situation.
  • The whole thing is an example of California’s Democrat-controlled government favoring virtue signaling over actual governance.

    Whether you agree or disagree with [religious liberty] laws, they don’t seem like any of our state’s business. California passes its share of laws that might offend any number of Nebraskans or North Carolinians, but we don’t see travel bans on official visits to Los Angeles or San Francisco. Federalism is a wonderful thing. Each state gets to pass laws that reflect the values of its voters.

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • There was a big, biased piece in New Yorker about Texas politics. Instead of linking to it, I’m going to link to Cahnman’s takedown of it.
  • California pension funds are going broke because math is hard:

    Unlike water deficits, pension deficits compound. As a result, years of healthy investment earnings cannot close pension deficits. Ironically, Walker herself supplies the proof with these two sentences from her op-ed:

    • “[CalPERS’s] investment returns over the last 20 years have averaged 6.7 percent.”
    • “[CalPERS’s] funded ratio [today] is at about 63 percent.”

    Yet CalPERS’s funded ratio 20 years ago was 111 percent! Ie, despite averaging a wonderful 6.7 percent annual return for 20 years, CalPERS’s funded ratio fell 48 percentage points. That’s because pension liabilities compound at high rates.

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • “Illinois at the brink: Parallel should give Californians pause….As in Illinois, the Democrats who control California politics use their power first and foremost to protect the interests of public employee unions — not the poor and powerless. This has created an entrenched pension-protection complex.”
  • Helping Californians move to Texas isn’t just an idea, it’s a business model:

    Paul Chabot was a hard working candidate for Congress in the Redlands area. He lost twice and decided that California was no longer a decent place to raise his family—so he moved to Texas. Now he is organizing conservatives and family people to move to Texas. There is an effort to re-populate that State of New Hampshire—indeed former San Diego Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian moved to the Granite State, along with thousands of other Americas.

    “So Chabot has found a new pursuit. Last week, he launched the website Conservative Move. It’s a business aimed at helping people leave blue states like California and move places where they might be a little more comfortable — like North Texas, where Chabot and his family moved in January.

    “The purpose of this organization is to help other families create an opportunity where we didn’t have much guidance,” Chabot says.

    After the election, Chabot searched for a community that appeared to uphold the values that he and his family held dear, like safe streets and good schools. Eventually, they decided on McKinney, Texas, a city about 40 miles north of Dallas with a population around 150,000.”

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • Missed this for the last Texas vs. California update:

    On Tuesday, May 6th, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, who are more concerned with the needs of parents, kids and taxpayers than stoking the bureaucracy and complying with teacher union diktats, were elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Reformers are now the majority of the seven member governing body in America’s second largest city.

    Melvoin, especially, was vocal in his campaign that the school district needs a major shake-up, including a call for more charter schools. He also stressed the need for fiscal reform, which includes a reworking of the district’s out-of-control pension and healthcare obligations. In December, LAUSD Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly told the school board that the district may not be able to meet its financial obligations in the future because it faces a cumulative deficit of $1.46 billion through the 2018-2019 school year. While that dollar amount has been disputed in some quarters, there’s no doubt that the district is facing a budgetary crisis. It’s also no secret that an abysmal graduation rate (pumped up with the help of fake “credit recovery” classes) and shrinking enrollment have taken a serious toll on LAUSD. Also, in 2015, only one in five 4th-grade students in Los Angeles performed at or above “proficient” in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

    Needless to say, anything that bodes well for parents and taxpayers will rankle the teachers unions, and the LA school board race was certainly no exception. Not only did the young Turks (Melvoin is 31 and Gonez 28.), defeat the unions’ candidates, they raised more money – in Melvoin’s case far more – than their opponents. This was a rare occurrence, because historically teachers unions have greatly outspent their opponents to get their candidates elected, especially in high-profile elections. But this time the unions could not compete with the likes of philanthropist Eli Broad who donated $450,000 to the campaign and former LA Mayor Richard Riordan who contributed over $2 million. Additionally, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings donated nearly $7 million since last September to CCSA Advocates (the political wing of the California Charter School Association), which spent almost $3 million on the board election.

    On the union side the United Teachers Los Angeles was the big spender, pitching in about $4.13 million, according to city filings. But much of this money came from the UTLA’s national partners. The American Federation of Teachers gave UTLA $1.2 million and National Education Association, $700,000.

  • More on the same subject. “Melvoin, especially, was vocal in his campaign that the school district needed a major shakeup, calling for more charter schools. He also stressed the need for fiscal reform, including a reworking of the district’s out-of-control pension and health-care obligations.”
  • California teacher who was laid off shortly after winning her school’s Teacher of the Year award takes her union to court:

    Bhavini Bhakta never intended to become an activist, but after being laid off six times in the first eight years of her career as an elementary school teacher in the Pasadena suburbs, she decided to get involved in the education reform movement. She focused first on challenging seniority-based layoffs, which in turn led her into conflict with the California Teachers Association. Now she is a plaintiff in Bain v. CTA, a case which challenges the dues structure of unions as a violation of the First Amendment. The suit seeks to restore voting rights on union matters to agency fee payers, who pay full dues for representational activities but opt out of paying for lobbying and political activities.

    “The state union forcibly takes our money and uses it to misrepresent us. They’re not serving the teachers on the ground,” she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re using my money for their own purposes.”

  • Tenure reform is the only big education reform under debate in California this year.
  • Back in May: ICE Nabs 188 In LA During 5-Day Operation. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Soros-Linked Groups Behind California Ban on Detaining Illegal Immigrants.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • California uses one credit card to pay off another. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • “Amid Funding Shortfall, Santa Ana Raises Median Police Compensation Above $213,000.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • California Democrats receive death threats for daring to point out that single-payer socialized medicine bill is pie-in-the-sky malarkey without a funding mechanism.
  • Let California try single payer…and deal with the consequences.
  • So how’s that minimum wage hike working out? At least 60 restaurants around the Bay Area had closed since September.
  • “San Francisco has a staggering $5.8 billion pension liability, and a series of retroactive benefit increases approved by voters over a dozen years is largely to blame.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • California farmer facing a $2.8 million fine for plowing his own field. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • California voters pass legislative transparency measure. California’s Democratic legislators ignore it. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Committing felonies on the job is no reason to give up your cushy pension:

    Mark Peterson, the Contra Costa district attorney forced to resign as part of a felony perjury conviction, cut a sweet plea deal with state prosecutors allowing him to keep most of his pension.

    The deal will probably let him walk away with starting annual retirement payments of about $128,000 in addition to Social Security benefits. That’s because he pleaded no contest to only the most recent of 13 felony counts stemming from his illegal tapping of campaign funds for personal use.

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • “California Democrats Want Data on Lobbyists’ Race, Sexual Orientation.” Social Justice Warriors wanting to milk the graft cash cow? Get the popcorn!
  • San Francisco to pay illegal alien $190,000 for violating their own sanctuary city policy. (Hat tip: Gabriel Malor’s Twitter feed.)
  • Just how big is Houston? Take a look at these overlay maps.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott celebrates the opening of Toyota’s American headquarters in Plano:

    Today we celebrate another milestone marking the incredible momentum of Texas’ continuing economic expansion. Toyota Motor North America joins Hulu, Jacobs Engineering, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kubota, Jamba Juice, Sabre and many other innovative industry leaders who have decided to go big in Texas.

    Our greatest natural resource in the Lone Star State is the hardworking people of Texas. And that work ethic draws global leaders like Toyota to Texas every day. With the second-largest workforce in the nation at more than 13 million strong, Texas continues to be a national leader in job creation. In fact, more Texans have jobs today than ever before, even as more people are moving here every year from states that overtax and overregulate.

  • Why Texas is so attractive for business relocation:

    During his latter years in office as Texas governor, Rick Perry made it a priority to lure businesses to the state, particularly from California. Two-and-a-half years into the term of Gov. Greg Abbott, the successor to Perry, the pace of corporate relocations to the Lone Star State shows no signs of slowing down.

    Much has been written about the state’s business-friendly environment. Most businesses in Texas that aren’t sole proprietorships or partnerships pay a 1 percent or lower “franchise tax,” in lieu of a traditional corporate income tax. In addition, the state’s governing bodies tend to favor minimal regulations and sponsor research and development initiatives.

    The state’s economy is healthy, evident by strong employment growth. The Texas Workforce Commission reports a net gain of 210,000 jobs across the state in 2016, and employers are projected to add another 225,000 jobs in 2017.

    Equally important to strong job growth is the quality of life that employees are promised upon relocating.

    According to Robert Allen, president of the Texas Economic Development Corp., the lifestyle element is perhaps the most common incentive for moving to Texas among executives and employees alike.

    “When we ask executives why they’re moving to Texas, what we hear is that providing a high quality of life for their workforces is number one on their lists,” says Allen.

    “Employees back that claim up. They’re able to buy larger houses, keep more of their incomes, send their kids to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods. This makes it easier for employees to take a leap of faith,” he adds.

    Texas has no personal income tax. Its education system currently ranks 21st based on a state-by-state study by wallethub.com, a credit scoring and reporting site. The study considers factors such as average SAT/ACT score, dropout rates, student-teacher ratios, graduation rate for low-income students and remote-learning opportunities within online public schools. The Huffington Post also notes that Texas has the fourth-highest graduation rate in the country, despite its ever-growing population and high percentage of non-native-English-speaking students.

    And according to a recent study from the NYU School of Law, while violent crime rates are rising in urban areas throughout the country, they’re holding steady in Texas. The state’s murder rate falls in the middle of the pack despite it being a national leader in population growth.

  • And Californians are still flocking to Texas.
  • “Los Angeles, San Francisco homeless woes worsen despite funding boosts.”
  • “Federal judge blocks California ban on high-capacity magazines.” Note that’s not just a sale ban: “The law would have barred people from possessing magazines containing more than 10 bullets.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “A former Diablo Valley College professor was arrested Wednesday in connection with the use of a bike lock in the beating of three people during a rally for President Donald Trump last month, police said Thursday.” I guess that’s the “high road” liberals keep talking about… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Bonus: He was tracked down by 4Chan, who are supposedly working on a face database of Antifa members.
  • “Student Agreed to Orgy, But Later Called It Sexual Assault, Lawsuit Claims. Judge says that University of California, Santa Barbara, may have denied accused male student due process.”
  • “San Francisco supervisor Norman Yee recently proposed legislation that would prohibit autonomous delivery robots – which includes those with a remote human operator – on public streets in the city.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »

    TPPF Legislative Update Recap

    Thursday, June 8th, 2017

    Tuesday I attended the Texas Public Policy Foundation‘s Legislative Update following the close of the regular 85th Texas Legislative Session. I meant to live-blog it, but I neglected to get the WiFi password before it started, so I ended up live-tweeting it from my iPhone instead.

    So here’s a recap in tweet form of what was discussed.

    The panel was introduced by TPPF Executive Vice President Dr. Kevin Roberts.

    Next was Dr. Vance Ginn, economist at the center for Public Policy.

    Next was James Quintero, who you may remember from this interview on the Texas municipal debt crisis.

    That was Gov. Abbott’s call for a special session, and one of the items on his agenda was indeed property tax reform.

    Next was Stephanie Matthews, Senior Policy Advisor of the Center for Education Freedom.

    ESA mentioned here stands for Education Savings Accounts.

    Next was Dr. Derek Cohen, Deputy Director of the Center for Effective Justice.

    The final panelist was Brandon Logan, Director of the Center for Families and Children.

    In case it’s unclear from the tweet, Logan was not enthused at the prospect of CPS using predictive analytics.

    I hope these tweets give you at least the gist of what was discussed.

    If you want to attend yourself, the Legislative Update has other dates around the state open to the public, so sign up for free tickets in advance if you’re interested.

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Regulation, Texas | No Comments »

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