california dreaming - guardian 4.10.09

[INDY500]

As usual, I'm going to ask for a citation here. I know I won't get one, but I'll ask anyway.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[BVS]

You realize that's backwards, that's not how the real world operates? Right?

 

[martha]

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The answer I was expecting. If you like to rely on made-up statistics, go right ahead. That works for conservatives all the time.


Today I asked my superintendent how many languages were spoken in our district. 73. Last time I checked, Spanish was only one language.

So, go ahead and make shit up. We're all on to you here.

 

[INDY500]

The answer I was expecting. If you like to rely on made-up statistics, go right ahead. That works for conservatives all the time.


Today I asked my superintendent how many languages were spoken in our district. 73. Last time I checked, Spanish was only one language.

So, go ahead and make shit up. We're all on to you here.

What a coincidence, my superintendent is my source as well.

So prove me wrong. Expose me for the fraud you say I am. A teacher in California should have no problem with such a task.

 

[INDY500]

You realize that's backwards, that's not how the real world operates? Right?

But isn't it fun to slap somebody down when they leave themselves open?

Well here's your chance BVS. The worldwide web is at your fingertips.

 

[Se7en]

And looking into the crystal ball, two-thirds of California's kindergarten students are Hispanic, most unable to speak English with illiterate, poorly educated and unskilled parents.
So buena suerte with your 'What Makes A Society Thrive And Prosper' theories.

As usual, I'm going to ask for a citation here. I know I won't get one, but I'll ask anyway.

2008-09 Enrollment by Gender, Grade and Ethnic Designation

Kindergarten
Female - Hispanic or Latino 115,223 (51.8 %)
Male - Hispanic or Latino 121,911 (51.1 %)

so just over half of enrolled students are latino/hispanic.

Statewide Enrollment by Gender, Grade, and Ethnic Designation - DataQuest (CA Department of Education)

California English Language Development Test 2008-2009
Annual Assessment - Primary Language-Spanish
Kindergarten

Advanced 54 1.0%
Early Advanced 306 7.0%
Intermediate 1,136 24.0%
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%
Number Tested 4,637 100.0%

it's a small sample, but most can speak some level of english. i don't know how representative of the population this is, but given the positive skew i *assume* it's relatively accurate.

http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/CELD...-09&cChoice=Celdt1&RptNumber=08&cTestNumber=2

 

[INDY500]

Here is my source.
Catching Up to Mexico by Alex Alexiev on National Review / Digital

In 2005, the California K–12 school system was 48.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 30.9 percent white. By now it is above 50 percent Hispanic. Two-thirds of kindergarten students were Hispanic, most of them unable to speak English.

Maybe the author meant 2/3rds of Hispanic kindergarten students were unable to speak English, which would be about right.
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%

Thanks for the link seven. I stand corrected then. The correct % is just over half.

Anyway, it isn't really that the immigration population has changed dramatically in the past few generations. It's that our country has changed. We are no longer manufacturing and agricultural based. We are technology and information based and thus need an immigration policy that reflects those needs. Educated immigrants in other words. The continued uncontrolled illegal immigration of unskilled and uneducated workers will only continue to overstrain government services and budgets.

 

[martha]

illiterate, poorly educated and unskilled parents.

Now work on this part.

2008-09 Enrollment by Gender, Grade and Ethnic Designation

Kindergarten
Female - Hispanic or Latino 115,223 (51.8 %)
Male - Hispanic or Latino 121,911 (51.1 %)

so just over half of enrolled students are latino/hispanic.

This data doesn't disaggregate into immigrant and US born, though. many Hispanic families have been here for generations.

California English Language Development Test 2008-2009
Annual Assessment - Primary Language-Spanish
Kindergarten

Advanced 54 1.0%
Early Advanced 306 7.0%
Intermediate 1,136 24.0%
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%
Number Tested 4,637 100.0%

it's a small sample, but most can speak some level of english. i don't know how representative of the population this is, but given the positive skew i *assume* it's relatively accurate.

That's the CELDT data for Spanish. What is it for Korean and Vietnamese? Or are those the favored minorities?

Here is my source.
Catching Up to Mexico by Alex Alexiev on National Review / Digital


Maybe the author meant 2/3rds of Hispanic kindergarten students were unable to speak English, which would be about right.
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%

Thanks for the link seven. I stand corrected then. The correct % is just over half.

While I'm terribly impressed that you actually have some sort of statistics and a resource to back up your claims, those figures don't really tell the whole story.

Anyway, it isn't really that the immigration population has changed dramatically in the past few generations. It's that our country has changed. We are no longer manufacturing and agricultural based. We are technology and information based and thus need an immigration policy that reflects those needs. Educated immigrants in other words. The continued uncontrolled illegal immigration of unskilled and uneducated workers will only continue to overstrain government services and budgets.

Then you start to change your tune, but NO! It's too hard. Must...go...back...to...blaming...illegal...immigrants.

It's all you've got.

 

[martha]

What a coincidence, my superintendent is my source as well..

Indiana= California. Everybody knows that! Sheesh. How stupid was I?

And my superintendent wasn't a "source" for anything except an interesting factoid.

 

[martha]

California's problem is a lot deeper than just those nasty Mexicans who do all our dirty work, endure the bullshit, and yet still find it a better place to live than their former country.

It's a ridiculous Constitutional requirement to pass a budget, and undemocratic term limits that get inexperienced legislators making short-sighted decisions. It's government by referenda, locking in spending rules without any real-life flexibility. It's a recall that threw out a really good governor in favor of a movie-star who really isn't bright enough or tactful enough, or enough of a real leader, to do a half-way decent job. It's a world-class economy caught in a world-class meltdown that involved fake money, more short-sighted decisions, and fucking GREED. It's a ridiculous limit on property taxes that has been a financial albatross for several decades now.

We had lots of illegal immigrants washing our dishes and cars when we were flush, and nobody seemed to care. We only care about the Mexican guys hanging around the Home Depot when times are tough. Then suddenly it's all their fault and they should just go home. And take those damn six-year-olds with them.


But leave the guys who pick the lettuce, please. Food prices are high enough already.

 

[Se7en]

Maybe the author meant 2/3rds of Hispanic kindergarten students were unable to speak English, which would be about right.
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%

no, i doubt it. it seems the author was simply wrong.

i'm not sure why you characterize bilingual five year olds speaking an intermediate level of english as "unable to speak english".

frankly, i'm impressed. i studied german for a year as a young adult and was barely at an advanced beginner level. can't speak a lick of it today, save a few words and phrases. scheisse!

Anyway, it isn't really that the immigration population has changed dramatically in the past few generations. It's that our country has changed. We are no longer manufacturing and agricultural based. We are technology and information based and thus need an immigration policy that reflects those needs. Educated immigrants in other words. The continued uncontrolled illegal immigration of unskilled and uneducated workers will only continue to overstrain government services and budgets.

and our economy is also increasingly service based. undocumented workers also fill these low wage positions in addition to agricultural labor. chances are that the last time you ate out an undocumented worker was in the kitchen. as long as there are jobs available they will continue to come. when the job market contracts they will leave: Global News Blog � Blog Archive � U.S. immigrant population dips in recession | Blogs |

there are plenty of highly skilled, highly educated immigrants in the u.s. on work or education visas. the universities are full of them.

 

[Se7en]

...That's the CELDT data for Spanish. What is it for Korean and Vietnamese? Or are those the favored minorities?

erm...indy made a statement about a spanish speaking population, so i looked up the data to see if his argument had any merit. i'll go ahead and assume those snarky questions weren't directed at me. either way, you can follow the link and find the info yourself if you're actually interested.

 

[BVS]

But isn't it fun to slap somebody down when they leave themselves open?

Well here's your chance BVS. The worldwide web is at your fingertips.

Ok, 75% of homeschoolers don't like cheese and pledge alligience to a plastic Jesus. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Your approach was backwards. If you make the statement you hold the burden of proof, not the other way around.

And now that you shared your source it turns out you're wrong.

 

[yolland]

and our economy is also increasingly service based. undocumented workers also fill these low wage positions in addition to agricultural labor. chances are that the last time you ate out an undocumented worker was in the kitchen. as long as there are jobs available they will continue to come. when the job market contracts they will leave:

This was my first reaction as well. I remember reading a couple years back, in the Wall Street Journal, that Hispanic Americans--this is including illegal immigrants--had the highest employment rate of any ethnic group. Yes, at the same time they're also among the least educated overall, hence their relative concentration in low-wage sectors (and financial vulnerability in times like the present), but to me that's first and foremost a comment on wage disparities and their public consequences. Someone's gotta wash the dishes, pick the lettuce, slaughter the cattle, stock the shelves, lay the bricks, fix the sewers...that's not gonna change. Are those who render us those services receiving enough in return for their children to have a meaningful shot at moving into these high-tech growth fields...assuming our education system has what it takes to prepare the next generation for that economic reality in the first place? Importing skilled workers is no sustainable substitute for producing them through your own resources.

 

[martha]

erm...indy made a statement about a spanish speaking population, so i looked up the data to see if his argument had any merit. i'll go ahead and assume those snarky questions weren't directed at me. either way, you can follow the link and find the info yourself if you're actually interested.

No, the snarky comment wasn't directed at you. And I appreciate you doing Indy's job and mine. Believe me, CELDT data runs my life.

 

[martha]

Ok, 75% of homeschoolers don't like cheese and pledge alligience to a plastic Jesus. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

If you email this to me, does it make it true?

 

[martha]

Someone's gotta wash the dishes, pick the lettuce, slaughter the cattle, stock the shelves, lay the bricks, fix the sewers...that's not gonna change.

Daily, my husband and I ask each other where California would be without Mexican guys. They are everywhere doing extremely useful jobs.

 

[anitram]

Maybe the author meant 2/3rds of Hispanic kindergarten students were unable to speak English, which would be about right.
Early Intermediate 1,604 35.0%
Beginning 1,537 33.0%

And these kids are all fluent by first or second grade. It's a very common thing among immigrant groups that kids enter kindergarten not speaking very much English at all since they've spent their entire lives at home. And they all do fine, many of them eventually outperforming the anglo kids. Take a look at the Asian population for an example of children who also have high proportions of no-English at the point of kindergarten entry and then follow them through on their path to Harvard. The inability to speak English at the age of 4 isn't really indicative of anything.

I spoke just passable English until I was 12, somehow magically I managed to do something productive with my immigrant ass anyway.

 

[BVS]

If you email this to me, does it make it true?

I'll add pictures just to make sure I cover my bases and so Diamond trust it.

 

[Tiger Edge]

And these kids are all fluent by first or second grade. It's a very common thing among immigrant groups that kids enter kindergarten not speaking very much English at all since they've spent their entire lives at home. And they all do fine, many of them eventually outperforming the anglo kids. Take a look at the Asian population for an example of children who also have high proportions of no-English at the point of kindergarten entry and then follow them through on their path to Harvard. The inability to speak English at the age of 4 isn't really indicative of anything.

I spoke just passable English until I was 12, somehow magically I managed to do something productive with my immigrant ass anyway.

It's common practice among most Hispanic families in Miami to raise young children strictly on Spanish. A few of my friends are US born, have parents that prefer English to Spanish, but nonetheless attended their first years at school as non-English speakers. They're going to learn English anyway, so might as well teach them Spanish while they're young and have no outside interference (Hey, that's the name of this forum!).
That's how my brother and I were raised also, although our parents weren't as strict on the non-English rule.

 

[INDY500]

Golden No Longer
George Will
Sunday, January 10, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) was a hero to the American left, partly because of his 1939 anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun." Trumbo's title modified the lyric "Johnny get your gun" from the World War I song "Over There." Trumbo's "Johnny" is horribly maimed in that war. Now we need a novel titled "Berkeley Got Its Liberalism." Pending that, we have Tad Friend's report, in the Jan. 4 New Yorker, on maimed Berkeley.

California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit. So the University of California system's budget was cut 20 percent. Then the system increased in-state student fees 32 percent to ... $10,302. But that is still 70 percent below student costs at Stanford and other private institutions in California that Berkeley considers no better than it is.

Last September, Friend reports, 5,000 Berkeley employees and students rallied in Sproul Plaza, scene of protests that ignited the 1960s and helped make Ronald Reagan governor. Some protesters, says Friend, were "naked except for signs that read 'BUDGET TRANSPARENCY.'" At an indoor meeting, a "student facilitator" used a projection screen to summarize proposals, which included: "rolling strikes"; "nationalize all universities"; "socialist revolution"; "a tent city in Sacramento"; "create a shadow Board of Regents"; "occupy Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Oakland"; "worker-student control of the university"; "strike in March"; "act now, f--- March"; "capitalism is bad." Toward the end of the seven-hour meeting, participants shouted "General strike! General strike!"

In its impact on the institution, and on students trying to grip the lower rungs of the ladder of social mobility, the UC system's crisis is sad. This academic year, only one-sixth of the normal number of new faculty have been hired at Berkeley. The Cal State system -- a cut below the UC campuses -- will enroll 40,000 fewer students this year than last. But because the professoriate is overwhelmingly liberal, there is rough justice in its having to live with liberalism's consequences, which include this:

Kevin Starr, author of an eight-volume -- so far -- history of the (formerly) Golden State, says California is "on the verge" of becoming something without an American precedent -- "a failed state." William Voegeli, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, tartly says that "Rome wasn't sacked in a day, and California didn't become Argentina overnight." Indeed.

It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state."

And the state's income tax -- liberalism codified -- intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism."

It took years for liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California's once creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians' many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism's laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California's welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico's poverty.

It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a "unionocracy," run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year's pay for life.

Friend reports that when the seven-hour meeting ended, the protest moved to the UC president's house. Two buses carried "some hundred Berkeley students and members of AFSCME." Perfect.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is one reason why California's government employees -- their numbers grew 24 percent between 1997 and 2007 -- are the nation's most highly compensated. And why California's economy is being suffocated by the weight of government. And why the state's budget has little left over for Berkeley.

Expect Cahl-e-four-knee-uhhh to come groveling for a tiddy sum of "Obama cash" sometime this year.

 

[INDY500]

Good news for California. They now have a chance to elect 2 candidates, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman (for governor and U.S. senate) with proven business experience at maximizing efficiency, creating jobs and working within budgets.

Of course there is a choice. One can always vote for the big-government-liberal Democratic career politicians, Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, who helped engineer California's current woes.

 

[deep]

yeah, mama grizzly bears are on the prowl

and in Blue state CA , either or both of these women have a good shot at getting elected,
2010 (scott brown) year of surprises?

 

[BVS]

One's from HP and one's from Ebay, right?

 

[deep]

yeah,
I watched Ebay Meg's speech last night, she seemed to copy a lot of Hillary's patterns and mannerisms from 2008 campaign, it has been a funny election, I have got about 15-20 robo calls a day on my land line.
and the amount of mailers, good god, my front room looked like a paper drive.
plus these liberal to moderate GOP candidates all tried to out conservative
each other,
'I will build a fence, and capture illegals and chop them into little pieces, etc. I will cut taxes and create 3000000 new jobs"

now for the general, they will race to capture independents, and mostly campaign as outsiders, a la Scott Brown, etc. They really do have a shot at getting elected in this Blue State,
also I forgot to mention that they are billionaires, and will spend a hundred million of their own dough to get the office.

pundits on the right and left here in CA
say they got real shots

 

[financeguy]

Good news for California. They now have a chance to elect 2 candidates, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman (for governor and U.S. senate) with proven business experience at maximizing efficiency, creating jobs and working within budgets.

Carly Fiorina? Fair play, good joke.

 

[Irvine511]

until someone starts talking about cutting defense, they cannot be taken seriously when it comes to the deficit.

there's not much left to cut. all that's left is defense and entitlements.

 

[BVS]

pundits on the right and left here in CA
say they got real shots

So far, that's what I've read, but that Carly Fiorina may have some issues, given her company's standing when she left and the compensation she got might not sit well with the angry at Wall Street types

But will those that vote for the primary's loser show up when it matters?

 

[INDY500]

until someone starts talking about cutting defense, they cannot be taken seriously when it comes to the deficit.

Well maybe we can agree here. I'll listen to any pol who says everything must be on the table. Unfunded entitlements is what will bust us but I'm guessing most Americans are also ready to let Europe and Canada defend themselves. I am.

there's not much left to cut. all that's left is defense and entitlements.

Oh I don't know, I think most Americans are also ready to forgo future $750 Billion slush funds stimulus packages or the countless government funded studies of the mating habits of insects. I am.

Randy little beetles.

 

[Irvine511]

the stimulus should have been bigger. but i'm glad we agree on defense cuts. even Gates wants to see this happen.

and talking about stuff like cutting, say, the NEA, or whatever "studies" we're talking about, is absolute pennies in comparison to where the money is actually spent. that's just stuff that's done to make political points -- i.e., Jessie Helms vs. Mapplethorpe -- and doesn't do much to tackle the actual problem.

and we can also talk about going back to Clinton-era tax rates.