Opinion: In today’s pages: Graduation day at Locke. Plus Holden Caulfield, smoke and mirrors
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The Times editorial page today comes to the end of the first year at Los Angeles Unified School District’s troubled Locke High School under charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools and finds progress, disappointment and hope. And change:
What makes Locke different under Green Dot...isn’t that the charter operator has the magic formula for successful schools. It’s that the people in charge don’t spend years obfuscating, defending and delaying when things don’t work. They do something to fix it.
The Times has been following the Locke Green Dot experiment closely. See reporter Howard Blume’s articles from earlier this week here, here and here, and the editorial page’s year-long series, A Year at Locke, here, and its earlier editorials like this one at the birth of the Green Dot experiment here. And don’t miss editorial writer Karin Klein’s many blog posts, including yesterday’s post from the graduation, with its chilling quote:
‘It’s happy, but it’s also sad,’ [a parent said]. I waited for the predictable next words - happy because his child had grown up, sad because...well, his child had grown up. Instead, he continued, ‘Because you know after today some of these kids are going to die. Some will go down a bad path and get taken out too young.’
In Op-Ed, this just in from calbuzz.com‘s Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine: California government is hard to handle. The two bloggers probed and have discovered that the problems include Proposition 13, voter initiatives, gerrymandering, term limits, a volatile tax structure, and the two-thirds rule for adopting budgets and taxes. Who knew? And guess what? It turns out some people are calling for a constitutional convention.
They made me look up the word bibulous, and now I’m embarrassed I didn’t know it before, so I deny it.
Roberts, by the way, is the former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the embattled editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press before his well-chronicled battle with owner Wendy McCaw. He wrote about one episode here.
He and Trounstine last wrote for the Times Opinion page here in March on whether Dianne Feinstein would run for governor.
Trounstine is former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University.
Elsewhere in the page, filmmaker Todd Darling writes in favorof the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, but says it’s not enough. By the way, catch the trailer from his film, ‘A Snow Mobile for George,’ on YouTube here.
And columnist Meghan Daum wonderswhat the deal is with J.D. Salinger, who went to court to block publication of a book in Sweden about his Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield. Say what you will about Salinger, who Daum points out has dabbled in (gasp) Zen Buddhism. But even at 90, he’s no phony.