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Letters to the Editor
AN AGENCY IN NEED
Editors, Daily Planet:
I am grateful to have the Berkeley Daily Planet back on the streets and on the Web to cover the local stories that the media outside our community ignores. One of those stories was City Council’s hearing on the distribution of Community Development Block Grant funds (CDBG). I was disappointed that John Geluardi’s article did not mention Jobs Consortium, one of the agencies that received the most significant cuts.
The city manager is recommending that Jobs Consortium receive no funding for the coming year. As a staff person, I did not speak before the council, but I listened as a dozen of our clients made an eloquent case for supporting the program. Mr. Geluardi cited agencies’ lack of need or mismanagement as possible reasons for the recommended cuts. If that is the reasoning behind the loss of Jobs Consortium’s CDBG funding, no one has told us that.
At the end of our presentation, City Councilmember Dona Spring commended us for the work we are doing in the community. The only reason we have been given is that we should be working harder to get money from private foundations. In fact, we have worked very hard to win foundation grants and have received grants in the past from foundations set up by the Clorox Company and the Haas family. Unfortunately, times are as hard on foundations now as they are on state and local governments. Shrinking stock portfolios have shrunk the amount of money that foundations can award.
We understand that times are tough, and the staff is already doing more with less by taking significant pay cuts in February. We will do all we can to maintain the current level of services to our clients.
Time is running out. I urge those who have benefited from our services in the past to call Mayor Bates and members of the council. Let them know how much Jobs Consortium helped you gain employment and stable housing. Without Jobs Consortium, the benefits you received will not be available to those who need us in the future. Think of what you would have done without Jobs Consortium there to help.
Tom Yamaguchi
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LONG-TERM SOLUTION
Editors, Daily Planet:
In Bud Hazelkorn’s article (Daily Planet, May 9-12 edition) on the student protest in Sacramento against education cuts, Mayor Tom Bates, bidding bye-bye to the buses as they left Berkeley, “insisted” that the state needed to raise income taxes as well as vehicle license fees to meet the current shortfall.
Bates’ failure to specify that only the top 10 percent income level and license fees for vehicles costing more than $20,000 ought to face stiffer rates makes me feel I’m hearing the same old, same old.
The budget deficits Berkeley and the state are facing call for more long-term solutions than increasing the financial burden for middle- and lower- income earners. I propose the following: Cancel the (unneeded) Delano II prison, $124,000,000. Adopt the Legislative Analyst Office’s options making better use of parole, $375,500,000. Reduce the number of parolees returned to prison on technicalities (returned without new convictions), $888,354,177.
These measures will save California more than $1.3 billion a year, every year. In addition, if tax loopholes that California oil companies enjoy were plugged, the state would also reap huge amounts every year.
It’s more than time for Berkeley’s elected officials to exhibit some creative political leadership, step outside the Democratic Party line and pro-actively advocate for some fundamental reforms. If they can’t or won’t, then they are simply party hacks working to save their own jobs and status.
Maris Arnold
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LANDLORD’S EXPENSE
Editors, Daily Planet:
I’m sure “Name Withheld” (Letters to the Editor, May 6-8) is unaware how costly his “run-down” apartment is to the owner (mortgage, water, insurance, multiple taxes and fees, and the only expense which can be delayed — maintenance). If these expenses are higher than Mr. Withheld’s rent (and they almost certainly are), the landlord is in part supporting him. People naturally resent having dependents who are not family members.
The tenants I know who’ve had rent-controlled apartments for 20 years (including lawyers and computer programers) aren’t heard from in the local press not due to fear of their landlords, but because they are embarrassed to have people know about their incredible deals.
Judy Johnston
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TRUE MEASURE OF TESTS
Editors, Daily Planet:
Lauren Kayed (Letters to the Editor, May 6-8 edition) doesn’t understand what Michael Larrick meant by “traditional scholarship” and the “psychological, social worker model of education” in his earlier opinion piece. A reading of the piece makes it perfectly obvious.
Traditional scholarship to Mr. Larrick means the “three Rs” of the conservative educational movement: rote, repetition and regurgitation. The psychological, social worker model of education means any recognition that children are individuals who have different ways of learning and develop them at different rates. Since teachers (at least at the elementary school level) can’t help but notice that the latter is true, conservatives are constantly shopping for “teacher-proof” curricula.
I can’t speak to Mr. Larrick’s presumptions about 100 years ago, but I do know that when I was in school in the 1940s and 1950s, fewer than half of those who entered high school in the United States graduated. In California, half of Latino students had been pushed out by the eighth grade. U.S. students consistently lagged behind those of other industrialized countries in math and science.
Unfortunately, every attempt to correct this has been vehemently opposed by the rote learning fans. When math teachers developed a curriculum which would teach children vital estimating skills, the regurgitators screamed that our children were being taught “to guess” rather than memorize formulae. Kids from countries like South Korea and Japan where they teach “guessing” naturally do better on math tests than rote-bound Americans.
The “drill and kill” testing ideology has two foundations. The first is that learning consists of mastering a body of received truth and the function of teachers is to memorize that truth, then pass it on to their students so that they can regurgitate it onto test papers. This essentially religious idea is joined to the 18th-century enlightenment notion that children are just small adults, differing from us only in that they don’t know as much. The function of the schools is to fill them with measured doses of knowledge. The function of tests is to measure whether the schools are pumping the goo in fast enough.
In reality, of course, what tests like the SAT measure best is how good you are at taking tests. (I speak as one who scored in the 99th percentile nationally on both parts of the SAT I. Give me multiple choices, and I can usually pass tests in subjects about which I know nothing.)
Tom Condit
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TRAGEDY AT HOME
Editors, Daily Planet:
During the past two months we lost over 200 Americans who fought for freedom in Iraq. This is a tragedy; one life is too much to loose. But the price of freedom and world peace is high, and we must always be diligent and ready to fight for liberty, freedom and world peace.
What is even more tragic is the loss of young American lives that occurred right here in the Berkeley-Oakland Congressional District of Dellums and Barbara Lee. During the past 12 years, since the Gulf War, we have lost 1,723 Americans to brutal homicides right here in our own neighborhoods.
Barbara Lee, Don Perata, Loni Hancock and Tom Bates ignore this tragic brutality and badmouth President Bush and rave about our 200 American losses in Iraq, but they don’t give a damn about our brutal 1,723 murders right here in our own neighborhoods. I’m afraid to go out at night, while our local politicians do nothing except condemn President Bush, who has overwhelmingly proved himself to be one of our greatest presidents and who will be known as one of the greatest world leaders of this century.
Ella Jensen
El Cerrito
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ALTERNATIVE NEWS
Editors, Daily Planet:
When George Bush was selected president, it was observed by some that only twice in our history have a father and son become president of the United States. I found myself cynically thinking, “Yes, the Adams father and son at the beginning of our democracy and the Bush father and son at the end of it.”
Remember that the first casualty of war is truth, so beware of propaganda out of Washington, D.C. For a true alternative to the corporate-owned media, we in Berkeley are lucky to have listener-sponsored, free-speech radio, KPFA, 94.1 FM. Try catching “Democracy Now” at 6 and 9 a.m. and “Flashpoint” at 5 p.m. for a different news exposure.
Ann Middleton
Albany
