Published
4 years agoon
Those to the left of the political centerline often complain — with good reason — about using taxpayer funds to bail out large corporations that are insolvent, or nearly so, due to mismanagement.
The criticism erupted 41 years ago when the federal government saved Chrysler Motors from extinction and was aired again a decade ago when Chrysler, General Motors and major banks were rescued during a global economic crisis.
In 2015, for instance, researchers at UC Berkeley concluded that LA Unified had shifted most of the extra money it received to improve the educations of poor and English learner students into general purposes, such as salary increases.
A coalition of local civil rights groups complained to the state Department of Education, which ruled that LA Unified was wrongly diverting funds and ordered it to redirect nearly a half-billion dollars to the required purposes.
Did LA Unified change its ways? Of course not.
A “realignment exercise,” blessed by state education officials, allowed LA Unified to recategorize expenditures to make them legal, just changing some computer codes without actually changing what it was doing. It was an under-the-radar bailout that shortchanged hundreds of thousands of children at high risk of educational failure.
Another example is the San Francisco Community College District.
In 2012, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges gave the City College of San Francisco eight months to prove it should remain accredited, citing multiple managerial and financial shortcomings, and ordered it to “make preparations for closure.”
That same year, the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance team declared the college to be in a “perilous financial position,” caused largely by “poor decisions and a lack of accountability.”
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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