Uh-oh, Shawn "Ferret Face" Nelson is a member of Team Greer (aka OC's League of Corrupt Republican Thugs)

     The OC Reg’s “Total Buzz” posted today about new OC Supervisor Shawn Nelson (Nelson threatens Sidhu over pension talk). Nelson won the June primary (to replace Chris Norby), emphasizing pension reform.
     Then, just before he was sworn in as a Supe, he signed up for a super-duper county pension.
     This crafty move was detected by Nelson's wily critics, who wasted no time calling Nelson a hypocrite. So Nelson tried to undo the damage by exploiting a loophole, voiding his sign-up.
     But there was no unringing the bell: rival Harry Sidhu and other critics have been banging the drum of Nelsonian “hypocrisy” ever since.
     So what did Nelson do?
     It’s the worst case scenario. He thugged up. He hired Phil Greer:

     In a letter to Sidhu’s campaign consultant Chris Jones, Nelson’s attorney, Philip Greer, said Nelson has never been and is not currently a participant in the Orange County Employees Retirement System.
     . . .
     “Furthermore, in that you ... are now personally on notice as to the falsity of the claim, if you choose to pursue the above described course of action, Mr. Nelson will seek to hold each of you personally responsible and liable for said actions,” Greer wrote.
     But Jones said Sidhu’s campaign has never claimed Nelson is a current member of OCERS, and they aren’t planning to say anything of the sort.
     “We said he signed up for a pension,” Jones said. “We’re going to continue to say that and that he’s a hypocrite.”

The Reg notes the curious ubiquity of Mr. Greer:

     Greer is a Newport Beach attorney who has become a mainstay at the county Hall of Administration, representing a number of Orange County politicians, including county Treasurer-Tax Collector Chriss Street and four of the five current county supervisors.
     Supervisor John Moorlach is the only one who has not hired Greer.
     Greer is also representing Public Administrator/Public Guardian John S. Williams whose office has been maligned with accusations of mismanagement….

     Mr. Greer has a history of ethics lapses.
     But of course he does!
     This really stinks.

Neanderthalic misadventures: Creationism

     I checked out the OC Reg this morning and came across an article about a presentation today at Chapman University:

     An advocate for the “spherical earth hypothesis” who will detail her fight against the “flat earth hypothesis” today in a talk at Chapman University says anti-Spherists are taking a new tack: teaching the “evidence against Spherism,” even though, she says, there isn’t any.
     Eugenie C. Scott, whose Oakland-based non-profit group, the National Center for Science Education, has been fighting “Flat Earth” science in public schools since 1987, says her wide-ranging talk will touch on the scientific, educational, religious and legal issues surrounding Spherism and Flat Earthism — and, perhaps most importantly, the politics as well.

      --Just kidding. The article isn’t about Spherism v. Flat Earthism. It’s about Evolution v. Creationism.
     Same thing.
     The Reg, being the Reg, has a poll:

Do you believe creationism or "intelligent design" should be taught alongside evolution in public school classrooms?

Yes, it is a valid scientific alternative
No, it has no scientific validity

     So far, two thirds of Reg readers voted “no” and one third voted “yes.”
     I’m impressed.
     The Reg article (Tough talk: evolution vs. creationism) includes an interview with Scott. At one point, she’s asked: “California seems to have few active controversies over evolution in public schools at the moment. Do you see the potential for such problems in Orange County?”
     She answers:

Let me put it this way. We tend to have the most problems in parts of the country where there’s a lot of religious conservatism, and certainly Orange County would qualify.

     Yeah. It’s the land of the Neanderthal.
     Today, the Reg also reported the opening of an “Evolution Education Research Center,” which exists

in part to combat “misconceptions” about evolutionary science and to explore how scientific and religious views intersect.
     The new center … will ... be a westward expansion of a center now based at Harvard and McGill universities.
     “The entire nation, almost, has problems with evolution education, with close to 50 percent of the public thinking the science is so bad they doubt that it even occurred,” said Brian Alters, a new science education professor at Chapman who will also head the center….
. . .
     Alters gave three main reasons for widespread misconceptions about evolution in the United States.
     “One is scientific illiteracy,” he said. “There is also religious illiteracy: people think they shouldn’t accept evolution because they somehow think their religion is against it, when maybe, perhaps, their religion isn’t against it.”
     A third factor, he said, is “an entire industry against evolution. It creates organizations that are large and powerful, and very effective.”

     A key financial supporter of that industry is OC’s own Howard Ahmanson, Jr.
     Ahmanson is one of Tom Fuentes’ pals.
     He’s also a major supporter of Education Alliance, which is a player in Orange County’s Neanderthal wars on school boards—e.g., the CAPO school board.
     In 2004, the Reg asked Ahmanson what he thought of societies that execute people for homosexual acts. His answer: "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things. But I don't think it's at all a necessity."
     How very big of him.

Tom Fuentes

Freshmen grow stale

California spent nearly half a billion on college freshmen who later dropped out, study finds (LA Times)
The state spent about $466 million — more than any other state — on students at public colleges who did not return for their sophomore year.

     At a time when California's public colleges are battling to maintain state funding, a report says that over a five-year period, the state spent nearly half a billion dollars to educate first-year college students who dropped out before their sophomore year.
     The report found that California ranked first in the nation in the amount of taxpayer funds — $467 million — spent on students at four-year colleges who failed to return for a second year. Texas, with $441 million, and New York, with $403 million, ranked second and third.
     The study, prepared by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, analyzed federal data on retention rates at hundreds of four-year colleges and universities and states' education funding between 2003 and 2008.
     Nationally, about 30% of first-year students do not return for a second year. At California public colleges, the dropout rate is about half that….

College Dropouts Cost Taxpayers Billions, Report Says (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     State and federal governments spent an estimated $9-billion between 2003 and 2008 on students who dropped out of college during their freshman year, according to a report scheduled for release on Monday.
     While that sum may be a small portion of the overall amount that governments spent on higher education during that time, it's still a high cost for failing to keep students in college, said Mark S. Schneider, vice president for education, human development, and the work force at the American Institutes for Research, which compiled the data for the report.
     And since the report considered only first-time, full-time freshmen at four-year colleges, the $9-billion total is also just a portion of the overall cost of dropouts, Mr. Schneider said on Thursday during a conference call with reporters….

Misplaced From the Start (Inside Higher Ed)

     Community college placement tests are a big deal. They determine whether someone can enroll in credit-bearing courses or is in need of serious remediation. But, according to a new report, many students simply don’t understand the high-stakes nature of these tests and are, more often than not, completely unprepared to take them.
     WestEd, an education research organization, released a report Friday about “students’ perceptions of assessment and course placement” in California’s community colleges. The report is based, in part, on interviews with 257 students at five California community colleges. Though the report’s authors also analyzed community college assessment and placement policies statewide to show their rampant inconsistency, they stress the importance of documenting student confusion about how this system works.
. . .
     While still in high school, the students interviewed said that they did not think they needed to “do anything extra” to prepare for community college. In other words, most thought “graduating from high school” was enough….

In Higher Education, a Focus on Technology (New York Times)

     The education gap facing the nation’s work force is evident in the numbers. Most new jobs will require more than a high school education, yet fewer than half of Americans under 30 have a postsecondary degree of any kind. Recent state budget cuts, education experts agree, promise to make closing that gap even more difficult.
     The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools.
     An initial $20 million round of money, from the Gates Foundation, will be for postsecondary online courses, particularly ones tailored for community colleges and low-income young people. Another round of grants, for high school programs, is scheduled for next year….