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Hmm. Seems like this is nothing that George Zimmerman couldn't solve. What could go wrong?
(Or his pride. Or Mount Pine. It depends.)
And nothing enhances home values like making sure it's highly publicized that there is a high crime rate in your neighborhood. It's good that he's so honest about things.
Last year Stockton had the 10th highest violent crime rate in the country, they're bankrupt so they've been slashing the police budget with a concomitant rise in the murder rate, and the city's really poor and shows no signs of becoming non-poor any time soon.
EDIT: Cokes
other than that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln?
One of my clients is a Fixed Income PM and I remember him using the term a number of years ago: 'Stockton Munis' to describe any awful municipal bonds. I suspect Assured Guaranty (a likely insurer of the debt) is taking the biggest bath on Stockton's bonds, and of course the city is pretty much screwed for some time, not necessarily the bond holders.
What he did probably won't help things, but OTOH, he seems like a pretty high-vis "local guy"- played little league in Stockton, went to a community college nearby, now plays for the A's. If there really is an issue with the police not doing their jobs, this kind of thing actually might galvanize change.
I've recently moved to the San Jose area, and I've heard several complaints along the lines of "these layoffs in the [sunnyvale] police force might cause the ones who weren't laid off to un-aggressively pursue law enforcement opportunities, like what's happening in Stockton".
Bad thing is, it's only going to get worse, since I doubt if CA can fix it's problems without QE-level federal intervention.
Modesto, Fresno, Salinas ... there are a lot of broken towns here.
Well, from the sounds of things, they were right. With Stockton's crime rate, they were probably understaffed even before any cutbacks occurred. (And as I've made clear in the "OT: Politics" threads, I'm not a fan of public-sector unions or their retirement/pension plans.)
Anyway, don't know if the stockton cops were even doing what my coworkers attribute, but my personal take is, I'd enjoy seeing a bit player like Dallas Braden at least get make someone high-up answer some tough questions.
So the city is bankrupt and the citizens are not safe. Property values are plummeting and so the city's revenues will decline further, and police funding will fall even more. Their being "right" isn't going to make things better.
As far as the underlying problem, Stockton should claim a local Al Qaeda cell and let the Feds roll in. Then again, the Feds have been gifting surplus military equipment like crazy to local law enforcement for the past few years - sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference between the local SWAT team and a combat patrol in A'Stan.
The problem here, as well as in other cities (e.g. Newark, NJ) is that instead of taking benefits cuts across the board, the Police unions refused, and forced the cities into layoffs.
So, you end up with fewer, really well-compensated cops, instead of more well-compensated cops.
Also, my friend got mugged at a gas station there while we were caravanning from LA up to Portland. So, yeah. It sucks there.
Hey, but the ballpark is really swell.
1: LA
2: San Bernadino
3: Vallejo
4: Visalia
5: Modesto
6: Barstow
7: Bakersfield
8: Fresno
9: Stockton
I would put San Bernardino (and some other inland empire cities) lower on the list. Bakersfield is nicer than San Berdoo.
This wasn't in the brochure when I enrolled at UOP!
I was just joking. I'm a NorCal kid and I knew what Stockton was like when I went up there. UOP is actually in the nicest part of Stockton, though I realize that's a relative distinction.
The best things about Stockton are Pavement and Fat City, of course. (Fat City, the book, not the movie, though the movie is fine. The book, however, is one of the best American novels of the 20th century. My favorite writer on one of my favorite books.
From a quick Google map search, Stockton appears to be about 40-50 mi. inland. How do you get away with calling yourself the Univ. of the Pacific, if you're 40+ miles from the ocean? It's like having Boston College located in Springfield.
Hell just the other day his teammate got hit in the head with a projectile and had to have brain surgery!
Stockton is a port town, correct? Maybe the river connecting to the bay connecting to the Pacific grandfathers you in.
It's closer to the beaches than Miami University is.
That's a good point. I jumbled my entire argument up into one sentence. I also don't know how to improve the system so my criticism probably doesn't help.
Correct. Also, in the grand scheme of a continent 3000 miles wide, it's close enough, I think.
I think Lake Michigan State is in Omaha.
Sounds pretty reasonable.
This could be a fun game.
Dante's Wisconsin
1. Beloit
2. Racine (sans the Danish bakeries)
3. Menomonie County
4. Cudahy (not crime drive, just rep.,perception is everything)
5. 1/3 of Milwaukee
Or the 47% moochers in this country who shamelessly suck on the government teat?
The 1st Circle of Hell is Limbo, for the unbaptized and virtuous pagans, good people who got unlucky in when/where they were born. It's not that bad a place, it's just that chatting with Virgil and Plato gets dull when you have to do it for all eternity.
No, not really, although I recognize that's a problem as well.
The real problem here is that the dodgers spent all that money and nothing is happening!
52: Never been to Milwaukee but I've always imagined it as an idyllic place for some reason.
57: aka Needless.
I do love it as my hometown (live out of state now) but like all major metros has some very serious issues in portions of the city. I guess the 'Dante's list for every state ought to have a placeholder for the large metro areas.
Milwaukee is a really great city. It's neck-and-neck with Cincinnati as the most underrated big city in the country. (Milwaukee's better, but I think Cincinnati's rated lower by the masses.)
1-6: New Haven
7-9: Bridgeport
1) Newport News
2) Hampton
3) Norfolk
4) Front Royal
5) Dumfries
Although there is that place in West Virginia or Pennsylvania that has the 20+ year old underground inferno.
Or having the University of South Florida in Tampa.
No, your criticism was valid. If kids aren't learning, either because of their bad parents and/or bad teachers, then the teachers are little more than glorified babysitters (or prison guards, in some cases). And not many babysitters or prison guards make $80,000 to $120,000 per year.
Welcome to BTF, Pat Sajak.
So, what do you do, boo them?
Dante's MA:
1: Lawrence
2:Springfield
3:Chelsea
4:Parts of Boston
5:Parts of Cambridge
6:New Bedford
7:Fall River
8:Brockton
9:Fitchburg
10:Leominster
In no particular order, in case anyone is offended.
Oh, honorable mention: Worcester
I think the only natural thing to do is go to a public union meeting with a baseball bat.
Not according to this: http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060228/news_1n28guards.html
I can't speak for babysitters.
1: LA
2: San Bernadino
3: Vallejo
4: Visalia
5: Modesto
6: Barstow
7: Bakersfield
8: Fresno
9: Stockton
Where's Charming?
And the International League isn't international. Those jokesters.
No, his criticism was misplaced. Middle school teachers are supposed to teach middle school subjects to middle school students, and middle school students are supposed to know how to read already, so that they can learn middle school subjects. Deciding to cut middle school teachers' pay because we know that the students aren't prepared to learn what the teachers are being paid to teach doesn't solve anything.
I would be like taking all the physical barriers out of prisons and taking all weapons away from prison guards, and then telling the guards that they're no longer worth what we contracted to pay them, since there's no way in hell that they're going to keep the inmates from escaping.
I thought it smelled bad... on the outside.
Granted, but if the kids can't read and do basic math, aren't the Middle School teachers obliged to teach at least that to them?
I'd rather be a 6th-grade teacher making $100,000 than a prison guard making $100,000.
***
Either the kids are being taught or they're not. If middle school teachers can't teach the kids arriving in middle schools, either the curriculum needs to be changed or the teachers should be reclassified as babysitters.
There's no evidence that kids get smarter if teachers are paid more. If these schools can get bad results while paying teachers $80,000 to $120,000 per year, then they can get bad results while paying teachers $40,000 per year.
No, it's not like that at all. Telling a 6th-grade English teacher that she now has to teach English at what used to be a 4th-grade level isn't remotely the same thing as asking prison guards to guard violent felons without walls or weapons.
Again, I'm not at all anti-teacher. I just believe compensation should be tied much more to productivity and results. It's undoubtedly not the teachers' fault that a lot of kids can't learn, but if that's the case, both the job description and compensation levels should be changed.
Of course Marquette University isn't in Marquette, MI, but Milwaukee.
This. Real (inflation adjusted) education spending per student has more than doubled in the last 30 years, with basically no improvement in performance.
Centralia, Pennsylvania
I don't think it counts, though, because only ten people live there.
...and don't get me started about Transylvania University.
I could be different in LA, but middle school was the point of my California public education career at which the students were aggressively segregated into honors/CP/general/remedial classes. So from that POV, there should be no reason to worry about slowing down the advanced kids by catering to the laggards. It's also the point at which a small but not insignificant subset of my fellow students started counting the days until they were old enough to drop out, and became completely intractable. And that was in an upper middle class suburban district.
OTOH, "you were supposed to have learned that already, so we're not going to/hardly going to cover it" was a phrase often repeated by educators (some of them perhaps bad at their job, some of them perhaps desperate to teach the stuff on the standardized test).
If there's no one to teach middle school subjects, why have the teachers? Your argument would support getting rid of these teachers altogether. If the kids can't learn the subjects, they should just get babysat by cheaper labor.
EDIT: "If there's no one to whom to teach middle school subjects" I guess. Difficult sentence to write.
I know; I was just playing along. (In addition to the Canadian teams, the I.L. also had a team in Havana.)
1. Oregon City
2. Salem
3. Albany
4. Hillsboro
5. Gresham
6. Springfield
7. Hermiston
8. Medford
9. Madras
Let's not forget many teachers only work 9 months out of the year.
I was recently doing transcription for beer money, and this came up. A superintendent being interviewed for some federally funded pilot program that gives cash bonuses to teachers based on student performance said (I'm paraphrasing), "Two kinds of people become teachers: the ones who genuinely want to educate children, and the ones who want summers off."
Or UC Santa Barbara in Goleta.
This'll never happen.
Oh, no. He went there.
Things I've learned now that I have a kid in public school (2nd grade in the highly rated Manhattan Beach School District).
1) Not so much teachers as supervisors or managers. Teachers assign huge amounts of homework and the process of doing the homework is where the teaching and learning takes place. At home. With no teachers in sight. Teachers check to make sure that the homework is complete, give a test, and let the chips fall where they may.
2) Adherence to inane, arbitrary rules trumps all. It is certainly way above learning on the list of priorities. And if, God forbid - I hesitate to even type this, a kid sneaks a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup on campus, all school business will come to a stop. A nut product on campus! Call the CDC! Stand up a PTA meeting STAT!
3) If you say that there are three months off in the summer, any teacher will immediately correct you that it's "only ten weeks". Without fail, they will correct you every time. Little Mason might get passed to the next grade with a reading disability but they are extremely vigilant on the ten weeks thing. And of course for the other 42 weeks, you regularly see teachers walking into class from their car at 8:04 for a 8:05 class and see them shopping with their kids at Target at 2:15 because school gets out at 2:05. So a work day is really more of a work 3/4ths day.
The takeaway is that teachers at high performing schools aren't any better, they are just as lazy and unmotivated as the rest of them. They get to look good simply because the parents in their district are overachievers and hire tutors and work the long hours at home with their kids to fill in the gaps. That's the bonus you are getting if you move into a good school district, not the teachers but you are surrounded by better parents and therefore better kids.
Longmeadow is nice; at least the portion on Route 5. East Longmeadow has that rotary from hell.
Speaking of hell, it is located right below Trona, California.
As for other comments regarding teachers above, I'll just leave 'em be.
The Red Mountain-Johannesburg-Inyokern stretch of the 395 in CA is pretty bad too.
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