The Union had a great piece yesterday about Ghidotti Early College High School. This is a partnership between Sierra College and the Nevada Union High School District, and honestly, I’d put my vote to open this school in the top five while I’ve been a trustee.

Bonnie Mortensen’s first taste of higher education came three years ago when she stepped onto Sierra College’s Nevada County campus and sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” on the first day of school.

She was 14 years old and part of a new $400,000 experiment paid for by the world’s richest man.

By the time she graduates, Mortensen will have nearly two years’ worth of college credits on her transcript, and a place in history as part of the first graduating class at Ghidotti Early College Preparatory High School.

Mortensen is part of a 38-member graduating class of seniors who have succeeded without giant pep rallies, teeming crowds at football games, or late-night dances.

She can name practically every member of her senior class and, she said, has excelled by learning alongside peers her parents’ age.

“I came here because I wanted the college classes, the college experience,” she said. “I figured that since the classes were small, the teachers would really care about my progress.”

By the way, the story is just a great piece of journalism by David Mirhadi and The Union. This is the kind of thing that makes newspapers great to read in the 21st century.

» Read the Entire Article

Photo Credit: The Union

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Rome and Ethiopia, I checked into what it would cost to roam with my AT&T BlackBerry Bold. I can’t say I was that surprised when I learned that AT&T wanted $3.49 per minute to let me talk on the phone from Ethiopia.

Fortunately, there are other options, and I can highly recommend QikRoam to you. Qik is a startup company with a service for broadcasting live video from mobile phones, but they developed a partnership to sell international roaming SIM cards as well.

The QikRoam service is great. For $34, I bought the SIM card with $20 worth of calling credit preloaded on the account. With no monthly fees or contracts, I can roam in Ethiopia using my very own BlackBerry, and it will cost me 64 cents per minute for incoming calls, and 93 cents per minute for outbound calling.

Even better, I can receive unlimited text messages at no cost, and send text messages for 33 cents. And without renting a different phone or using a different service, I’ll also be able to roam in Italy with outbound calls for 80 cents, inbound calls for 33 cents, and the same rates for text messaging.

As good as these rates are, I still don’t want my regular cell phone number to reach me while I’m in these countries. I’ll put an “away” message on my voice mail, and give the QikRoam number to several key people, as well as the grandparents watching Spencer.

And that leads me to another great benefit: those folks get to call us for free. QikRoam assigns us a Belgium number as the “primary” telephone number for the SIM card, but for about $8 per month (and we’ll only do this for one month), they will assign us a local US telephone number that will ring to the same SIM card.

I’ve tested all of this spending about $5 of my calling credit while roaming on the US AT&T network, and it all looks quite simple and easy to do. The only problem I ran into was an error when trying to send a text message, but as it turns out, I simply needed to edit the phone number into an international format (i.e. 530-555-1212 became +15305551212) and it worked like a charm.

So if you have an international trip coming up, I highly recommend QikRoam. I’ll let you know how it works in Rome and Addis after we return.

PS: You can do data roaming in Italy as well, although we probably will not. Ethiopia doesn’t have mobile data connections, so I’ll only be twittering with text, and we’ll try to get some pictures posted when and if we encounter wi-fi connections.

Another piece, this time in the New York Times, on the centrality of community colleges to our nation’s economic recovery.

When Todd Sollar was laid off after 11 years at General Motors, he enrolled at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton to study robotics.

After working for eight years at a now-closed Delphi auto parts plant, Kelli Martin enrolled at Sinclair Community College, hoping to become a nurse in pediatric oncology.

Steven Johnson, the president of Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, with Alan Edwards, a student, in the library.

“Hopefully, with a degree I’ll be marketable for a job,” said Mr. Sollar, 32, who has overcome his nervousness about not fitting in because of his age. In fact, he is thriving, getting A’s and B’s, far better than in high school where he said officials had wrongly pegged him as having a learning disability.

As legions of displaced autoworkers and others face the prospect that their onetime jobs may be gone forever, many like Mr. Sollar will need training for a fresh start.

And perhaps the best place for them will be community colleges, long the workhorses of American higher education, workhorses that get little respect. In an unforgiving economy, these colleges provide lifelines not only for laid-off workers in need of a new career, but for recent high school graduates who find that many types of entry-level jobs now require additional skills.

President Obama has embraced the nation’s community colleges, arguing that they are vital bulwarks against the decline of the middle class — and of America’s competitiveness.

Speaking last month in Michigan, Mr. Obama placed the nation’s 1,200 community colleges at the center of his ambitious plan to increase the number of college graduates by five million over the next decade. The goal is to create a higher skilled, more prosperous work force.

» Read the Entire Article

Photo Credit: NYT

Congress has quietly killed the voucher program that allowed hundreds of poor and socioeconomically disadvantaged kids to experience the education that their upper-class counterparts do.

John Fund takes Congress to task in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

My vote for the worst scandal in America right now is the education monopoly that keeps poor, inner-city kids trapped in failing public schools. Special mention here goes to the politicians who oppose giving these children the choice to escape even as they send their own kids to private or elite public schools.

Let’s call them Sidwell Liberals, after the famous Washington, D.C., school where President and Mrs. Obama send their daughters. Despite this personal experience, Mr. Obama signed into law a provision passed by Congress that shuts down Washington D.C.’s voucher program, depriving 1,700 disadvantaged kids of the chance to escape failing public schools through the use of scholarships that let them attend private schools. Two of them attend Sidwell Friends School with the Obama girls.

Competition is good for public education. A good example is Sierra College’s career and technical programs, which compete with Heald and ITT Tech. The leadership of our CTE departments know it, and we consistently beat those competitors on quality, cost and student outcomes.

Well-run institutions of public education have nothing to fear from competition. It makes everyone better.

» Read the Entire Article

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often does. The folks at the Calculated Risk blog matched up the low points of the market crashes in the Great Depression and this Great Recession that we’re in (along with a few other comparison points).

As you see with the gray line, the stock market crash that started the Great Depression began a recovery, but then crashed again, and this time for a painful and sustained period of time.

The blue line, which is today, is tracking right along. Even if it turns downward, that certainly doesn’t mean we’re in for a great depression — but it certainly won’t be a comforting sign, that’s for sure.

Here’s hoping for a big divergence on that chart, and soon.

» Read the Original Post and Updated Chart

A fascinating chart from GOOD.is on the sources of legal immigration. Saw this in a tweet from @MichaelHyatt.

For example, who would have thought that 188 people immigrating from Canada in 2008 would be classified as refugees, or seeking asylum? Did the “Blame Canada” song really upset them or something?

The 26,155 legal immigrants from the Koreas may or may not have included my son. His adoption was finalized in 2008, but he came home in 2007. Who knows how CIS decides to count that.

Notice the remarkably low number of refugees from the Koreas. That would be higher if North Korea allowed their people the freedom to leave. Being starved by your own government isn’t exactly an appealing life.

» View the Chart at Full Size

Looks like I’m all set to post via BlackBerry now. Assuming we can find wi-fi, this should come in handy during a particular trip to Ethiopia!

The Union has a story up this morning on the budget cuts the college will be working to digest over the next few months.

“This is new ground for us, and fortunately, we’re prepared,” said Klein, noting that the community college district has $10 million in reserves.

The cuts are not likely to reduce class sections — at least not in the fall term, which begins Aug. 31.

Ortiz will be evaluating suggested cuts to her campus over the next few weeks.

“We’re trying to avoid a direct impact on students and the classes they take,” Ortiz said.

The cuts are part of a bigger picture to narrow the focus of the state’s more than 100 community colleges to two purposes: Provide general education requirements for transfer to a four-year college and job re-training, Klein said.

» Read the Entire Article

An outstanding piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal on health care reform from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. Honestly, there’s so much common sense here I may have to start shopping at this store more often.

In the piece, he lists eight recommendations. I just picked a few of them, and they make you ask, “why isn’t this the center of the debate in Washington DC right now?”

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

The other four reforms he writes about are just as solid and important. I’ve discussed and thought about each of these individually, but have never heard them laid out quite as succinctly as that.

Of course, it was sort of a hint that it was going to be a good piece when he started with the old quote from Margaret Thatcher: “The only problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

» Read the Entire Piece

Illustration Credit: WSJ

For those reading this blog who might still be tempted to think that the state might magically undo the spending cuts, please read Dan Walters’ column today on the mountain of debt the state has been piling up in the process of “balancing” the budget.

What, one might ask, is the appropriate metaphor for California’s convoluted budgetary situation?

Would be it be Enron, which cooked its books to fool investors and lenders? Perhaps a Third World country whose rulers run up a mountain of debt while squandering revenues? Or both?

Whatever it may be, years of irresponsibility by politicians and voters alike have left California with ongoing spending obligations that are nearly 50 percent higher than its ongoing revenues – roughly $110 billion a year in the former and $75 billion in the latter – and debts that would be daunting even were the economy to improve dramatically.

California will either repay this debt or go bankrupt. Those are the two choices.

And for those of you who think this will be solved by raising taxes, please rewind your memory banks all the way back to March of this year. The state did that, and revenue went down, not up.

» Read the Entire Column