Author: California Health Report

As Congress begins what is likely to be a lengthy and contentious debate over immigration reform, California has a huge stake in the outcome. We have the nation’s biggest population of immigrants, both legal and undocumented. We are the country’s biggest farm state, measured by the value of our production, and those farms are largely dependent on immigrant workers.
And we are, arguably, the innovation capital of the world, with much of that innovation driven by immigrant engineers, software writers and entrepreneurs. If Congress and President Obama can somehow agree on legislation that normalizes the status of immigrants already here, secures the borders, and fixes problems in the legal immigration system, California will almost certainly be the biggest beneficiary. This is something that could help rich and poor alike, and most people in between. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

As California heads into a future dominated by technology, a skilled workforce is going to be more important than ever. But despite recent gains, the state is still not producing enough educated workers to fill all the jobs that are open — a cruel paradox in a time of persistently high unemployment. Only 78.5 percent of the students who started high school with the class of 2012 left with a diploma four years later, according to the latest figures released by the state Department of Education, up from 77.1 in the class of 2011. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

Amid all the recent worry about people lacking health insurance, one vulnerable group of Californians appears to be suffering from too much, not too little coverage. Low-income older adults qualify for both Medicare and Medi-Cal. That might sound like a good thing. But the lack of coordination between the federal program for seniors and the state-federal program for the poor may be hurting their health. It is also costing the taxpayers a ton of money. Now the state is trying to fix the problem by combining all of the services available to these people under one administrative roof. That will include not only their health care but social services too, such as in-home workers who bathe and feed patients who can’t take care of themselves but don’t need to be in a nursing home. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

One day soon, a student with a laptop in her bedroom in Mission Viejo will be able to take a full-credit, certified class online from a community college across the county. Or from Cal State Fullerton. Or UCLA. The student will watch the professor’s lectures on her computer, ask questions via email or text message, and take exams, probably from home. At least that’s the vision of Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who wants to use technology to bust the bottlenecks that are blocking student access in California’s cash-strapped and over-subscribed systems of higher education. Steinberg is vowing to get California’s public universities ahead of – or at least caught up with – a revolution underway in higher education while ensuring that the state continues to offer consistent, high quality classes, whether students take them on campus or over the Internet. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

For decades, Los Angeles County has been a tumultuous demographic soup, with immigrants pouring in, longtime residents moving out, and the status quo turning upside down. The only thing that stayed the same was the pace of change. It was always fast.

But suddenly, the music stopped.

Immigration to Los Angeles has slowed to a crawl, relatively speaking. More of the county’s residents have lived there for decades instead of just a few years. A large cohort of second-generation Americans is rising to prominence. And for the first time since the Gold Rush, a majority of Los Angeles County will soon be homegrown, born in California rather than having arrived from another state or country. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

Even as Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing to decentralize control of California’s public schools, Roger Dickinson and his allies are, on one issue, pushing back. The Democratic assemblyman from Sacramento County wants the state to intervene to reduce the number of students suspended for defying the authority of adults on campus. The problem, according to Dickinson and many others — including a growing number of law enforcement officials — is that many schools are too quick to remove students for acting out. When that happens, it can accelerate a cycle of bad behavior that leads from the classroom to the streets, and eventually to the criminal justice system. It’s known as the school-to-prison pipeline. See Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.

The daily news is filled with disturbing social trends portending awful consequences around the corner, next year or for generations to come. The economy is sluggish, our safety net is unraveling, Social Security and Medicare are running out of money, and we can’t fix any of it because the government is broke and we’re buried in debt that will be passed down to our grandchildren.

It can all be very depressing.

But there is at least one social indicator that for two decades has been moving in the right direction, and it’s one that bodes well for our future: The number of births to teen-age mothers has been in a 20-year free-fall that shows no signs of abating.