Hey kids, PragLib's Summer California Tour will head down Highway 101 this weekend with stops in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Oxnard en route to San Diego for a nice little family vacation on Coronado Island. Expect posts very infrequent or not at all until late next week.

Cheers.

Oakland wants to have its cake and eat it too, with regard to the latest development in the Grizzly Peak Road controversy. After firmly staking its claim on the road last year when it blocked the University's attempts to curtail parking on Grizzly Peak, Oakland needs to take care of its OWN guardrails. To expect the University's assistance because Grizzly Peak Road overlooks University land is assinine and indicative of Oakland's poor city management and understanding of basic and logical administrative procedures.

What is really ironic, is that Oakland is bringing up the risks of wildfire from crashing cars careening over the edge (just to note, there've only been some 20-odd crashes in the last 70 years on that road, so we're not exactly dealing with a "Blood Alley" here) when the very reason the University wanted to curtail parking was, among other things, prevent accidental fires started by hot exhaust pipes.

If anyone has seen this road and how cars park on it, it is intrusive and extremely hazardous. But after denying the University in its attempts to make the road safer, Oakland should not be surprised to find an unwilling partner in its efforts to install guardrails along Grizzly Peak Blvd. In addition, statisitcs suggest that guardrails aren't even necessary. Typically, single-car accidents are the result of reckless/careless driving, driving under the influence, or falling asleep at the wheel. Once those accidents are removed from the statistics and we look only at accidents caused "by the road" (meaning unsafe conditions, etc.) I don't think Grizzly Peak will come across as being any more unsafe than other stretches of windy two-lane road.

Also, I can't believe this coffee legislation that is trying to get passed in the Berkeley City Council. At first I thought that it was just something silly (especially since I don't drink coffee). But then when I read that the bill includes a provision to fine and/or IMPRISON offending businesses, I found that just plain scary. Should the bill pass as written it would be thrown out on constitutional grounds the first time any business sought to challenge it.

A more productive and less divisive method would be to offer some form of "gold star" recognition that coffee shops could advertise if the VOLUNTARILY complied with these regulations. That way, the prissy little Berkeley residents who boycott Safeway but don't mind being raped in the ass for prices by Whole Foods could have a clear conscience when they enjoy their coffee, but it won't force shops to comply and it won't cause civic embarrassment when their little Big Brother legislation is torched upon constitutional review.

And in other news, Salar Jahedi is an idiot. I'm glad that he doesn't vote. His logic is flawed. His message is dangerous. Why is he a columnist?

So it seems that the latest hot-button issue in education (something I didn't even know WAS an issue), is the idea of weighted grade point averages. It seems that there is a proposal in the state legislature to make the UCs and CSUs not weight GPAs for AP/IB/honors courses, because it puts those students who are at schools where weighted classes aren't available at a perceived "disadvantage." I think this is all a pile of horseshit, and here's why.

I find it highly suspect at first simply because this is coming from legislators. Legislators are influenced by lobbyists, constituencies, and hot-button issues, not cold objective facts or even rational thought. If these sentiments were coming from the universities themselves and the administrators in charge, it'd be a different story, but the University of California has remained notably silent so far on this issue.

Second, I had always been under the impression that the university grants admission based on the degree to which you excel given the options that were presented to you. This is even more the case now then when I applied because of the new comprehensive review plan, a very good plan with only one big flaw. This is why someone with a 3.5 GPA and 1300 SAT from Los Altos Hills doesn't get into Berkeley, while someone with similar statistics from Kennedy High in Richmond or Mission High in SF does. This makes a lot of sense because you are comparing success contextually. The student who earns A's taking the most difficult classes at school X that doesn't offer weighted grades is viewed as achieving just as much as the student who earns A's at school Y that DOES offer weighted grades. Sometimes even more so because of particular hardships that the student may have had to overcome.

However, why should it be that students should be PUNISHED because they're going to a well-funded high school? It's not the fault of those students that their schools offer advanced classes while other schools do not. These advanced classes, as I'm sure everyone reading this is aware, are signifcantly more interesting and educating than their non-AP/IB counterparts. The argument that I hear to that point is that the very nature of the class should be encouragement enough. But under these guidelines, the person who graduates from high school with a 3.9 UC GPA in advanced classes is at a distinct disadvantage to the student who graduates with a 4.0 UC GPA from the same school in standard-level courses in terms of distinctions like valedictorian or certain achievement-specific scholarships.

And here's where my logic's going. A 4.0 is not a 4.0. Just as we shouldn't PUNISH people who earn a 4.0 without taking advanced courses, we shouldn't PUNISH those students who DO take advanced classes and succeed. The GPA of someone taking standard college-prep courses and who earns all A's should not be the same as the GPA of someone who earned all A's in AP/IB/Honors courses. Something needs to be done to show delineate numerically (as archaic and cold as that sounds) and distinguish those students who take advanced courses and succeed from those who take standard courses and succeed, at the same school.

This will only close the achievement gap inasmuch as the numbers are concerned by punishing students who by happenstance go to well-funded schools without making any real effort to INCREASE the performance and funding of underperforming and underfunded schools.

Effort should instead be spent on increasing funding toward underperforming schools, a gradual development of AP/IB programs at all schools, and a continual effort to expand comprehensive review to all state universities. In this way, the context from school to school is evaluated, but we don't punish those students within the same school who do and do not take advanced courses.

Otherwise, it's like a garden where not all the flowers are the same height. Do you cut down the ones that are tall and healthy so they match they height of the sickly ones, or do you provide nourishment and care to try to get the other flowers to grow taller?