Recent California newspaper editorials

Public safety should not be an afterthought for state regulators. The California Public Utilities Commission needs to change lax institutional attitudes and do a better job of protecting Californians. Ensuring that utility operations do not endanger the public is a fundamental duty of state oversight.

The agency's nonchalant approach to risks has been under scrutiny since the 2010 explosion of a gas pipeline in San Bruno that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. The National Transportation Safety Board's 2011 investigation of that incident faulted the commission for failing "to uncover the pervasive and longstanding" deficiencies in safety procedures at pipeline owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co.Elpas Readers detect and forward 'Location' and 'State' data from Elpas Active RFID Tags to host besticcard platforms.

The commission hired a consultant last year to survey agency officials and staff about safety issues last year and the results suggest too little has changed since the pipeline disaster. Those surveyed said safety was not a top priority at the agency, with weak enforcement efforts and mild consequences for safety violations. The report said that commissioners had minimal interest in safety issues,Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors. and cited a too-cozy relationship between regulators and the companies they oversee.You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions.

Such casual attitudes are unacceptable at an agency charged with ensuring "safe, reliable utility service at reasonable rates." The abysmal failure to monitor pipeline safety already undermined Californians' confidence in the commission's commitment to protecting the public. The internal report only provides additional reasons for skepticism,We offer over 600 chipcard at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. as Assembly members noted during a hearing on Wednesday.

Californians also have good reason to be frustrated with the slow pace of improvement. PUC Executive Director Paul Clanon said during the Assembly hearing that changing the agency's attitudes was a five-year process that would take at least another two-and-a-half years to complete.

But why should California have to wait years for state regulators to focus on a fundamental public duty? Regulatory oversight that ignores risks to the public is pointless. Gov. Jerry Brown should insist that the commission composed of five gubernatorial appointees improve the agency's record on safety, or face replacement.

The commission said that the report was an informal survey, not a thorough analysis of the agency's record. But if the agency's own staff and managers think the PUC's attitudes toward safety are too lax, why should the public believe otherwise?

And safety is hardly the only question swirling around the agency. A December audit by state finance officials faulted the commission's sloppy accounting practices. The state's legislative analyst said in February that the commission's poor fiscal oversight suggested that utilities could be overcharging customers and regulators would not know.

While education reformers in Sacramento continue to obsess about how easy it should be to fire teachers and how important tests should be in evaluating their performance, almost no one is talking about the central issue of what students are supposed to be learning in the near future.

A sea change is coming to schools in California, one of the 45 states that have adopted what are known as the Common Core State Standards. The idea of the new standards is to bring some consistency to education from state to state, and to better prepare students for the work they'll be expected to do in college and their jobs. Though the Obama administration couldn't legally force new standards on states, it threatened to deny grant money under the federal Race to the Top program if they didn't create and adopt common standards.

The standards are designed to push students to deeper levels of understanding and analysis. They call on teachers to cover fewer topics but to delve into each more thoroughly, and they discourage rote learning in favor of fuller understanding of the material. In math, for example,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. it might be less important for students to give the correct answer to a problem than to be able to describe the best process for reaching the solution. In California, the curriculum standards and the new tests that go with them are supposed to be implemented in the 2014-15 school year.

That's soon, and at the rate California is going, it won't be ready. The core curriculum standards lay out extensive guidelines about the knowledge and skills that students should master in each grade of public school, in both reading and math. But there are many complicated steps involved in turning those guidelines into a day-to-day educational plan for California schools, and the state isn't even close to halfway through them. It hasn't figured out how to go about training teachers, and won't begin to adopt new textbooks a slow and politically rancorous process for at least two years.

What's more, common core is expensive, requiring extensive new training for teachers, new textbooks and computers on which the new tests must be taken. It's unclear where the state will find the money.

At the rate the state is going, teachers will end up being trained before the English curriculum is even in place, and instruction would start before the new textbooks are in anyone's hands. Yet if the school reform movement has its way, teachers will be evaluated in part based on how well their students do on the very different standardized tests that go with the new curriculum. Reflecting the concern that teachers throughout the state have been expressing, one California teacher recently tweeted that within a couple of years, "we start testing on standards we're not teaching with curriculum we don't have on computers that don't exist."