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Six years after rocking the Palo Alto education scene with a threat to petition for a charter school here, Grace Mah finds herself in the vanguard of a major charter-school drive as president of the Santa Clara County Board of Education.
The county board, which Mah joined in 2007, has OK'd two dozen charter schools in the past two years, aimed almost entirely at boosting options for low-income children in San Jose not for Mandarin Immersion, which Mah had sought in Palo Alto in 2007.
Mah's journey from engineering manager at Agilent Technologies to elected official overseeing a $275 million countywide agency with more than 1,700 employees would seem an unlikely one.
Today, she bridges the gap between oversight of the county's nearly 300 traditional public schools, which are heavily regulated under the California Education Code, and a reform movement of 52 public charter schools that is experimenting with new learning models.
The charter schools, whose numbers are growing, operate with public funds but less bureaucracy in exchange for meeting agreed-upon educational targets.
Mah was drawn into education activism a decade ago when, in search of a preschool for her first son, she responded to a Palo Alto Weekly ad for a Mandarin-English program.
She enrolled him in that home-based preschool. When he made good progress in the language she began wondering why the Palo Alto school district couldn't replicate its wildly popular Spanish Immersion program with a parallel K-5 offering in Mandarin.
Amassing a 250-member Yahoo group through various contacts, including the Palo Alto-Menlo Park Parents Club, Mah generated a petition signed by 1,000 community members in support of Mandarin Immersion for Palo Alto.
What followed in 2006 and 2007 was a bruising political battle that resulted in the 2008 launch of Mandarin Immersion at Ohlone Elementary School and some hard feelings that, for a few, linger even today.
After initially losing her bid for Mandarin Immersion on a 3-2 school board vote in January 2007, Mah decided to pursue a charter-school petition.
The prospect of a costly and polarizing charter battle persuaded school board member Dana Tom and then-member Mandy Lowell to reverse their votes.
Five months after rejecting it, the school board voted 4-1 in May 2007 in favor of launching Mandarin Immersion in the fall of 2008. Joining Lowell and Tom in the majority were Barb Mitchell and Camille Townsend. Dissenting was then-board member Gail Price, who is now on the City Council.
Mah was in the midst of the 2007 Palo Alto charter effort when she was appointed to the county board, filling a vacancy created by Hoover Institution research fellow Bill Evers, who resigned to become an assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration.
The following year she was elected to a full four-year term with 71 percent of the vote. She was re-elected in 2012 with 66.76 percent.
Mah's opponent last November, Los Altos computer engineer Dave Cortright, focused almost exclusively on her pro-charter voting record, which aligns with that of the county board majority.
Despite a lack of experience in public service or education, Cortright secured the endorsement of the South Bay Labor Council representing 90 unions and more than 100,000 union members in Santa Clara and San Benito counties.
He got 33 percent of the vote.
Mah indeed has been a solid part of the county board's pro-charter majority.
That includes a sweeping grant of 20 charters in December 2011 to the ambitious Rocketship Education, a charter-management company co-founded by Palo Alto resident John Danner.
Among the supporters of the Rocketship charters were San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, as well as many parents.
"Charter schools give families of underserved kids another choice besides the traditional school, which typically has been failing those kids," Mah said in an interview with the Weekly.
"It's considered an equal-opportunity, civil rights mandate to be able to support kids to have equal access to a really great education.
"I believe in choice in general, in parents having that ability if they want to have that different kind of education."
Although there are none in Palo Alto, there are 52 charter schools among the 352 schools across Santa Clara County, 33 of them in San Jose.
Thirty-six of the 52 are run by individual school districts.
The remaining sixteen with many more in the pipeline are chartered by the county Office of Education.
Charter schools are publicly funded entities that operate on five-year "charters" from sponsoring agencies, usually a school district.
They are exempt from many strictures of the California Education Code but are required to meet educational benchmarks as measured by standardized tests taken by all California students. They must petition for renewal every five years.
Prominent supporters of charter schools as a means to closing the achievement gap include U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, philanthropist Bill Gates and, locally, Netflix CEO and education activist Reed Hastings.
Hastings sits on Rocketship's national strategy board.
Santa Clara County's charter grants to Rocketship, which already operates six charter schools in San Jose, are part of "San Jose 2020," an initiative to eliminate the achievement gaps among San Jose's 150,000 public school students by 2020.
Currently, nearly half are not proficient in grade-level skills, and 2,300 middle and high school students drop out each year.
The Rocketship charters, projected to be educating 14,000 San Jose students by 2020, are "like opening a whole new school district," Mah said.
"So far Rocketship has been doing well, scoring really high on (standardized) tests as one of their metrics and with a lot of happy campers."
But Mah acknowledged a Rocketship pledge to slow its growth if existing schools are not meeting certain test-score metrics.
"The plan is to open five schools per year for four years, but if they don't feel they've got the bandwidth or quality level they won't open," she said.
Rocketship also has secured charters to open eight campuses in Milwaukee, Wis., and up to eight campuses in Washington, D.C., in the next few years. It is pursuing initiatives to open campuses in Oakland, New Orleans and Chicago as well.
Mah rejects criticism that the county board has never seen a charter it didn't like or is circumventing the control of local school districts. Some of the seven school districts located within the City of San Jose are unhappy about the county grants.
Pending lawsuits by the San Jose Unified School District and a community member challenge the county board's legal authority to exempt charter schools from local zoning ordinances, as was done in a recent case of a proposed Rocketship campus in San Jose.
"To be a countywide charter you have to not only have a sound program, sound financials and a sound organization, but you have to be able to prove that what you're doing and teaching is something that a local district cannot do," she said.
She opposed the 2011 renewal petition of Bullis Charter School in Los Altos on grounds that the school proposed boundaries that excluded low-income neighborhoods. She was in the minority on that 5-2 vote.
Mah says she also will vote against charters when, in her view, they lacked a sound educational plan.
"We've closed down two charter schools for financial reasons, and there was another one that came to us where we felt the organizers didn't have enough preparation and resources.
"Studies have shown that charter schools as a whole can be just as good or bad as traditional public schools, so that's why it's important for us to make sure all our schools maintain their quality," she said.
Though charter-school controversies have made recent headlines, the county Office of Education has a far broader purview to oversee and support the county's 31 separate school districts, which collectively educate nearly 270,000 children.
Of its $275 million budget from state, federal and local sources, most goes toward special education, with about half the office's 1,730 employees allocated to that area.
The county office operates classes on public-school campuses to serve children with special needs and also coordinates preschool and post-high school programs for special-needs students.
It runs 32 federally funded Head Start programs and several additional state-funded preschool programs and administers federal grants targeted to education for migrant children.
It is the pass-through agency for a variety of restricted state and federal funds and also provides personnel services for many school districts, including fingerprinting and printing paychecks.
The board acts as an appeals agency for expulsions, interdistrict transfer requests and charter-school petitions.
Of the office's 1,730 staff members, about 425 work in the Office of Education headquarters in San Jose which features a three-story atrium with a wall of glass and an indoor pond.
The board has dipped a toe into the controversy over the high number of school districts in Santa Clara County -- 31.
The Santa Clara County Grand Jury has found that millions could be saved through consolidation.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation Executive Director Emmett Carson has argued strongly that having 56 separate school districts in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties constitutes a "fundamentally flawed system," obscuring accountability for large numbers of low-performing students.
At its Feb. 20 meeting county board members unanimously backed a $29,000 contract for a limited study "to evaluate various reorganizations of school districts within Santa Clara County."
"There certainly are a number of very small districts that would stand to improve efficiencies and lower costs by unifying with neighboring districts," Mah said.
"But the problems with the whole idea is typically it has to be voted on by local communities, and a lot of local communities don't want to change their school districts. People are emotionally tied to their schools as community centers.
"Hopefully our study will highlight some possible improvements."
With the county board entrenched in the state and local bureaucracy of public education, Mah continues to forge ties to the reform movement.
She and fellow board member requested funds to attend the invitation-only summit held annually by the New Schools Venture Fund, a venture-philanthropy firm that has invested heavily in charter schools, the Khan Academy video courses and other entrepreneurial efforts to transform public education.
"These are the billionaires that want to change public education in America, and they're putting a lot of money into venture funds that support startups on software for schools ... or charter organizations they feel are doing an exceptional job," said board member Joseph Di Salvo, a former teacher, teachers' union president and principal.
"There are frighteningly few traditional public-school people at these conferences," said Di Salvo, who has attended in the past.
"I think we should all know what they're saying about traditional public schools, and how they're able to do it differently."
Mah and Di Salvo will attend the New Schools Summit at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront Hotel next month.
Di Salvo, who represents parts of San Jose on the board, spent 33 years in public education, four of them as principal of Palo Alto's JLS Middle School.
He's come to see charter schools as necessary to fixing a "very broken" public education system.
"I know the system is broken and we need outside forces, provocateurs, if you will, to influence and move things," he said.
Di Salvo said Mah is "well-equipped emotionally, intellectually and politically to guide our work in a balanced and thoughtful way."
With her older son now taking Mandarin at Gunn High School and the younger a fourth-grader in Ohlone's Mandarin Immersion Program, Mah continues her interest in bilingual education, serving as a community liaison for the Ohlone program.
She's organizing a trip to China this summer for Ohlone fourth- and fifth-graders, not through the school district but through the independent youth organization Me to We.
"I think the 'fight' is behind me -- Mandarin Immersion at Ohlone is successful, this being its fifth year with a full strand of 125 students K-5," she said.
"Having another language immersion program as a choice for parents has been a great opportunity."
Both of her sons' Mandarin level has surpassed her own, which she spoke as a toddler growing up in southern California but abruptly stopped at the age of 4.
Though her parents met in the United States, they spoke Mandarin with her, their oldest, until a preschool teacher told them their daughter wasn't talking.
"They said, 'Grace might be mentally retarded -- she can't speak.' After that my parents said 'No more Chinese; let's speak English.'
"People weren't very enlightened about bilingualism back then."


text:
There are lines on the landscape that you can't see easily, lines that mark the memories of stream pathways and old property boundaries, leaving a persistent impression of the past on the surface of today.
We've all seen lines of trees before. Depending on the place, straight tree lines are usually old property boundaries, with the trees marking off the edges of ephemeral property ownership that changes at decade speed, while the trees change at century speed, out of sync with the short / fast / furious lives of those that would use them to mark a bounding box around what they think they temporarily own. In California there's been a long-standing tradition of using eucalyptus trees to mark off edges, even though the trees remain long after the human claimants have been returned to the soil as nutrients.
What's even more remarkable is that these green lines can be seen through Google Maps. The aerial images ("Satellite view," even though many of the images at the scale we're interested in are actually taken from planes) often reveal the past of a place through the green lines.
Click on image to see at full size.
But I'm really more interested in the ways memories of streams persist in the landscape. Here's an aerial image of some land in Palo Alto taken in 1948. The sinuous line of trees running through the photo is Matadero Creek. The straight line running almost vertically is a railroad track, and you can see that the line of trees following the creek stops at a major highway—in this case it's El Camino Real, an old road that has been in that location for hundreds of years.
From 1948... I pieced these together from Google Earth images in History view mode.
What captivates me about this is that the tree lines persist for a very long time, even through 50 years of intense development. As you can see, the line of trees along the creekbed have survived, in a sense, for half a century. The creek is in a very different setting now; once it enters the industrial park, the stream is completely driven by runoff from acres of asphalt, and no longer fed by trickles from grassy fields.
This is a recent image. I've highlighted in red the creek once it enters the Stanford industrial park and flows into suburbia. It's really broken only in two places—first when it crosses Foothill Blvd (just before entering the industrial park), and then just a bit later when it was channelized to go beneath the Tibco building (the straight segment in the middle of the industrial park).
Seeing these images makes me think of how much of a lasting impact we have on the world. Developers channelize creekbeds, but the lines still persist. It's hard to undo that much geography, it's just incumbent unless you move the entire landform.
These lines of trees (oaks, mostly) explain something you see from time to time walking through suburbia. Every so often, there's a tree that is way out-of-size, something that just seems incongruous with its surround. If it's an oak, chances are good that it's part of a much larger structure—a persisting line of trees that remembers a world before the developers came.
I find this both heartening and sad at the same time. I feel lucky to have come along at a point in time when one can still see these marks on the land. At the same time, it's a bit like finding a palm tree deep in a scrub oak woodland—the marks of people on the land are inescapable, and often woefully out-of-place.
We cover, we bury, we replant… and still the land manages to persist. The big oak in the suburbs is an oddity, way out of keeping with the other trees in the area, until you realize that it's been there for 200 years. Ultimately, that makes me glad. I hope the trees win in the end.
And feeling lucky enough to live in a time when I can see both the trees from the ground and from the air through Google Maps and Google Earth.
Searching for more trees and more green lines on the land...

subset: commoncrawl


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Men's hockey off to a slow start
MIDDLEBURY — For the first time since 1993, the Middlebury College men's hockey team stands at 0-2. And those two losses came in Kenyon Arena on Friday and Saturday to Tufts and Connecticut College, respectively, teams against which the Panthers had a collective record of 38-8-2 entering the weekend.
But more puzzling to Middlebury Coach Bill Beaney than the results — Friday's 3-0 loss to Tufts and Saturday's 5-3 setback to Conn. College — was the way he said the Panthers played.
After Saturday's loss, Beaney talked about what he saw as the Panthers' lack of fire and effort.
"We didn't move our feet. We didn't play what people consider Middlebury hockey," Beaney said. "It's disappointing. I feel bad for the guys in there. They didn't want to do that. They're great young men and they'll get better. It's just disappointing they didn't step up and compete."
Granted, the Panthers were playing without key forwards Martin Drolet, who was with the Panther men's soccer team in the NCAA Division III tournament, and Nick Resor, who earned a break after a season on the Middlebury football team.
And the team has just three seniors, and almost a dozen newcomers who could play key roles this winter. But Beaney refused to say inexperience mattered.
"They were all recruited to come here and play. They know what our program is all about.
They should be ready to play," he said.
After the loss to Tufts, Beaney sat a number of veterans on Saturday.
"We had a group of guys that played with so little enthusiasm that I didn't think they deserved to play and some other ones did," Beaney said.
On Friday, although the Panthers had a big edge in puck possession and outshot the Jumbos, 29-15, Beaney was unhappy.
"How many pucks did we win? Any 50-50 puck, we lost 95 percent of them," he said. "We didn't play gritty."
In that game, the Jumbos took advantage of turnovers to score goals early in the second (by Dylan Cooper) and third (by Zach Diaco) periods. Freshman Panther goalie Nick BonDurant (12 saves) could not be blamed for either, and the final goal was an empty-netter. Tufts' goalie Scott Barchard made 29 saves.
On Saturday afternoon, the Panthers dominated the first period, outshooting the Camels, 16-6. But they could not score even when they skated a man up for the final 4:29 after a major penalty to Connecticut.
Junior captain Charlie Strauss put the only tough shot on Camel goalie Andrew Margolin (32 saves) during that power play, and the Panthers gave the puck away in their own end, forcing freshman goalie Nick Jasset to make one of his 12 saves. Earlier in the period, the Panthers really tested Margolin just twice, on a wraparound by Chaz Svoboda and a short wrister by freshman Louis Belisle.
Penalties plagued the Panthers in the second period — they took nine in the game. The Camels took the lead at 6:53 when they were two men up — Jordan Gray tipped in a Dawson Luke drive. At 8:16, Connecticut made it 2-0 on a shorthanded goal by Sean Curran set up by a Panther miscue.
The Panthers tied the game in the second period. Their first goal of the season came from Michael Griffin from the high slot at 8:55, assisted by John Barr, who picked off a Camel pass.
At 16:37, Tucker Donahoe and Charles Nerbak combined to make it 2-2. Donahoe sent Jak Knelman into the Camel zone with a two-line pass, and Knelman carried to the bottom of the left-wing circle. Nerbak returned the puck to Donahoe at the top of the circle, and Donahoe beat Margolin to the near side.
The Panthers took another penalty 24 seconds into the third. It proved costly at 1:11, when Mike Sinsignalli converted a rebound of a nice Jasset stop to give the Camels the lead. At 2:42 Sinsignalli set up Julien Boutet's breakaway, and it was 4-2.
At 7:45 the Panthers made it 4-3 on the power play. Griffin found the near corner from the right point, with assists from Bryan Curran and Strauss. But at 10:05 the Panthers allowed a two-on-one break, and Sinsignalli picked the near side from the left-wing circle. BonDurant (four stops) then replaced Jasset. One last Panther penalty, this one at 16:50, ended comeback hopes.
The Panthers next face defending NCAA Division III champ Norwich on Friday in the Great Northern Shootout, which will be held in Plattsburgh, N.Y. Beaney no doubt hopes the Panthers, who he said put the effort into preparing for the season, will upset the Cadets instead of him.
"I feel bad for them because I think they worked extremely hard. They worked hard in the fall. The practices were not bad at all," he said. "It's a little surprising."
Andy Kirkaldy may be reached at [email protected].
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Over the next few weeks officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) face a tough and politically charged call. The Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, begins July 9 and could draw as many as two million people from around the globe to the holy sites of Saudi Arabia in a pilgrimage called umrah. But a new disease, called Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, could threaten them.
Infectious disease control at mass gatherings is always a challenge, but this year even more so. Saudi Arabia is currently waging battle with MERS, yet it has released only the barest of details that scientists or public health officials could use to try to prevent its spread within Saudi Arabia or around the globe. In early May Saudi officials startled the world by announcing 13 new cases over the course of a few days. Since the start of May there have been 38 new cases worldwide—31 of them in Saudi Arabia—and 20 of the victims have died. With virtually no clues to draw on about where the virus lives in nature and how people contract it, WHO is trying to figure out what guidance to give those pilgrims, and the countries they will return to, about how to avoid infection and the international dissemination of a devastating new illness.
MERS triggers severe pneumonia and kidney failure in some cases. It is a cousin of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which broke out in mainland China in late 2002, spread from there to Hong Kong in 2003, and was then transported in the lungs of international travelers to Singapore, Hanoi, Toronto and other cities. Health officials do not want to pull out the big hammers used during the SARS outbreak, such as WHO travel advisories that urged the world's citizens to avoid infected hubs such as Hong Kong and Toronto. On the other hand, no one wants umrah and the even larger hajj pilgrimage that will follow in October to trigger a pandemic.
The new virus was first isolated in June 2012. But its existence came to the world's attention only weeks before last October's hajj, when an Egyptian infectious diseases specialist who had been working in Saudi Arabia's second largest city, Jeddah, reported that he had treated a man who died from an infection caused by a new coronavirus. Whether MERS has or can gain the capacity for sustained person-to-person spread is unknown. Kamran Khan, an infectious diseases physician who researches global flight patterns as a means of predicting disease spread, has had a worried eye on the Muslim religious calendar for some time. "We still don't have a good idea where this (virus) is coming from, so taking measures to mitigate risks are constrained," says Khan, who works at the Saint Michael's Hospital Keenan Research Center in Toronto.
Coronaviruses such as MERS, SARS and numerous others are named for the hallmark halo, or crown, they appear to sport in their outer shells. Many infect bats; the few that infect people cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to the severe lung devastation seen with many MERS cases, forcing patients to undergo mechanical ventilation. MERS has not yet evolved to spread as well as SARS can. And SARS, which was no wimp, killed about 11 percent of cases before it disappeared in 2004.
Last fall and in the early part of 2013 MERS infections popped up sporadically in a variety of places. Testing of samples from an April 2012 outbreak in Jordan revealed the virus had killed two nurses there. Three men in a family in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, appeared to have passed the virus to one another. Sick people from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were medivacked to the U.K. and Germany. And more recently tourists have taken the infection to the U.K., France, Tunisia and Italy.
The affected Arabian Peninsula countries have not been particularly forthcoming with information, and global health experts have yet to hit on the right strategy for persuading officials to get serious about finding the source of the infections or the scope of the illness in people. An outbreak of H7N9 bird flu virus in China at the beginning of April also distracted attention from MERS.
The latter virus, however, would not be ignored for long. The 13 new infections in early May were linked, arising in dialysis patients treated in Al Moosa Hospital at the Al-Ahsa oasis in the kingdom's Eastern Province. Infection in hospitals is how SARS took off, so word that an institution—or as sources suggest, several institutions—were epicenters of the outbreak raises the level of concern.
Donald Low, a microbiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto who became a SARS expert in 2003, expressed hope that the Al-Ahsa outbreak would "put their feet to the fire to get serious about this." Low has been worried about the possibility that superspreaders will emerge, as they did during SARS. Most people who contracted SARS passed the virus to at most one other person. But some SARS patients infected large numbers of people. One patient in Singapore infected 62 others; a woman who fell ill in the early days of the Toronto outbreak infected 44. With SARS, superspreaders turned a virus that likely would have burned itself out into a global outbreak that claimed 916 lives.
Has there been a superspreader in Saudi Arabia? If so, Saudi authorities have not revealed it. But it is evident that infections are being detected at a more rapid pace. At WHO's annual meeting—the World Health Assembly—in late May, the Saudi delegation was given what amounts to a diplomatic dressing down, with Director General Margaret Chan lauding China for its handling of the H7N9 outbreak and demanding that countries with MERS cases act as good global citizens and share information in a timely, complete manner. The next day Saudi Arabia announced five more cases in a three-line statement, which revealed only that victims ranged in age from 73 and 85; all had chronic diseases and lived in the Eastern Province.
Infectious disease experts are aghast that this late into MERS's spread the world still has no idea what puts people at risk of infection, how long the incubation period is, when people are contagious or whether there are mild cases that are being missed because surveillance is focused on finding sick people in hospitals. They put the problem squarely at the feet of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), which accounts for 41 of the 55 infections to date. Says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota: "The European countries have largely done an exemplary job of investigating and following up on the cases [that have been exported there]. Now, either the Middle Eastern countries, particularly KSA, have not, or they're just withholding information, for whatever reason. And in a situation where this represents a potential global pandemic, that is inexcusable."
Scientists also have no sense of whether the virus has changed over time. Genetic sequences of only four viral isolates have been placed in GenBank, the open-access sequence database run by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information. The most recent of the genetic blueprints dates to an infection that occurred in February. No sequences from the flurry of recent cases have been released. In fact, except for the sequence of the first spotted case—the man from Jeddah—no Saudi sequences have been placed in the public domain. The kingdom's deputy minister of health, Ziad Memish, has promised that sequences will be shared.
This week an international team of experts convened by WHO has gathered in Saudi Arabia to make headway in prying information out of the country. With the clock counting down to Ramadan, they have little time in which to answer key questions about the disease—answers needed to help safeguard the umrah pilgrims, and the rest of the world.


text: Fender Cover f/A-6 Ball Style - BlackFender covers should be as tough as the fenders they protect. That's the criteria we used in developing the Elite Fender Cover series. Polyform uses a premium grade yarn that is resistant to sunlight and abrasion. They are women by a special knitting machine that produces a seamless tube so you dont have to worry about seams splitting and allows for a heavier yarn content. The result is a fender that is built to last for many years and not just a season. Features: