Bars and Measures, Idris Goodwin’s moving drama, directed with a sure hand by Weyni Mengesha, can be appreciated on several levels. To begin with, it’s a political work, a disturbing tale involving the questionable prosecution of an American Muslim for abetting a terrorist organization.
In 2011, Antonio Ramirez* was working in an Inland Empire warehouse, where he’d spent several hours emptying and sweeping out a metal freight container. With the indoor heat level passing 100 degrees, Ramirez showed symptoms of heat stroke – but his employers failed to take any action to help him and Ramirez was forced to call his son to take him to the hospital. He was hospitalized for three days due to heat stroke.
Eduardo Vargas enrolled at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park during the fall of 2011 looking to help his financially troubled family, but then found he had to wrestle with a problem he had not foreseen: a crippled community college system.
On same the July day in 2009 when President Obama held a prime-time press conference on health-care reform, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted a video of himself showing off a hunting knife. The symbolism wasn’t hard to discern: Schwarzenegger was about to sign one of the most austere funding packages the state had ever seen.
Parents manage a huge pile of details to guide their children’s education. What, then, happens when a recession hits, state education funding is drastically cut, class sizes reduced, parents are called upon to replace library staff and you’re worried that the teacher who provided crucial support for your special needs student may be laid off?
Born Doris Feigenbaum in 1931 in New York, Fisher and her husband struck modern-day gold in San Francisco when they founded the first Gap store there in 1969. By all indications, Doris and her husband, who passed away in 2009, worked hand in hand building the brand — which, like many global retailers, has also faced intense scrutiny for its labor practices.
In the spring of 2008, Underwood was an eager and popular young assistant band director at a high school in Moreno Valley, a suburban enclave in Riverside County, but the first clouds of what would soon be called the Great Recession were gathering in New York — and were clearly visible to Underwood.
Four years ago California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 30 and rescued public schools and community colleges from the Great Recession’s economic free-fall. But the measure is scheduled to expire at the end of 2018, which could again place the state’s still-wobbly public schools on the edge of a fiscal precipice.
This new series examines how a ballot measure rebuilt the state’s public education system — and what’s at stake in November.
Both presidential candidates agree that America’s aging infrastructure needs massive investment. Why wouldn’t they? Fixing and replacing our roads, public transit, and other critical infrastructure will benefit the economy long into the future. The hard question is, where do we get the money?