Today on the show, we'll have an Oscar recap with Rebecca Keegan of the LA Times. We'll also speak with a writer on the show 'Family Guy,' who helped pen Seth MacFarlane's Oscar bits. Then, the Supreme Court weighs genetic privacy rules, Deep Fernandes reports on California's new grade to ease 4-year-olds into, Kindergarten and much more.
Supreme Court to weigh genetic privacy rules
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court takes up the right to privacy — genetic privacy.
California is one of 28 states with laws on the books that allow authorities to take DNA samples from people arrested for, but not convicted of, a serious crime. The Justices will be deciding if those DNA samples violate the 4th Amendment, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
For more on this pivotal Supreme Court Case, we are joined by Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School.
Assembly to review conditions in state's highest security prison units
Today in Sacramento, the Assembly's Committee on Public Safety will take up special security units in the state's prison system, which was the focus of widespread hunger strikes in 2011.
Civil rights groups are suing the state for what they say is cruel and inhumane punishment, but prison officials are expected to testify they've made significant changes. The California Report's Michael Montgomery has the story.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Hollywood Monday: Academy Awards winners and losers
Early reports show a jump in the ratings for this year's Academy Awards show, probably helped along by some popular films up for Best Picture. There was a stumble on the stairs, host Seth McFarlane played to mixed reviews, and the First Lady announced the winner for Best Picture.
Joining us with her observations on this year's awards, and on the awards show, our regular Hollywood know-it-all, Rebecca Keegan of the L.A. Times.
'Family Guy' writer on penning Seth MacFarlane's Oscar bits
Writer Patrick Meighan was hanging out backstage at the Oscars last night. Normally he works as a writer for Seth MacFarlanes hit show "Family Guy," so when MacFarlane was chosen to host the awards show, Patrick was enlisted to help write material.
After the show and the infamous Governor's Ball, he was kind enough to wake up early to talk with us.
Scientists use 3-D printing to create body parts from scratch
Making body parts from scratch sounds like the stuff of science fiction novels, but scientists are already creating artificial organs and tissue with the help of machines.
This month, Cornell University researchers demonstrated how they could make a new ear with a 3-D printer, using living cells as the printer jet ink. With more on medical 3-D printing is Quentin Hardy, Deputy Technology Editor of the New York Times.
California creates new school grade to ease 4-year-olds into kindergarten
As the public education system becomes more rigorous and standardized, its effect is creeping down to the littlest students. If you think back to your own Kindergarten days, you might remember singing and puppet shows and smearing paint with your fingers to create art. Today kindergarten is more academic, resulting in more struggling children.
To remedy this, California has implemented a new grade called Transitional Kindergarten (or TK for short). In its first year, this new grade aims to bridge the gap between the play-world of preschool and the rigors of kindergarten.
So how’s it working out?
A good place to begin is the kindergarten classroom. Unless you’ve had a child start school in the past decade, it’s likely that the big changes to this first year of school have passed you by. Not so for elementary school educators who have been on the frontlines as the changes have occurred.
Barbara Friedrich is the Principal at Stanley Mosk Elementary School in Los Angeles. She has watched kindergarten change over her decades at the school. Friedrich points out that kindergarten went from half to full day and became much more academic. She says her staff now has to “assess kindergarten children in ways which we never had to before.”
The result? Friedrich says these changes to kindergarten have “set up many children for failure.” That failure is largely due to children arriving at kindergarten unprepared for the academic demands that are placed on them.
At Martha Escutia elementary school in Bell, children in the kindergarten classroom are working on a class project to draw and label a map of their neighborhood. Principal Janice Shinmae says the skills needed for this kind of advanced exercise involve fine motor control to “grip” the pencil, advanced literacy to do “independent writing” and social-emotional regulation to sit and focus on the task. A decade ago this activity would likely have occurred in first grade.
Kindergarten used to function as a bridging year to elementary school. It was where children would learn the basics needed to ensure a smooth transition to the academics of first grade. It used to be the place where teachers had time to work with children at all their varying levels of literacy, numeracy, fine motor skills and even emotional control.
When children arrived at kindergarten they had come from a variety of different settings. If a child has been home with a parent or nanny since birth, kindergarten was her first exposure to socializing with other children. Even preschool experiences differ widely resulting in kids being all over the map when they arrive in Kindergarten.
Enter Transitional Kindergarten, or TK. It’s a new grade introduced to the California public school system serving four year olds born in the Fall. TK is an optional program and its goal is to prepare children for the rigors of Kindergarten.
Kris Damon is a TK Instructional Coach for Long Beach Unified School District, one of the districts that has most embraced the new TK grade. Damon says four year olds need to learn to work with each other just as much as they need to learn to write letters. Damon offers an example in which two Long Beach four year-olds are participating in a counting and art activity. They are placing objects in a straight line to make sets of nine.
Damon says, “they both want to count and they both want to lay down the objects and then they’re counting over each other but sometimes they’re counting with each other.” Eventually, Damon says, because of the time allowed in a TK classroom, the students reach their goal of making their set of nine “together.”
Critical to an exercise like this are the art elements that make a simple counting exercise more engaging and fun. That’s likely to help a four year-old stay focused and complete the task. Kris Damon says the ability to focus is one of the most important skills needed for success in kindergarten, where it is just expected that a child will complete the exercise without constant encouragement to do so from the teacher.
Learning to work with other children is another important skill that Transitional Kindergarten teaches. In the TK classroom at Martha Escutia Elementary school in Bell, the four year olds are working in groups. One group is placing colored dots over numbers from 1 to 100 on a number chart. This involves focus, fine motor skills and the ability to count and recognize colors.
Another group is pasting circles of different colors onto a long piece of paper in rows of ten. Then they practice counting to ten and learning to count in multiples of ten. All of which are skills children will benefit from knowing by the time they start Kindergarten.
Advocates and educators had been pushing for a TK-like program “for years,” according to Catherine Atkin, Executive Director of Preschool California. Atkin says teachers have been “telling Sacramento that these kids are just too young to be in traditional kindergarten.”
In 2010, the Kindergarten Readiness Act changed the birthdate for entry into Kindergarten to account for too many young four year-olds failing. It also established a transitional program to accommodate the children who would miss out on starting kindergarten if they were born in the Fall. TK began last August, and while every school district is required to provide TK classes, not every school in the district has to offer it. The Department of Education is not keep track of which schools, or how many schools, currently have TK programs.
Ana Jimenz has a four year old son. She lived in South Gate and had her son on a preschool wait list for over a year. Frustrated that he could not gain entrance to preschool, Jimenez began researching options. She found the TK program at Martha Escutia and moved to Bell. Jimenez says “he didn’t have a chance to go to preschool, so I think this is a great opportunity for him to catch up and learn what he didn’t learn because he didn’t have preschool.” Jimenez volunteers at the school and is able to observe first hand the progress her son is making on a daily basis.
For now TK is an optional program for children. However, if President Obama’s push for Universal Pre-K comes through, California will be well on the way to meet that mandate.
US Border Patrol agents still use horses to help secure border
Many advocates of immigration reform believe border security must be tightened, and they are calling for high tech options like unmanned drones and sophisticated surveillance equipment. But for decades, the Border Patrol has relied on an old-fashioned, low-tech solution: Horses.
Fronteras Desk reporter Erin Siegal has the story.
Garcetti's LA mayoral quest: Smart enough, but tough enough? (Photos)
Los Angeles municipal elections are known for low voter turnout, but this year’s mayoral candidates are hoping that a small increase in participation will lead them to victory.
In Los Angeles, political candidates sometimes try to build their street credibility by talking about witnessing gang violence firsthand . Eric Garcetti tells of coming under fire in 1993 – at an airport in northern Cambodia.
“As the plane was about to land, Khmer Rouge rebels came out of the jungle and shelled the airport,” Garcetti recalls. “Luckily, it didn’t hit the terminal, but it did hit some soldiers and killed one of them close by.”
RELATED: KPCC's coverage of the 2013 LA mayoral race
World traveler may be an understatement for Garcetti, who says he’s visited more than 80 countries. Some of them were human rights trips: he worked in Burmese jungles promoting democracy and spent time in Ethiopia providing medical relief. On an environment-related trip to the North Pole, he found Salma Hayek’s wallet . (She is campaigning for him now).
The 43-year-old L.A. city councilman says his travel makes him “uniquely qualified” to be mayor in a city with people from all over the world. He talks easily with Thai business owners in his Hollywood council district, for example.
“They open up when they hear that I lived in Thailand,” he says.
Garcetti says his interest in human rights has its roots in his family: his paternal grandfather could not swim in a Boyle Heights public pool because he was Mexican. His maternal grandfather, who was Jewish, was an active member of the ACLU.
He grew up in Encino, and attended the private Harvard Westlake school. Half-Jewish, half-Mexican, with an Italian last name, Garcetti flew under the racial radar.
“So I would hear what people would say about Jews when they think no Jews are around. I’d hear Mexican jokes from folks who thought I wasn’t Mexican,” he says. “While it was hurtful at first, it also allowed me to navigate those frontiers, those borders, really easily.”
Garcetti’s mother provided arts programs to poor kids. His father, Gil, was a prosecutor who served two terms as L.A. County District Attorney. At times, Garcetti may appear buttoned down. He is not, says a former aide.
“I will say that I have danced with him at parties,” says former aide Josh Kamensky. He also tells of driving Garcetti around his district singing Broadway musicals.
Music is a favorite past-time of Garcetti’s. He’s a pianist and composer and even performed with the musician Moby at a recent fundraiser. He and his wife, political activist Amy Wakeland, have been foster parents.
Politicians by nature are ambitious. A childhood friend saw it early .
“For Eric, there is an unusual sense of ease with his drive. It’s just natural,” Leo Marks says.
Garcetti attended Columbia University and then became a Rhodes scholar, studying at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He holds a Masters of International Affairs. For the past dozen years, he’s represented Hollywood, Echo Park and parts of Silver Lake on the L.A. city council.
At a recent Hollywood Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Garcetti touted his work revitalizing the area. It’s been a dramatic change with new restaurants, nightclubs and the return of the Academy Awards.
“Today Hollywood is once again a place of opportunity,” he told the crowd.
But for some, that’s meant having to move out as gentrification pushed rents up.
“Low-income working people who have been there, in many cases, for generations,” says Larry Gross, who heads the Coalition for Economic Survival. He says Hollywood residents have crowded his tenants' rights clinics over the last few years as they’ve struggled to hold onto their homes. But he also praises Garcetti’s work.
“At the same time, Eric has been one of the more vocal proponents of various tenants rights and affordable housing ordinances before the city council,” Gross says.
Garcetti says he worked hard to mitigate the effects of gentrification with new affordable housing, parks and after school programs – even as he’s played a key role in bringing new developers to Hollywood. Chamber President Leron Gubler says Garcetti personally mitigated a dispute involving the W Hotel project.
“Eric interceded, brought the parties together and negotiated a settlement that was amicable to all the parties,” Gubler says. “He definitely saved that project.”
Garcetti likes to say that finding consensus is his forté. That helped him during his six years as president of the city council, according to a former colleague.
“I found him really easy to work with,” says former Councilman Greig Smith, a Republican who often differed with Garcetti, a Democrat. Smith called him “intelligent and affable.”
But his desire to “make everybody happy” was a liability too, Smith says. He recalls a dispute over a rate increase proposed by the mayor and the Department of Water and Power. Garcetti went to the DWP Board of Commissioners to negotiate a lower hike before a midnight deadline.
“When he came back at 10 o’clock at night to the council … he came back and said here’s the deal – same deal as the mayor’s,” Smith says. ‘He needed to be stronger, and it just wasn’t his style.”
Garcetti says he did push for the lower rate, if unsuccessfully. But he is aware of his bent toward consensus, and pokes fun at it as a reporter negotiates for more time with him.
“You guys, can we build some consensus here? What would make you happy?” he mockingly pleads.
The councilman says he’s a more decisive leader now.
“At the beginning you want to really listen to everybody and make everybody agree, and I am much more impatient now.”
He also says he’ll be emboldened by the office.
“When I have the power to do things as mayor," he maintains, "I’ll be strong and say this is where we are going."
'Six Strikes' copyright alert system goes live this week
The Center for Copyright Information has revealed more details about its Copyright Alert System, a cooperation between internet providers and content owners.
The new plan, nicknamed the "six strikes" system, warns users when they are downloading or sharing owned content then issue a warning, a requirement to watch an educational video, or a temporary slowdown of service.
Gov. Brown heads to DC to gain support for Medicaid expansion
Governor Brown is in Washington, D.C. Monday morning, meeting with President Obama on national healthcare reform. Over the weekend, Brown said his top priority for the visit is getting the Administration to agree to provide some protection for states that want to expand Medicaid as part of the federal healthcare reform.
As we discussed on this program last week, the Affordable Care Act provides states with the option to expand Medicaid programs. The federal government has said it will pay 100 percent of the costs for the first three years and 90 percent after that.
But Governor Brown, and other governors, worry what happens if Congress reneges on the deal.
KPCC's state capitol reporter Julie Small has been tracking California's efforts to implement these reform and joins us now to talk about it.
What sequestration could mean for California's public health system
If sequestration cuts take effect this Friday, California stands to lose about $16 million marked for public health spending.
Joining us to explain where those cuts would come from and what effect they could have on California’s public health, is Dr. Kavita Patel. She’s an adjunct professor at UCLA and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Studying expressions of gratitude in Oscar acceptance speeches
Those joyful Oscar acceptance speeches we've all rehearsed in our heads a hundred times. Oscar speeches have become the stuff of legend, deconstructed and criticized as if they were one of Lincoln's great orations.
No one has looked at them closer than Rebecca Rolfe. She's a graduate student at Georgia Tech who has been studying expressions of gratitude in Oscar speeches going back to the 1950s.
South LA guerrilla gardener Ron Finley presents at the TED conference
The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference (known as TED) kicks off in Long Beach today. It's the major leagues of public speaking, and in the past it's brought together big names like Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, and Bono on a wide range of topics.
Being invited to speak is such a big deal that past speakers say they spent months honing their presentations. While many of the talkers come from all over the world, one is literally homegrown from right here in L.A.: Ron Finley.
Finley's a local gardening guru and cofounder of L.A. Green Grounds who in 2010 transformed the parkway outside his Crenshaw home into a garden flush with kale, lettuce, lavender, and more. But in 2011 he ran afoul of city officials who said his plants were "obstructions" and that he needed a $400 permit.
Finley, however, took the issue up with City Hall, and he's now working with officials to make what he's doing legal so that his neighbors can also replant their own grassy lawns into harvestable vegetables.
His story caught the attention of TED organizers, and they invited him to speak at a smaller conference in Vancouver last year about transforming South Los Angeles' front yards into edible gardens. He was such a hit that they also asked him to this week's flagship convention in Long Beach.
Take Two host Alex Cohen met up with Finley next to his garden, and he explained how he wants it to be a beacon for his South LA neighborhood.
"Getting healthy food in this area was non-existent," he says. "I want get people to take back their health. I want them to see how easy it is and how beautiful food can be."
While he's nervous about speaking this week in front of the thousands of TED attendees who could afford the $7,500 admission, he's confident his message will resonate with anyone, because, "Just like they want healthy food, we want healthy food."
To see Finley's garden, it's located at the corner of W Exposition Blvd and Chesapeake Ave.