On today's show, why campaign cash could flow into the coffers of Republicans who support gay marriage. Also, picturing the price of war, Latinos trying to change how Hollywood depicts them, telling stories of illegal border crossings as part of your family's history, trying to cut your toddler off from the iPad, and much more.
Picture This: Ashley Gilbertson's lens on the Iraq War
This weekend, a new exhibition, called WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY, opened at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.
The exhibit encompasses more than 150 images of war that range from 1887 to the present.
Among the photos included are ones shot by Ashley Gilbertson - an Australian photographer known for his work on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has since produced a series called Bedrooms of the Fallen, photographing the bedrooms of fallen soldiers.
Prop 8: What is at stake for both sides
This week the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, and Proposition 8. Reporter Scott Shafer is in Washington D.C. for two days of arguments and has this look at what's at stake for both sides.
How Supreme Court Prop 8 decision could boost Republican fundraising
On Tuesday the Supreme Court takes up gay marriage but this morning we talk about how this debate could change Republican fund raising. According to a recent Pew poll, 49 percent of Americans now support same sex marriage. That statistic includes a growing number of Republicans, and - according a recent article in Politico - many GOP fund raisers believe this shift in views could mean an influx in cash in places like California, New York and Florida. Tarini Parti joins the show.
Challenging Latino stereotypes in the media
Picture a strong and positive Latino character in film or TV, and you might think of Edward James Olmos as math teacher Jaime Escalante in 1988's Stand and Deliver.
But that example is more of a blip than a theme.
Latinos, like many minority groups, struggle for visibility in news and pop culture. And when they are seen, it might be as a bandit, a gang member, a gardener, an illegal immigrant, or a maid.
Filmmakers Miguel Picker and Chyng Sun explore the history of how this group has been portrayed in the new documentary Latinos Beyond Reel.
"It's bothersome and painful, actually," says Picker. "When you grow without a set of role models or things that reinforce that you are someone that can do big things, then it affects you negatively."
Merced River plan for Yosemite draws fire from several quarters (Photos)
A National Park Service plan to better protect the Merced River calls for closing some commercial ventures in Yosemite National Park – a proposal that has drawn criticism from a variety of quarters.
The $235 million proposal would close the pool at the Ahwahnee Hotel, several snack stands, and some tourist-related businesses, including horseback riding and bike rentals. The plan also calls for closing the ice rink, even though no one is claiming that it harms the river.
The plan would move some tent cabins away from the river, which runs through the Yosemite valley floor. But the number of hotel rooms and campsites wouldn’t change much. The proposal envisions up to 19,900 daily visitors, which is close to what the park sees on a peak summer day.
Yosemite’s director of planning, Kathleen Morse, says the plan focused on what is worth protecting around the river.
"The meadows and the riparian systems that weave in and out, just the whole alluvial river system," she says. "It’s a very broad floodplain. And river related recreation – boating, hiking along the river, camping along the river, things like that."
The Merced River plan is the result of a lengthy legal dispute that sent the National Park Service back to the drawing board three years ago. A federal court finally ruled that what’s along the Merced river must protect and enhance it.
The court said "take a look at this stuff," says Morse. "You’ve got swimming pools, tennis courts, sports shops, restaurants, cafeterias, bars, ice skating rink, its all going on out there– make a conscious choice about what should continue."
In preparing the plan, the park service asked visitors about transit. Morse says they like having clean-fuel buses, but they don’t like using them.
"They said, 'we want to bring our cars in but can you do something about all that traffic and congestion? It’s really unsettling and it’s difficult to enjoy the valley when you’re in a traffic jam. So can you fix that?'"
The plan includes recommendations from traffic experts to re-route cars as they move around the valley. But environmental groups feel the plan does not go far enough. Greg Adair of Friends of the Yosemite Valley likes that the Park Service is suggesting getting rid of some commercial activities, but he feels that it still places too much emphasis on lodging and concessions.
"There are other activities like picnicking, bathing in the river, bird watching, simply walking around and hiking, taking photos which should be given more space and those sort of distracting commercial activities given less space," says Adair.
Other environmental critics say the proposed plan is flawed because the Park Service didn’t take previous degradation into account when it started preparing its study.
"The willows that were historically here covering the banks for miles through the valley here are completely gone in most places," says John Buckley of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center.
Environmentalists are weighing legal action to halt the park’s plan. They’re not the only ones unhappy with compromise. Republican Congressman Tom McClintock, whose district includes Yosemite, has threatened to introduce a bill that would force the park to keep its commercial services.
Meanwhile, gateway communities around Yosemite that depend on tourism don’t want the park to do anything that might reduce the number of visitors.
At the ice rink, Mark Collishaw of Scotts Valley is chaperoning a group of kids. He's not happy when he hears that the rink might close.
"Boo! Bah humbug!" he says. "This...this is awesome right here."
The public has until the middle of April to weigh in on the Merced River plan. Yosemite officials say they’re already taking comments like Collishaw’s – in written form – into account. They say nothing’s set in stone.
Older Americans are going to the movies more
A new study of ticket buyers shows a fairly dramatic increase in the numbers of people over 40 who are so-called "frequent moviegoers."
According to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, almost 6 million Americans in their 40s go to at least one movie a month. That's up from 3.3 million just two years ago.
The number of frequent moviegoers in their 50s and 60s also increased, though not as dramatically.
Still, Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter Rebecca Keegan doesn't think Hollywood is going to drop youth-oriented films to cater to the older market. The gray hairs are showing up a bit more often, but Hollywood box office is still driven largely by the under-35 crowd.
But frequent moviegoers are the mainstay of the business. Another MPAA survey found only about 10 percent of Americans see at least one movie every month. But that 10 percent buys fully half of the movie tickets sold.
In turning point for mayor's race, Wendy Greuel shakes up campaign
The race for mayor of Los Angeles hit a key turning point over weekend, with a series of rapid-fire announcements from Wendy Greuel's campaign. She shook up her campaign team and hastily arranged a Sunday night endorsement from a prominent African American leader. Many thought this race was Greuel's to lose. Now, it's turning into a close contest between Greuel, who is city controller, and City Councilman Eric Garcetti. For the latest on the race for mayor, we turn to KPCC's Frank Stoltze.
Godfather of modern bodybuilding dies
The godfather of bodybuiding, Joe Weider, passed away over the weekend at Cedars Sinai, he was 93. He started the popular magazines like Muscle and Fitness, Flex, Men's Fitness or Shape and brought weight lifting to the masses. He also founded the Mr. Olympia body building competition that discovered names like Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Lou Ferrigno.
For more on the life and legacy of the Master Blaster, we're joined by John Balik. He was a competitive body builder, friend and colleague of Weider's for more than 40 years. He now runs Iron Man Magazine.
Touch-screen toddlers: the concerns of technology on children's development
For years, parents have heard the warnings to not let their children zone out in front of the TV for too long; the American Academy of Pediatrics warns against any TV time for children under 2.
But what about iPads and educational mobile apps? It's a question that puzzled journalist Hanna Rosin.
In her cover story, "The Touch Screen Generation," for this month's Atlantic magazine, Rosin writes,
"On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them."
How much do you let your child use electronics, and for what purpose?
Baldwin Park school's immersion program shows promise for closing the achievement gap
Foster elementary school sits adjacent to the 10 Freeway in Baldwin Park, a low-income pocket of the San Gabriel Valley. Nearly nine out of ten of the schools' students come from families that live at or below the poverty line.
And the vast majority are the children of Mexican immigrants or recent-arrivals from Mexico or South America themselves. The student body is 90 percent Latino.
Foster serves the kind of population researchers would expect to under-perform compared to middle- and higher-income, English-speaking students.
RELATED: Bilingual Learning: The science, options, and dilemma of dual language education
But Foster is a high performing elementary school. It's Academic Performance Index of 830 last year put it in the top 20 percent of the state's similarly ranked schools. And it's principal, Lorraine Perez, attributes those grades to one thing Foster does that most American schools don't: it teaches children in two languages.
"To just say, 'oh we want our students to be successful' but not know exactly how to do that becomes the problem," Perez said.
Brain research is finding that learning more than one language creates a workout for a child's brain that pays dividends in all kinds of learning -- actually making kids smarter. And advocates for bilingual education argue that the method produces higher performing children.
"We know that when children are part of bilingual programs their academic ability [is] much higher than students that are in a monolingual background," said Jan Corea who runs the California Association of Bilingual Education.
Magaly Lavadenz, a professor at Loyola Marymount, said bilingual proficiency exercises the brain's executive functions more. This increased workout for the young brain helps children "concentrate and focus more to get tasks accomplished."
"Brain science is telling us that if you have greater cognitive functioning you’ll be smarter, you’ll be more proficient, you’ll be less distractible," she said.
RELATED: Does dual-immersion learning pay off in better test scores?
Foster elementary is providing a sort of controlled study on the effect of a bilingual education. The school teaches half the students in a traditional, English-only curriculum and the other half in dual language immersion program.
When Principal Perez compares the test scores of the school's 6th graders, those in the dual language program outperform those in English-only classes by 20 to 30 percent. Of the students in the bilingual program, 86% were proficient in English last year, compared with 66% of those taught solely in English. Math scores were even better: 83% of the dual immersion students scored proficient, compared to 55% of those taught only in English.
When comparing the test scores of Foster's 6th graders to those across the state, the dual language students did very well. 76% of the class was above the state average in Language Arts and 88% of the class was above the state average in Math.
"The students leave bilingual and biliterate. They not only speak the language, they can read and write it with a great deal of accuracy, " Perez said.
Foster's teachers constantly encourage students to think about how their fluency in two languages can open doors for what they plan to do in their lives, in college and in their future careers.
The school's program appears to offer educators one way to tackle their hardest challenge: how to close the achievement gap between low-income students of color and their middle and upper income peers.
When parents enroll a child for kindergarten at Foster, they can choose whether the child will follow the traditional English-only path or the enter into the dual language immersion program. To enroll in the program later, children would have to demonstrate they have the proficiency level in Spanish to join the class.
Children in the immersion program are taught in Spanish for 90 percent of the kindergarten day. In first grade, that decreases to 80 percent of the day in Spanish and 20 percent in English. The ratio continues to shift by 10 percent a year until 5th grade, when the students are learning 50-50 English and Spanish. Sixth grade is also 50-50 English and Spanish.
Perez said that even parents whose native tongue is Spanish and speak it at home still hesitate to chose dual language immersion.
Part of the reason they worry is that the school's youngest students' test scores are far from stellar. School wide, only 36% of Foster's Dual Language third graders scored above the state's average in English and 39 percent in math. The test is given in English. By the third grade, Foster's dual language learners have had very little instruction in English.
Perez shows enrolling parents the test score differences that appear by the sixth grade to allay their biggest concern: that their children will learn not English.
Perez said there's no difference between the home lives or backgrounds of children in the bilingual and English only programs.
“It is not a program that is only for students that we have identified as being high achievers,” Perez said.
Foster's teachers are certainly engaging. Luz Velasquez leads soon-to-be graduating sixth graders in a research project to design, build and sell the next hottest toy to teach them geometry and math. She calls it "real world learning" and Velasquez says that whether the language she is teaching in is English or Spanish, the key is engaging students by making her classes relevant to their lives.
And despite the poverty, the neighborhood is well cared for. Homes and gardens are meticulously tended, cars give off a just-washed sheen.
Principals of nearby schools and districts in Monrovia and Arcadia are watching Foster's success. Monrovia dual language immersion teachers have come to Foster to observe and learn its methods.
Whether the test results can be replicated remains to be seen. Many other dual-language schools don't have an English only program with the same population. Others said they are too new to draw any conclusion from their test scores. But they believe the method will ultimately prove to be a powerful educational tool.
“All of the social science research, without question, says that if you start learning a second language at age 4, 5 & 6, you develop a switching mechanism in the brain that changes you and makes you smarter,” said Roger Lowenstein, who founded a dual language charter school in Lincoln Heights, the L.A. Leadership Academy.
"It allows you to acquire information --not just other languages-- but music, math, everything, so much more nimbly" he added. "You become a better student."