Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/326160
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS NotlongagoRedBluff'sRiverParkwasa not so pleasant place to spend time — typi- cally occupied by criminals, vandals and addicts. The rest of us didn't feel safe at the park and we stayed away. But we encourage you to take another look. Thankstosomepro-active police work — you'll be hearing more about this concept in com- ing months — and the cooper- ation of city departments, the city has reclaimed River Park for the majority of residents. Chief Paul Nanfito secured grant funding to purchase and install security cameras that cover the entire park, from Mc- Glynn Pool to the sidewalk crossing under Main Street next to the Chamber of Com- merce office. The police and parks departments coordinated to trim trees and clean up the grounds at the park to allow better sight lines for the cam- eras and improve the park's ap- pearance. From the dispatch desk at the station, officers and dis- patchers can keep an eye on the park around the clock and re- spond to signs of trouble as it happens. Lo and behold, it's working. Over the last couple of months the less desirable elements that kept the rest of us out of the park have moved on and fami- lies are beginning to spend time by the river, playing volleyball, sharing picnics and enjoying the spring weather. We tip our hats to Nanfito, Lt. Dan Flowerdew and the parks department for giving us back the tremendous asset that is River Park. Now the burden shifts to us as residents to keep the park looking nice and make sure it gets used. When the park is full of residents enjoying them- selves, it will be less likely the undesirable elements will seep back into it. A good time to start is this morning, with the Red Bluff-Te- hama County Chamber of Com- merce's certified farmers mar- ket kicking off the season up until noon. Head over and pick up some succulent local fruit and share some at a picnic table or on the grass. The weekend's heat may keep some indoors, but enjoy the park and market during the cooler morning. Head out to the park Monday at 8 p.m. for a free concert by the Red Bluff Community Band. Both are weekly opportuni- ties to take advantage of River Park. Let the city know you appre- ciate being given your park back by making the most of what it has to offer this summer. Editorial RiverPark: Use it or lose it By Jason Stanford It's hard to tell what's a bigger joke: Common Core or Common Core critics. Right wing hysteria that Common Core will turn our children into gay socialists — not kidding about that one — is over- shadowing legitimate reasons to oppose it. The problem with Common Core isn't that Barack Obama is brainwashing our chil- dren. It's that the brand new cur- riculum is being ruined by the same old tests. The Common Core State Stan- dards Initiative began inno- cently enough under George W. Bush. Governors and state edu- cation officials convened to de- termine what to teach our chil- dren in math and English to get them ready for college. Then Barack Obama got elected and of- fered competitive grants to states through Race to the Top, where- upon Common Core became an insidious plot to destroy America. It's gotten a little out of hand. In March, a Florida state rep- resentative said the purpose of Common Core was to "attract every one of your children to be- come as homosexual as they pos- sibly can." The Oklahoma legis- lature just voted to repeal Com- mon Core standards because, as one state representative said, it was "indoctrinating" children into socialism. An Alabama Tea Party leader warned legislators that voting to adopt Common Core would damn them to Hell because it promoted "acceptance of homosexuality, alternate life- styles, radical feminism, abor- tion, illegal immigration and the redistribution of wealth." I am neither kidding nor done. The American Family Associa- tion predicted that Common Core would make it impossible for chil- dren from right-thinking fami- lies to survive in secular society, forcing the creation of "a paral- lel society" with a "parallel econ- omy, parallel job opportunities." Not to be outdone, WorldNetDaily warned that Common Core would turn America into Nazi Germany. Amid this cacophony of kooky, it can be easy to chalk up the op- position to a different strain of Obama Derangement Syndrome. But most of the opposition to Com- mon Core deals with how stan- dardized testing has turned schools into a "massive stressball" in the words of comedian and pub- lic-school parent Louis C.K. When Louis C.K. went on a Twitter rant to his 3.4 million fol- lowers about how the pressure had made his daughters misera- ble, people noticed. "My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!" he tweeted. Suddenly, the country's educa- tion policy was getting more press than Benghazi. He took criticism from Newsweek and Vox about how he didn't understand how Common Core was raising stan- dards. That criticism misses the point that with Common Core the testing tail is wagging the teach- ing dog just as it was under No Child Left Behind. As Louis C.K. explained during an appearance on David Letterman's show, it's the testing, not the standards, that was stressing out his kids. "Well, the way I understand it, if a school's kids don't test well, they burn the school down. It's pretty high-pressure," he said. "And the tests are written by people nobody knows who they are. It's very secretive.... They [teachers and students] prepare for these tests for a long time. A lot of the year is about the test. Teaching to the test they call it." Actually, we do know who writes the tests: Pearson, the world's largest testing company. The testing giant has been work- ing hard behind the scenes to make sure it would cash in on Common Core, sometimes ille- gally. Last December, Pearson paid $7.7 million in New York State to settle accusations that it used its charitable foundation to help its for-profit parent com- pany develop course materials and software for Common Core. If you thought that would dis- qualify them from the Common Core bonanza, you filled in the wrong little oval. In May, Pear- son won the testing contract for Common Core states. We don't know how much money this is, but at $24 per student we could be looking at the largest testing contract in history. It's fun to mock the paranoid Tea Party rantings. There's no way Common Core will turn our children into gay socialists. Only ice-skating while singing "Let It Go" can do that. But because high-pressure standardized test- ing is still the stick we use to measure schools, Common Core could make your children hate learning. And that's no joke. JasonStanfordisaDemocratic consultant who writes columns for the Austin American-Statesman and The Quorum Report. He can be reached at stanford@oppresearch. com and on Twitter @JasStanford. Editorial Common Core opposition is no joke Cartoonist's take I would recommend that the child does not know how to swim wear a life jacket. Jaime Furnells: On shortage of lifeguards at McGlynn Pool WASHINGTON Colleges and uni- versities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say cam- pus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, vic- tims proliferate. And academia's progressivism has rendered it in- tellectually defenseless now that progressivism's achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia's turn to be broken to government's saddle. Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, aka "sexual as- sault." Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarth- more College, where in 2013 a stu- dent "was in her room with a guy with whom she'd been hooking up for three months": "They'd now decided — mu- tually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was put- ting his arm around her and tak- ing off her clothes. 'I basically said, "No, I don't want to have sex with you." And then he said, "OK, that's fine" and stopped. ... And then he started again a few min- utes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn't do any- thing — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.'" Six weeks later, the woman re- ported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of "sex- ual assault" victims. It vows to excavate equities from the am- biguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alco- hol and the faux sophistication of today's prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults. The administration's crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by of- ficial repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexu- ally assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 per- cent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009-12 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female stu- dent population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent. Department of Education lawyers disregard pesky arith- metic and elementary due pro- cess. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, DOE mandates adoption of a minimal "prepon- derance of the evidence" stan- dard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female "survivors" — note the language of prejudg- ment. Combine this with capa- cious definitions of sexual as- sault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly liti- gation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what soci- ety considers serious felonies. Now academia is unhappy about DOE's plan for government to rate every institution's educa- tional product. But the profes- sors need not worry. A DOE offi- cial says this assessment will be easy: "It's like rating a blender." Education, gadgets — what's the difference? Meanwhile, the newest cam- pus idea for preventing victim- izations — an idea certain to multiply claims of them — is "trigger warnings." They would be placed on assigned readings or announced before lectures. Otherwise, traumas could be triggered in students whose ten- der sensibilities would be lacer- ated by unexpected encounters with racism, sexism, violence (dammit, Hamlet, put down that sword!) or any other facet of re- ality that might violate a stu- dent's entitlement to serenity. This entitlement has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a "safe," "supportive," "unthreatening" environment, intellectual com- fort for the intellectually dor- mant. It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance to- ward limited government and cultural common sense, is mak- ing itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to cre- ate victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victim- izations — brings increasing su- pervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates. What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on them- selves, diminishes their auton- omy, resources, prestige and co- mity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by ask- ing for progressivism. George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com. George Will Universities have become victims of progressivism Sounding off A look at what readers are saying in comments on our website and on social media. We tip our hats to Nanfito, Lt. Dan Flowerdew and the parks department for giving us back the tremendous asset that is River Park. Now the burden shifts to us as residents to keep the park looking nice and make sure it gets used. When the park is full of residents enjoying themselves, it will be less likely the undesirable elements will seep back into it. OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Saturday, June 7, 2014 MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A4