Education

Times are tough enough for Californians; they're even tougher for Californians' teeth. "One-quarter of all adults and 28% of children in California have untreated dental caries [cavities]," says Len Finocchio, a senior program officer at the California Healthcare Foundation, a health advocacy group. "Our research tells us that many people in California have been avoiding routine care that might have cost about $100 for a checkup and cleaning, and then find themselves in the emergency room, where they get only an antibiotic, a bill that can average over $600 and instructions to see a dentist."

For the first time, L.A. Unified and other individual school districts can apply for federal Race to the Top grants, bypassing California officials, including the governor, who had objected to the rules for receiving the education-reform incentives. The draft rules, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education, will allow school systems to vie for funds that had been unavailable to any state that was unable or unwilling to compete for the grants. "We're wide open to new strategies, new approaches," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a conference call.

Last week, the Senate voted on a proposal by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez to end some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry. The Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act was a curiously skimpy bill that targeted only oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas. Even so, the proposal didn't pass. But that hasn't stopped President Obama from calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz.

I remember, many years ago a mexicano working in a sweat shop on E Street by the library. I could see him through the window - a tailor by trade. Thought about asking him to make me a suit for graduation. His fingers were so thin, so dark. Usually, he labored on a sport coat. Could tell the owner had granted him privacy. He seemed happy and at ease.

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

Like its creator and star Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedy of "The Dictator" is mercurial to the extreme and as crude as the massive oil reserves of Wadiya, the fictional North African nation where his latest movie prank begins. By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious, the film follows the power-mad leader Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen as he loses his bearings, his beard and his heart in New York City. "The Dictator" underscores both Baron Cohen's genius and his folly, and delivers the actor's signature blend of scatological outrage, sagacity and at least one full-frontal assault with a flaccid unmentionable.

In a move that heightened competition in online education and brought more prestige to the still-fledgling field, Harvard University and MIT announced a partnership Wednesday to offer the public mainly free Internet classes. Harvard and MIT are each donating $30 million to create a nonprofit organization, to be called "edX" that will develop an Internet platform for the classes and design new ways to teach and learn with technology, according to the two Cambridge, Mass., schools.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

At Gulf Avenue Elementary in Wilmington, 4-year-olds in a transitional kindergarten class start the day singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" before sitting down to trace the letter A and learn its sound. Nearby, students in the school's regular kindergarten class are also hard at work, reading and writing sentences. The two sets of students are separated in age by only a few months, but the gulf in maturity and academic skills is wide. Teacher Carmina Gonzalez, who helps some of the 4-year-olds with their letters while tending to a little girl who is crying distractedly, says she saw the contrasts every day in the kindergarten classes she taught.

For 18 years, Dora Sanchez Hernandez has fiercely protected her son. From the time Erik Esequizel was born prematurely at just 24 weeks, she has been there for him. Through 50 surgeries and two near-death episodes. Through the daily demands of feeding, bathing and dressing. Through abandonment by his father and advice from doctors to pull the plug. Now - in what L.A. County Superior Court Judge Michael I. Levanas called a "celebration of family" - Hernandez and 14 other families have been granted limited conservatorships over their disabled children.

College graduation is typically a time to tally accomplishments and to look ahead. But for many graduates, it is also a time to tally student loans and figure out how to repay them. About two-thirds of college graduates have some student loans to pay off, and their average debt is about $25,000 to $28,700, according to estimates by education experts and organizations. (About 10% of those with loans owe more than $50,000 or so.) Many college seniors say they had not thought much about their debt until they received summaries just before graduation.

Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises. "Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does," said Juan Felipe Herrera, 63. "People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. " Herrera then launched into poems by Federico García Lorca and other 20th century masters and had students recite their own compositions for group critiques.

As if on cue, all faces turn alertly toward the front of the classroom where Bridget Brownell has set up a slide show at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. They are about to view diseased sex organs. "First," she said, "let me take attendance, and then I will shock you. " Brownell belongs to a declining breed: She's a certified health instructor leading a one-semester health class in a California public high school. The Los Angeles Unified School District nearly killed health as a required course, to focus more on its new mandate that all students complete college-prep classes.

The United States has reached a historic tipping point, with children born to Latino, Asian, African American and mixed-race parents now constituting a majority of all births, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The long-expected demographic shift is considered a milestone for the nation, though one that California passed three decades ago when births to racial and ethnic minorities surpassed those to white parents. The new report shows that minorities accounted for about 2 million, or 50.4%, of U.S. births in the 12 months ending July 1 of last year.

University of California regents Wednesday discussed the possibility of a 6% tuition increase for next fall but pledged that they would lobby hard to avoid such a $732-per-student hike. With such money worries rippling through the 10-campus system, the regents approved the hiring of a new chancellor for UC San Diego at a $411,084 salary, which is 4.8% higher than his predecessor, Marye Anne Fox. In addition, Pradeep Khosla, now the engineering dean at Carnegie Mellon University, will receive a relocation bonus of nearly $24,700 annually for his first four years.

It's lunchtime at Van Nuys High School and students stream into the cafeteria to check out the day's fare: black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears and other items on a new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District. But Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez don't even bother to line up. Iraides said the school food previously made her throw up, and Mayra calls it "nasty, rotty stuff. " So what do they eat? The juniors pull three bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks.

Like many business school graduates, Jake Neuberg and Ramit Varna had big plans. Theirs didn't involve corporate offices with city views or big signing bonuses but instead the standardized test that is the bane of many high school students' existence. When they graduated from UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 2002, the two wanted to create the largest SAT preparation company in the country, even larger than long-established companies Kaplan and Princeton Review.

A Bay Area nonprofit backed partly by groups known for battling teachers unions has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn five California laws that, they say, make it too difficult to dismiss ineffective teachers. The suit, filed on behalf of eight students, takes aim at California laws that govern teacher tenure rules, seniority protections and the teacher dismissal process. "A handful of outdated laws passed by the California Legislature are preventing school administrators from maintaining or improving the quality of our public educational system," according to the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court and announced Tuesday.

Now that most states have received or applied for relief from the No Child Left Behind Act, California is submitting its own proposal . And in true California fashion, it's - different. The state has long been at odds with the U.S. Education Department over the waiver process. Both sides agree that the federal law is flawed to the point of being counterproductive. But California won't agree to do what other states have promised to get out from under the law's most punitive measures: include standardized test scores as a significant component in the performance evaluations of individual teachers.