Where were you,

when the winds blew,

and the limbs flew?

Where were you,

when the sparks flew,

and the power went too --

and the teenagers cried:

“Now what do we do?”

Southern California's devastating windstorm toppled trees, damaged homes and cars, and knocked out power to thousands, forcing numerous schools to call off classes.  

It's the combination of those last two, frankly, that caused real headaches.

Thousands of teenagers, members of the most wired generation in history, were suddenly confronted with their worst nightmare:  Forced to be home with mom or dad, and denied the three basic necessities of life -- TVs, computers and smartphones.

That wasn't just the wind you heard shrieking.

At my house, the conversations went something like this:

Son No. 2: I need to call [blank] (name removed to protect the innocent).

Mom:  Go ahead, this phone works (points to ancient touch-tone land-line phone with a cord in living room).

Son:  But you'll be able to hear what I'm saying.

Mom:  That's right.

Or this:

Son No. 1 (after letting said phone ring 10 times):  Hello?

Dad:  Hello?

Son No. 1:  Oh, I didn't know that was our phone ringing.  I mean, I heard it ringing, but I didn't know what it was.

Dad:  That's our old land-line phone.

Son No. 1:  Yea.  You know, this is kinda cool.

Still, on a stormy day, they were among the haves:  Those with land lines. (Tell me again, oh techno wizards, how it's so '80s to keep a land line?)

Mostly, though, it was retro-day for kids and parents, with a real mid-20th century vibe.

How do you tell time when the power's out?  How about the 50-year-old grandfather clock. Or that battery-powered travel alarm. 

And what do kids do when "there's nothing to do"?

I slept in.

I read all day.

I got all my homework done in record time because there were no distractions.

I (take your pick) hung out with friends, played ultimate Frisbee or basketball, went for a walk, drove around. (The latter was especially popular because -– ever the survivalists -– kids knew that they could kill two birds with one stone:  Ditch their parents and charge their devices.)

As the day wore on, folks discovered old truths. Such as how dark it gets at 5 in the afternoon when there are no lights. And how -- even when charged -- today's high-tech devices devour power and run down batteries.

In the '60s, we turned on, tuned in and dropped out.

Today's kids just want to plug back in.

Of course, they'll get their wish.  The power will come back. Modern life will return.

Still, it was kinda, uh, what's the word? Oh yea: Cool.

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Photo: Felled trees and a power line at Longden Avenue at San Gabriel Boulevard. Credit: Ken Kwok / Los Angeles Times

So the "stupor committee" failed.  Surprise.

Democrats wouldn't budge on cuts to social programs without tax hikes. Republicans wouldn't budge on raising taxes. Voila: A no-budge(t) collapse.

Where have we seen this before?

Oh, right: California's Legislature.

The "super committee" was supposed to make the hard choices that Congress couldn't.  The nation's future was at risk, our political leaders warned.  This time it's serious. We can't kick this can down the road any more.

Oh yes we can.  Heck, we've been kicking this can down the road in California for years.

Remember all the brinkmanship during Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration?  How many times did we hear that we had to get our fiscal house in order?  How many times did someone say "it's now or never"?

But it wasn't.  And it isn't. 

California did what Washington is about to do:  Take the meat-cleaver approach.

Our state budget  calls for automatic cuts if revenues don't come in at a certain level.  And guess what? Revenues aren't keeping up.

So the cuts are coming -– but only to stuff we don't need, like schools. That allows the politicians to point fingers -– while the arms and legs of our kids' futures are being lopped off.

It works so well, Washington has basically agreed to do the same thing:  The super committee couldn't come up with a plan, so automatic spending cuts will kick in.

But wait, there's more: Things are so messed up that, because the committee failed, the average American may see a tax increase of nearly $1,000 in January.  Oh, and unemployment benefits for about 2 million people may run out. (Not to worry, though: The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are safe!)

Good plan.  Thanks, Congress -– now that's leadership.

Still, there's one bit of  good news for California. At least we won't be the butt of all those jokes about how screwed up our state has become.

Because now the whole country will be as screwed up as we are.

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Photo: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is co-chair of the congressional "super committee." Credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images

We can talk all day about test scores and what they tell, do, or don't tell us about the worth of a teacher, but most parents know the good and bad teachers on campus from a mile away. I was reminded of that at Thursday night's meeting of the school board at the Santa Monica-Malibu School District, which was mostly about whether the donations of parents at the rich schools in Malibu should be put in a central pot for use by students at all the district schools -- more coming on that next week.

But one mother spoke on a very different topic. It seems her Santa Monica school had instituted a new system that informed parents about their children's ongoing grades as well as their homework and other assignments, but that some teachers weren't posting the assignments. This mom wanted to make sure her sons were doing their schoolwork.

When she contacted the teachers, most were great about adding the assignments, but about one-fifth  told her that the union contract didn't require them to do that and so they weren't going to extend to her what they considered to be a "courtesy," not a necessity.

Of course, I don't know what the teacher contract says, and maybe these teachers didn't either. But there's no reason to doubt this frustrated woman's word.

Often, teachers write to The Times about reform by complaining that they are being held accountable for the failures of uninvolved parents. To some extent, that's true. But it's too easy for union supporters to avoid talking about truly awful teachers -- including the teachers who just don't care. Here's a woman who wants to be involved in a very direct way, helping the teachers by making sure her children do their part in the educational process.

The superintendent promised to look into it, and I'll be interested in hearing the results. If this mother's story is true, though, it's a perfect illustration of why the public is so fed up with teachers' unions and with uncaring teachers who go through the motions. For many parents, it's not all that important how much teachers improve their students' scores on a standardized test that the kids take once a year. What's most important is whether teachers care, whether they interpret information in ways that helped children learn and think, and in this case, whether they bother to do their jobs. From my perspective, any teacher who isn't willing to follow a school's policy by giving parents the information they need to do their job should be fired.   

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Illustration by Peter Bennett / For The Times

Alabama’s controversial immigration law will undoubtedly be decided by the courts. A federal judge and appeals court have already weighed in, blocking parts of the law, including provisions that would allow school officials to ask students about their immigration status.

Whether the law is ultimately found to be unconstitutional has yet to be determined. A trial is pending.

In the meantime, at least one state court has already been forced to wrestle with one part of the new law. This week, a judge in Jefferson County Alabama has cast doubt on the constitutionality of the state law.

The case involved two immigrants who sued a used car dealer alleging the seller failed to disclose the real condition of the cars -- salvage vehicles. The dealer asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit, arguing that the men are undocumented immigrants and under a new Alabama law any contract with those illegally in the country is prohibited from being enforced.

The judge refused to dismiss the case because the new Alabama law is at odds with the state constitution drafted in 1901. It bans state lawmakers from enacting laws that interfere with existing agreements.

It seems the Alabama law is already having all kinds of unintentional consequences.

What do you think?

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Why is Barack Obama’s presidency a tale of two situations?

On the foreign-policy front, the administration has had a string of successes: Osama bin Laden killed; major Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen killed; and this week, of course, Moammar Kadafi killed.

And on Friday, the president announced that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by year’s end.

An unpopular war will be officially over for us soon.  Terrorists and terrorist groups that threaten us are dead or on the run. Libya’s longtime strongman has been overthrown, thanks in part to Obama’s policy that had the U.S. and NATO working together.

But here’s a question:  If Obama has been so successful in foreign policy, why has he been so unsuccessful on domestic issues? 

Sure, unemployment fell in California last month, but it's nothing to write home about. Joblessness, foreclosures, poverty -– you know the numbers, and they're not pretty.

Even his signature domestic achievement, healthcare reform, remains under attack by Republicans.  They vow to undo it as soon as they control the White House again.

So what’s the deal?

It isn't that he's escaped criticism on foreign policy. Republicans -- heck, even some Democrats -- have been critical of Obama's moves.   But what he's done has, in the main, worked.

No, domestically the problem is that Obama's opponents have turned criticism into obstructionism.  Unlike his foreign policies, Obama's efforts to fix the economy have been thwarted at every turn by Republicans.

Take the president's jobs bill. As The Times reported:

Republican-led opposition in the Senate blocked a key element of President Obama’s jobs plan Thursday night -- a proposal to send $35 billion to cash-strapped states to keep public school teachers, police and firefighters on the job.

That's right.  Republicans won't even agree to spend $35 billion on teachers, police and firefighters.

And why not?

Republicans are fighting the measures because they do not believe such government efforts will help businesses to create jobs in the struggling economy. They also oppose asking those earning beyond $1 million a year to pay more.

Yes, protecting people making more than $1 million a year is far more important that saving a $35,000-a-year teaching job, wouldn’t you say?

The bottom line?  It's wrong to say the president's domestic policies haven't worked when those policies haven't even been given the chance to work.

Abroad, Obama has been allowed to set policy, and those policies have been given time to work.  And, for the most part, they have.

Perhaps if Republicans gave the president that same leeway on domestic policy, we might be winning some battles at home, too.

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Photo: President Obama on Tuesday told a crowd at Greensville County High School in Emporia, Va., that Republicans were blocking his efforts to boost the economy to deal him a political setback. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images

School officials tend to run into trouble when they play cop instead of educator. So it was with the dean at Porter Middle School in the San Fernando Valley who unsuccessfully (what on earth was she thinking?) tried to devise her own campus drug sting by dragging a 12-year-old in to be the decoy.

Now the ACLU has filed suit against a Glendale high school for reportedly staging its own version of a "Scared Straight" scenario to keep some possibly at-risk students from joining gangs. The lawsuit claims that the school called in police, who detained about 55 Latino students in a classroom, questioned them, examined and asked about their tattoos, demanded their addresses and even threatened them. There was no evidence, at least before the incident, that the students had broken any laws or school rules.

The school district doesn't appear to contest the facts of the matter; in The Times' story on the subject,  a school district spokesman says that this was an educational exercise designed to keep some students who looked like they were on the verge of joining gangs -- hanging out with and admiring known gang members -- from taking the next step.

It's unclear why the ACLU sees this as racial profiling. The students were all of one ethnic group, true; the question is, would school officials have acted the same if they saw a group of white students hanging out with and showing respect for known lawbreakers who were back at school on probation? Were they inclined to bother Latino students whose behavior didn't worry them?

But if the lawsuit is accurate in its description of the incident, the school officials were at least guilty of a really bad idea. Frightening and intimidating students at school, a place where they should feel welcome and safe, could only serve to alienate at-risk teens. Dragging in police when no laws have been broken raised the whole incident to the level of unnecessarily high drama.

How about an assembly or series of assemblies for all students, featuring anti-gang programs and former gangsters who can talk about what they lost through their involvement? Maybe bringing the students into a counselor's office, on an individual basis, for a heart-to-heart? Or, if the administrators needed to get tougher, calling their parents in for a conference?

Being treated like a criminal by school administrators isn't all that likely to prevent a kid from becoming one.

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Photo: ACLU attorney David Sapp speaks to the media during a news conference about the lawsuit alleging that students searched by police were racially profiled. Credit: Raul Roa / Times Community News

It's a new school year, so the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is fretting about ... flu? Alcohol abuse? Nope, this time the agency is worried about lack of sleep among teenagers. About 70% aren't getting the recommended minimum of eight hours on school nights, the CDC reports, and students who don't sleep enough are more likely to be depressed, to drink sugared soda, to smoke cigarettes and so forth.

This is the moment to pull out the usual observation that correlation does not imply causality. In other words, lack of sleep isn't necessarily causing depression and tobacco use. It could well be, for example, that depressed youngsters have a harder time sleeping. In fact, that's probably the more likely scenario.

That said, teenagers don't get much sleep and most parents, looking at their own kids, will say it's a problem. There's a visible difference between a well-rested adolescent and the grumpy character who slouches around after a late night and catches every cold and flu bug traveling around campus.

The CDC hasn't been offering much in the way of solutions so far, but lack of sleep isn't usually the teenager's idea of fun. Adults place so many demands on them -- do more homework or the students in India will take away your future job, get involved in the school play, community service and at least two athletic teams or a good college won't consider you worth a glance -- that sleep takes a lower priority in everyone's eyes. I remember a coworker who said that while she was in high school, her mother made her stay up until 1:30 a.m. every day for extra study, telling her that teenagers don't need more than five hours of sleep.

Then, of course, there's evidence that teenagers' internal clocks work differently than the scheduling demands we place on them. Their circadian rhythms are telling them to start winding down at 11 p.m., according to the Mayo Clinic, while school starts at about 7:30 a.m.

Of course, their computer time is often a big time chunk out of the day, but before we get too smug about their ridiculous social networking habits, let's remember that prior generations tended to spend that extra time staring vapidly at a TV set each evening.

Authorities are good at making parents aware of all the items they must provide for their children -- healthy, tasty, home-cooked meals with lots of vegetables; family dinnertime with stimulating conversation; involvement in school events for kids and parents alike; academic support; and now sleep. They just haven't gotten very good yet and telling parents how to fit it all in.

Besides, as most parents know, sleep is like the adolescent version of potty training. There are some things you just can't force a kid to do; toddlers and teenagers have more than a little in common.

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Photo: Kyle Gosselin talks to a friend on his cellphone while working on a computer in an upstairs study at his home. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

On Friday, the Obama administration came out with details about how states could win relief from No Child Left Behind's requirement that all students be proficient by 2014. It was always a silly and wildly unrealistic gimmick, and the forecast is that the vast majority of schools will be labeled as "failing" over the next couple of years.

States would gain a waiver from the 2014 mandate, but only if they followed a long list of new requirements. Some of those requirements make more sense than others. Schools could pick new goals to meet. Two of those are federally drawn, and frankly, they're about as bad as the old goals. They still make "proficiency" the only mark of success, even if schools show big improvements among their lowest-performing students. The third would allow states to draw up their own new goals, which would have to pass a review process.

The U.S. Department of Education would stop treating schools that are missing goals in minor ways as though they are as bad as the utter failures.

However, as it did with "Race to the Top," the Obama administration is using a carrot-and-stick method to push states into doing what it otherwise could not require. Want a waiver?  Better include standardized test scores in those teacher evaluations.

High standards are good, and there isn't anything inherently wrong with making test scores a relatively minor part of a teacher evaluation. But this would indicate a level of federal management of schools that states have resisted. For all its badly written elements -- and No Child Left Behind is riddled with them -- its strong point is that it focuses on results, not on dictating how schools get there.

We don't really have much in the way of evidence that including the test scores will be some sort of magic key to improving education. And the tests themselves will be changing drastically over the next five years, with 40 states having developed core curriculum standards that call for deeper, more meaningful tests. Shouldn't we see how that plays out before we start tying teachers' livelihoods to test scores?

As The Times' editorial board prepares to write about the waiver proposal, as well as Republican-led legislation that has come forth to reform parts of No Child Left Behind, what are your thoughts about what this should look like?

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Photo: President Obama smiles as he speaks about the need to provide states with relief from key provisions of the No Child Left Behind education policy Sept. 23. Credit: Larry Downing / Reuters

Republicans reiterated their border-first, border-only approach to fixing the nation's immigration system during Thursday's debate. But at least two of the candidates offered up a couple of additional suggestions.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) repeated her pledge to build a wall along every inch of the border between the United States and Mexico, and also promised to end all taxpayer-funded support for illegal immigrants or their children.

It's unclear what benefits Bachmann would eliminate because undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for federal assistance, including welfare. They are not denied access, however, to emergency room care. And undocumented immigrant children are allowed to attend public schools.

Bachmann may want to consider a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Plyler vs. Doe. The court rebuffed efforts to keep undocumented immigrant children out of the classroom, finding that schools could not deny them access to a public education.

Perhaps she is referring to a handful of states that have voted to grant undocumented immigrants in-state tuition. The U.S. Supreme Court in June refused to consider an appeal to overturn a California law that allows undocumented immigrants to pay reduced, in-state tuition.

It would be interesting to see if Bachmann mounts a legal challenge -– something she not need be president to do.

Similarly, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said he opposes illegal immigration. However, he is also opposed to E-Verify, a controversial employment verification system that is the centerpiece of Republicans'  enforcement efforts in Congress, which would would require all employers to use E-verify to confirm that a worker is in the country legally and eligible to work. Paul has previously said E-Verify places too great a burden on business owners to act as "policemen."

The problem is that employers are already required to verify an employee's eligibility to legally work in the U.S.; they rely on passports or other information to confirm the person's status. And those businesses that are most worried about it aren't concerned about playing cop. Instead, growers say they worry E-Verify will wipe out their labor supply. American farmers admit that more than half of all farmworkers in the U.S. who harvest crops are here illegally. Growers say they can't find enough legal workers willing to help with the harvests.

Like Paul, some "tea party" groups have suggested that E-Verify is an intrusion by government because it is a de facto national identification system.

So far, the field of candidates has stuck to a border-only conversation. It will be interesting to see if the talking points give way to more specific plans or whether the debate stays light and fluffy.

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Back-to-school night has changed over the last couple of decades, and not for the better. It's unclear to me exactly when this happened; it's been more of a gradual shift noticed after 23 years of annual attendance at my kids' schools, all of them in an affluent suburban school district. Three more to go after Wednesday night.

In those earlier years, teachers spent most of their time -- admittedly, in upper grades, they're allotted a measly 10 minutes each -- talking about what the students would learn and how they, the teachers, would transmit knowledge, build skills and foster intellectual growth. Sometimes they would talk about goals -- not testing goals, but about sending students out of the class at the end of the year who had more confidence in themselves, or more compassion for others, a sense of being world citizens, or a lifelong reading or exercise habit.

These days, the talk is mostly of grading rubrics, class rules, points deductions for various behaviors, the preparations for the state's standardized test. There were a couple of classes Wednesday night that could have been in any subject; the teachers didn't actually mention anything about the curriculum or the value of learning this topic, but one gave a lengthy talk about the dire consequences of unexcused absences. Another teacher finished early with her spiel about how to navigate her website and how many days students were given to make up missed work, so asked for questions, then seemed nonplussed and unprepared when a parent asked what the students would learn this year.

I imagine that we parents have contributed mightily to this. Students aren't the only grade-obsessed ones around these days; their parents appear to be planning for their second-graders' Princeton careers. If teachers don't mention how the grades work, a parent is sure to mention it. Surely, the most common parental question is, "Do you give extra credit?" This is also the teachers' one big chance to impress a few basic rules on the parents so that no one comes running later for a special break for this little darling or that. The state's standardized tests have added another layer of deadening.

Still, a couple of teachers managed their way around this. One dispensed with the organizational stuff in a minute and gave us the contact information for parents who might have more questions -- and then launched into an enthusiastic pitch about the value of learning both foreign language and culture, and how the students would absorb both. The English teacher handed out an easy-to-parse brochure she'd prepared to take care of the basics and devoted most of her time to helping parents understand the wonderful literature the students would read and analyze, and urging them to immerse themselves in a couple of the books as well.

Various teachers interpreted the school district's new emphasis on college- and career readiness in extremely different ways. One saw that as the virtual end of multiple-choice tests. Long live the lively classroom discussion and essay writing! Another saw it as paramount the importance of tidy-looking homework with proper staples, because messy work is not accepted in the workplace.

The most interesting part of this is comparing the evening with my daughter's view of her daily educational experience. The classes she loves and feels she's learning the most in happen to be the same ones where the teachers showed a passion for their subject and well-focused goals for the students they teach. Goals, that is, beyond well-stapled homework.

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-- Karin Klein

Photo: A student at Bard Elementary School. Credit: Carlos Chavez / Los Angeles Times