Nine California school districts lost an appeal to have students who speak English as a second language undergo testing in their native languages for No Child Left Behind assessments. The school districts first sued for that right in 2005, claiming that it punished non-native English speakers, 85 percent of whom speak Spanish.

These last days of July and the first few weeks in August continually prey on my mind. As an educator I always want what is best for all students: great teachers, rigorous, engaging lessons, and high expectations for learning. As an administrator, one has the charge to provide these during the 180-day school year. But what about the 65-70 days of summertime?

SJI’s Rants & Raves has an open-door policy, especially in summertime: All opinions on any topic are welcome.

Over the years, San Jose Stage Company’s annual political-theater event, Monday Night Live, has gotten less vicious in its political satire while amping up sex humor and punctuating skits with F-bombs. Last year, library porn filter champion Pete Constant achieved notoriety by donning a kinky S&M ball-gag. Constant bravely returned to the scene of the crime on Monday with another, slightly less risque, dominatrix-themed skit. But his aide, Jim Cogan, a council candidate himself, showed the lengths to which aspiring officeholders will go for public attention.

Santa Clara County’s poet laureate Nils Peterson may not have written a word of it, but he was proud to announce that the county’s official poem has finally been completed. The poem, entitled “A Family Album; Santa Clara County 2009,” was composed by hundreds of local residents, each of whom contributed a line. Peterson then selected 100 lines and fashioned them into a poem, divided into such sections as Work, People, Our Lives, What Was Lost, What’s Here, and The Look of Our Place.

The historic St. James Square neighborhood in downtown San Jose is now home to another worldwide center of creative exploits. ZER01, the organization that produces the 01SJ biennial festival of art and technology, officially opened its new permanent command center at St. James Place, 152 N. Third St., last week. Thanks to the donations of many entities, the new high-tech office occupies two floors and gives ZER01 a solid planning headquarters for year-round programming as well as a place to host visiting artists and a meeting space for its partners to gather and exchange ideas. The facility is slick.

Last Tuesday I had the same exact meal as two million people—two eggs, two strips of bacon, two pancakes, and two pieces of sausage. I feel like a jerk saying this, but I have never felt more connected to my fellow Americans, or our collective condition.

Last month saw the passing of John Byrne, lead singer of the ‘60s San Jose garage-rock band Count Five. He penned the immortal fuzzed-out 1966 hit Psychotic Reaction, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard charts and was listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Top 500 songs that shaped rock & roll. A whole two years before Dionne Warwick sang that tune we all know and despise, the Count Five staged its famous promo picture, wearing Dracula-style capes in front of the Winchester Mystery House.

My vote for the Best Apocalyptic, Post-Suburban-Wasteland Photo Book of 2008 goes hands down to a glossy hardback aptly titled Frezno from Process Books. Photographer Tony Stamolis grew up in that Central Valley city, and spent six years chronicling the dreadful, doped-out, deranged and disregarded underbelly of the city whose airport code is FAT.

Tom McEnery recently returned from a visit to Vietnam. This is the second in a three-part series.

Beyond the Continental Hotel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame—we just missed a wedding there—is a place I was both anxious and nervous to see. It was once called the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. But in slight bow to political expediency,  it has a new name: The War Remnants Museum.

“My father insists that I call it Saigon—you see, he was in the Southern Army,”  was the simple, direct way our guide informed us why he used the city’s old name.  The comment was made in near perfect English. “Sometimes we say Ho Chi Minh City,” he conceded, “but I prefer Saigon.”  This was our introduction to a place so much in American minds for the last forty years, just recently a significant factor in San Jose politics.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” a father tells his son while standing outside the cyclone fences being erected for the inaugural. He was, of course, talking about tickets. And if you know a congressperson, you had a chance of getting the Ticket of the Century.

Last month, for the seventh year in a row, the folks at NVIDIA—the Santa Clara–based visual computing giant—decided to do forego their annual company holiday party and commit themselves to a knock-down, drag-out community service effort called Project Inspire. One thousand employees, along with students, friends and family, volunteered and made their way out to Overfelt High School in East San Jose for the shindig last month.

One of the shows that defined my childhood was the late-night masterpiece, Creature Features, on KTVU, Channel 2 in the ‘70s. On Saturday nights at 11pm, there would be a table. With a skull on it. With a candle emerging from the skull. Bob Wilkins would sit there in a faded rocking chair, cigar in hand or mouth, wearing the most hideous checkerboard sports coat, the ugliest plaid slacks, and he would show the most insipid, utterly worst horror movies imaginable.

The Sword of Damocles hanging by a horse hair over the heads of the legislators in Sacramento is about to drop come Feb. 1.  The two choices have been to increase revenue and/or cut programs/spending in order to dig us out of the grave we starting digging when we passed Proposition 13 over 30 years ago. If I begin from the premise that K-12 education is over 40 percent of the state budget, then education, along with all other state-funded programs, must share in the pain.

Former San Jose State University literature professor Shelby Steele, now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is in the news today for taking issue with the GOP’s distribution of a racially inappropriate video, Barack, the Magic Negro.