The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday approved a three-year benefits package that contains some costs but falls well short of the savings that district officials say is needed to keep the school system solvent. The 60,000 employees of L.A. Unified are not among the nation’s highest paid, but most enjoy comprehensive medical benefits […]
High school graduation rates have traditionally been a barometer of student success, as well as a measure of the quality of school systems. The members of California’s education establishment have been high-fiving each other over the state’s on-time high school graduation rate reaching 83.2 percent in 2016. But a peak behind the curtain reveals some […]
California’s sweeping education reforms championed by Gov. Jerry Brown have resulted in higher graduation rates and especially sizable gains in math among low-income students in the 11th grade, according to a new study. . . . The Learning Policy Institute’s Tanner said that because math scores increased more among low-income children than all children, if […]
One of the state’s largest charter school organizations is exploring whether it wants to withdraw from CalPERS, raising alarms among unions and public pension officials who fear a gradual weakening of the fund. . . . But Aspire’s inquiry about leaving CalPERS comes at a moment when a rising share of new charter schools are […]
With tens of thousands of Californians turning to private and out-of-state schools for distance learning, Brown and Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley say they want to provide an affordable, high-quality option for busy adults to gain skills that will help them in the labor market. They’re asking the Legislature to approve $100 million in […]
Center for a Competitive Workforce (CCW), of which LAEDC is a partner, has published a new report analyzing the Entertainment & Digital Media Industry in the Los Angeles Basin. The report is the first to define the rapidly growing “Digital Media” industry and its occupations in Los Angeles, and it analyzes the overlap with the […]
In this study, researchers Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and LPI Senior Researcher Sean Tanner found LCFF-induced increases in district revenue has a “strongly significant” impact on average high school graduation rates for all students in the state. For example, a […]
A majority of Californians say affordability is a problem in the state’s public colleges and universities, according to the PPIC Statewide Survey. In addition, three-quarters of residents in the survey agree that the price of college prevents students who are qualified and motivated from going to college. Not surprisingly, state leaders are exploring new strategies to help students and families better cope with college costs. Most current approaches, such as state and institutional financial aid, focus primarily on tuition relief. This makes sense, as tuition more than doubled at California universities from 2006 to 2012—and is on the rise again.
About one-quarter of California’s school districts don’t make the grade in serving students — either in achievement or other areas assessed under the state’s new school report cards. Oakland, Hayward, Antioch, Mount Diablo and Pittsburg unified school districts and East Side Union High in San Jose are among the 228 poorest performers in the state. Most of those districts fail to meet benchmarks for one or two groups of students, particularly, with those who have disabilities. In East Side, for example, the district fell short in that category as well as with homeless and foster youth students.
One out of every seven students in the Los Angeles Unified School District — more than 80,000 kids — missed more than three weeks of classes, according to a report from an attendance task force presented to the district’s school board Tuesday.
Missing that amount of school is enough to put a student’s education at risk: Students who are “chronically absent,” which many researchers define as missing at least 15 school days in a year, are more likely to drop out once they reach high school. Roughly another 100,000 L.A. Unified students who missed between eight and 14 days of school last year are also at increased risk.
A group of prominent lawyers representing teachers and students from poor performing schools sued California on Tuesday, arguing that the state has done nothing about a high number of schoolchildren who do not know how to read.
The advocacy law firm, Public Counsel, filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court to demand the California Department of Education address its “literacy crisis.” The state has not followed suggestions from its own report on the problem five years ago, the lawsuit said
Most Americans don’t need a college degree to get a job. Many do need to spend a lot of time on their feet and get some post-employment training if they want to keep it, according to a new Labor Department report detailing occupational requirements for American workers in 2017.
Building on our January 2017 report on automation, McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation (PDF–5MB), assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation. The results reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills and wages. Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.
Another prominent education research and advocacy organization that disapproves of California’s approach to school accountability has ranked California’s new system at the bottom nationwide in a report released Tuesday.
The low score by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reflects a core disagreement over how best to identify and work with schools needing help. California education leaders are unapologetic about the route they’ve chosen, and they say the Fordham analysis contains a key error.
Like Bellwether Education Partners, which harshly criticized the state’s approach in an August analysis, Washington, D.C.- and Ohio-based Fordham gives high grades to states that will rank schools with an A-F letter grade or a similar method that’s understandable at a glance. States will use rankings to select the lowest-performing schools, as required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
Three recent and seemingly discrete events neatly frame California’s political and legal war over whether the state’s six million K-12 students are being adequately educated.
The conflict pits the state’s education establishment against a coalition of civil rights groups, education reformers and charter school advocates over the “achievement gap” that separates poor children, particularly Latinos and African-Americans, from more privileged white and Asian students.
The battle has been waged in the Legislature, before the state school board and local boards and quite often in the legal arena.