News

By funding public schools, health systems, and social services, state and local governments provide the resources and services that support children’s healthy development. But children in some states tend to do better than others on measures of key educational and health outcomes. We examine how much states spend on children, including education, health, income security, and social services spending. We find substantial differences in how much states spend on children and discuss the implications of these differences. We also highlight the possibility that population trends will lead to an even wider spending gap in the future.

California school and community college districts are contributing $5.6 billion to CalSTRS and CalPERS during the current school year. These contributions will total $6.7 billion in the next school year, and, according to CPC’s analysis of actuarial projections, they will reach $11.3 billion in the 2022-2023 school year.

The California State Auditor has delivered a damning assessment of the management practices at the single largest university system in the United States. . . In other words, administrators have been hiring more administrators for make-work positions and giving each other raises without sufficient accountability in a self-perpetuating cycle of bureaucratic decay that is sadly endemic to academia at large.

About 60% of adults and 66% of public-school parents in a new poll said they favored vouchers that parents could use for their children’s education at any public, private, or parochial school. Republicans (67%) were more likely than independents (56%) and far more likely than Democrats (46%) to hold that view. Across racial and ethnic groups, 73% of African Americans, 69% of Latinos, 56% of Asians and 51% of whites supported vouchers.

Four years after its passage, the Local Control Funding Formula has narrowed and, by some measures, reversed the funding gap between the lowest- and highest-poverty districts in California. But an infusion of funding hasn’t translated yet into improved opportunities for low-income students and English learners ­– and may not achieve that goal without tighter disclosure rules and more innovative approaches to distributing districts’ resources, a student advocacy organization said in a report published Thursday.

When the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy surveyed foreign exchange students studying in the U.S. in 2001, it found that they thought that American education was a cake walk compared to secondary education in their home countries. And when it conducted the survey again in 2016, it found that exchange students thought that U.S. education was even less challenging than before.

California State University’s governing board has approved a tuition increase that will raise the cost of an education by $270 a year at its 23 campuses.

The University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts in response to a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the educational content accessible to people with disabilities.

Facing insolvency, Santa Barbara’s Hope Elementary School district governing board laid off six full-time and three part time teachers, effective next academic year. . . During the 2016 school year, general fund expenditures exceeded revenues by $132,000. Among the district’s expenditures were a $146,000 contribution to CalPERS and a $458,000 contribution to CalSTRS.

California will issue school and district report cards later this month, but without a key measure – whether students are prepared for college or careers.

The study, Apples to Apples, released on Wednesday, shows charter schools and private school voucher programs doing better at educating students than public schools in Wisconsin.

Some of the only state money available to incoming college students could get cut under Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget.

A study found that the California State University system had 11,614 full-time faculty in 1973, and 12,019 in 2008. During that same time period, administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, ending up with more administrators than faculty. I would guess that things were not really all that lean in 1973 either. It has only gotten worse since 2008.

In a shock critics had warned against, Golden State schools discovered that their nation’s largest pension system, CalPERS, was on track to force substantial budgetary cutbacks on core education spending.

According to a landmark study for the Equality Opportunity Project, Stanford’s Raj Chetty and coauthors found that certain state and community colleges offer effective pathways to higher incomes for younger generations. . . Of the top ten colleges in the country with the best mobility rates, three are in California: top-ranked Cal State Los Angeles, Glendale Community College and Cal Poly Pomona.