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But California is radically boosting pension spending instead. Legislation bailing out California’s teacher pension fund requires a doubling of spending on pensions to more than $10 billion per year, leaving that much less for preparing, hiring, paying and upgrading active teachers. $10 billion is nearly three times more than the state spends on California State University or the University of California. Needless to say, California cannot deploy a sufficient number of great teachers for six million students when so much of its education budget is being diverted to pensions.

The report by The Campaign for College Opportunity said California ranks near the bottom nationally in the rate of bachelor and associate degrees in those subjects at a time that it has far more STEM entry-level jobs than any other state.

After years of lagging behind Arkansas, West Virginia and several other states, California is expanding computer science in public schools across the state and training teachers to teach it. 

The manufacturing sector shed 10,000 jobs, and has shown job losses in three of the past four months. Year-over-year growth in manufacturing employment has been negative for three months in a row, and it would appear that whatever manufacturing employment renaissance occurred in the years immediately following the Great Recession is over. . . Part of the answer came this week in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which suggests that manufacturing employment weakness may be a result of a lack of labor supply, not lack of demand. Manufacturing job openings in April jumped to a 15-year high.

Wednesday’s report on the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) has intensified concerns among some economists that the U.S. economy is running out of people who want jobs and are qualified to fill existing openings. 

In a recent court hearing, one young man after another claimed that former Franklin High football coach Jaime Jimenez befriended them during summer practice before 9th grade, then sexually abused them. But it’s not the allegations against Jimenez that are at the center of a lawsuit filed this month against the Los Angeles Unified School District. It’s about whether school officials once again missed — or ignored — warning signs about Jimenez that prolonged the alleged abuse. The nation’s second-largest school system has been plagued in recent years by a series of cases in which officials missed indications of teacher misconduct, and in some instances, continued to employ teachers who were under a cloud, or ignored or overlooked direct complaints

The dispute began about a year ago, when the union demanded a 5% pay raise for professors and other faculty members. Cal State said it could only afford a 2% raise. . . The compromise plan allows for a larger pay increase, but spreads out the cost over three fiscal years. . . A final bump on July 1, 2017, will bring the total increase to about 10.5%. . . So far, administrators have identified about $68 million to cover the salary increases going into July and are hopeful they will secure additional funding from the state by the end of the next budget cycle.

Why aren’t teacher salaries rising? . . . It’s not for lack of money. Even after adjusting for inflation and rising student enrollment, total school spending is up by about 29 percent over the last 20 years. . . This puzzle can be explained by three trends eating into teachers’ takehome pay: rising health care costs, declining student/teacher ratios, and rising retirement costs. . . Today, states are paying an average of 12 percent of each teacher’s salary just for debt costs.

Nearly 402,000 California high school seniors received diplomas last year, raising the state’s graduation rate to 82.3 percent, up 1.3 percentage points from 2014’s class, state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson reported Tuesday.

Despite getting an extra $187,000 this year to help at-risk kids — the state’s new way of handing out money — Oak Ridge still has to make cuts because several other streams of funding are drying up. . . A big chunk of the state money next year is paying for the school’s assistant principal. But some teachers argue specialists are more critical.

Despite lowered state revenue projections and Gov. Jerry Brown’s prediction that an economic recession could come any moment, state funding for K-12 and community colleges will rise nearly $3 billion for the fiscal year starting July 1, under the May revision of the 2016-17 state budget released on Friday.

Yet Canada, which has about one-tenth the population of the United States, still has a higher absolute number of people who undergo apprenticeships than the U.S., notes Lerman. In the U.S., there are barely more than 300,000 people in apprenticeships. “That is really a drop in the bucket compared to the U.K. or some of the E.U. countries,” says Colborn. “That is a function of our secondary-school system, which for the last 30 years has been almost entirely focused on putting people on a college trajectory.”

Higher Education in California

What happened? Technology happened, and we need come to grips with the reality that new technologies and new skill requirements are demanding new ways to prepare our future workforce. By 2025, 65 percent of all job openings in California will require some form of postsecondary education, according to Dr. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. California — of all states – should be leading the nation on delivering this, but unfortunately, we’re not keeping up.

But for reasons that defy common sense, many of our larger school districts assume that all students are bound for four-year colleges, even though a relatively small number of those who make it through high school will, in fact, earn bachelor degrees.