LinkedIn, which has more than 400 million users, has created its own new website to synchronize with Skillful. The site, dubbed Training Finder, is designed to broker the conversation between job seekers, employers and providers of job training. Skillful acts as a funnel to specific jobs and other material on LinkedIn, with Training Finder as a more personalized form of portal.
Yet the large majority of California’s public high schools don’t offer dedicated computer science or computer programming courses, according to a Sacramento Bee review of teacher assignment data from the California Department of Education.
When looking at reinvestments in the child care system as a whole, the state has put back more than $578 million, according to the Department of Finance, which is part of the Brown Administration. Taking a more narrow look at what can be defined as child care, Brown’s finance team said the state has still pumped more than $450 million back.
Growth in “labor quality,” a measure of the skill set of the average worker, has declined in the last few years, according to the report. In 2015, the growth in overall workforce skills contributed less than 0.1 percentage points to GDP growth, the smallest contribution of labor quality to growth since 1979. Michael Feroli, the author of the note, estimates that contribution will remain below 0.1 percentage points for the next few years.
Popular culture portrays innovators in the U.S. as young college dropouts. A more accurate description is older, well-educated immigrants, according to a new study.
You would think the number of apprenticeships in the U.S. would have recovered since the recession.
It is an article of faith among California’s political class that insufficient higher educational opportunities are a constraint on California’s economic and job growth. . . Unfortunately, the facts disagree with the faith. California is educating far more people than it is creating jobs for them to take. In the past 10 years, California’s public higher education system alone issued 2,455,421 degrees. Over the same period, the state saw a net increase of only 1,136,642 jobs.
So this week the union asked its 32,000 members — down from 45,000 in 2008 — to raise their dues by nearly a third, to about $1000 per member annually, and also to allow UTLA to pass on to members any future increases in dues owed to state and national parent unions.
It could shift a greater-than-expected portion of the burden for paying off the debt to school districts; makes the state share highly vulnerable to market volatility; and leaves a good chance that the state will pay no more than it would have before the deal was struck. . . Moreover, in the long term, the plan does not ensure that the debt will be paid off by 2046, or ever.
School districts are required to begin reporting their share of a pension debt that previously had been reported only by the two big statewide retirement systems for teachers and non-teaching employees.
Up and down California, public schools are enjoying a rapid rise in state funding. With the state’s economic gains and a temporary tax increase approved by voters in 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed $71.6 billion education budget for the next fiscal year is up more than 50 percent since 2011. Spending per student has increased more than $3,800 to a projected $14,550 this year.
As it illustrates, California education funding is finally booming. The $71.6 billion budget that Gov. Jerry Brown proposed in January would be the fifth consecutive year of growth since the Great Recession. If approved by the Legislature in June, the budget will be up 50 percent from 2011. Most of the increased funds have gone to teacher and staff salaries, which account for more than 85 percent of school budgets.
The teacher shortage in the K-12 system has become so critical that a local school district is offering a $10,000 signing bonus for its next math and science teachers.
Ninety percent of students completing Capistrano Unified School District’s dental assistant career education program are hired for jobs right out of high school. . . And the auto repair graduates can go straight to work making a livable wage or continue their education for another year or two at community college and graduate to jobs earning $80,000 to $90,000 a year.
The increased pension payment is projected to consume about 38 percent of growth in the education budget between now and 2019. In other words, school districts will pay $3.1 billion more to the pension system in 2019-20 than they do today while the state’s minimum school funding guarantee, called Proposition 98, is projected to be about $8.3 billion higher in that same year.