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Tragically, in other words, the efforts devoted to raising the academic achievement of low-income children went for naught. Other factors, such as poverty and familial and peer influences, prevailed.

Total cost of compliance across all institutions in the study was found to vary between 3 percent and 11 percent of each institution’s FY2014 operating expenditures, with a median value of 6.4 percent (Exhibit 4). This variation in overall compliance was found to be driven by two key factors: 1) presence and extent of research at the institution; and 2) scale of expenditures at the institution.

This report updates and extends projections of California’s workforce skills through 2030, focusing on the supply and demand for workers with a bachelor’s degree. We find that the state will fall about 1.1 million college graduates short of economic demand if current trends persist—a problem we call the workforce skills gap. Even the arrival of highly educated workers from elsewhere is unlikely to be large enough to fill this gap.

The evaluation was funded by a grant from the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (R305E090009). It was designed to determine whether the children who participate in the TN‐VPK program make greater academic and behavioral gains in areas that prepare them for later schooling than comparable children who do not participate in the program. It is the first prospective randomized control trial of a scaled up state‐funded, targeted pre‐kindergarten program that has been undertaken.

The most important step our schools can take to help close the achievement gap, ready our students for college, and prepare our students for work in the 21st century, is to ensure that all students have equal access to effective teachers. These statutes operate counter to that goal by elevating seniority over the ability to improve student achievement, and undermining our schools’ ability to impose quality controls on their staff. Such quality controls are necessary for ensuring that all students have equal access to the sorts of teachers that are capable of teaching the 21st century skills students deserve to learn and need to succeed.

L.A. Unified already has the largest charter school program in the country, representing about 16% of total enrollment. But getting to 50% would mean creating 260 charter schools that would provide 130,000 seats, the report said. 

California will have more than 1.4 million STEM jobs by 2022, having gained 200,000 in employment, more than any other state. Other large increases in the nation during this period include Texas at 160,000 STEM jobs, and Florida, Illinois, and Virginia at between 40,000 to 60,000 jobs each.

Mr. Flores notes that the Democrat-dominated legislature in Sacramento has made a point of spending big on schools with a high concentration of disadvantaged students, with little to show for it. “You could throw millions of dollars into these schools,” he says, “and if there is no accountability, you have the same situation.”

And the picture is even worse for L.A. Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, than it is for the state. Across California, 44% of students achieved targets for their grade in English, while 34% did so in math. In L.A. Unified, the figures were 33% and 25%.

Just over half of 11th graders (56 percent) who took the new tests are “ready or conditionally ready” for college in terms of English literacy, while just 29 percent meet those standards in math. For an economy that increasingly runs on tech and professional jobs that require strong math, science and communications skills, that’s not a good sign.

Most students in the Sacramento region and statewide failed to meet English or math standards under the more rigorous California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, which replaces the former STAR tests.

The state Department of Education will release initial results of “Smarter Balance” tests aligned with Common Core standards in English and math next week, and the results are widely expected to show huge shortfalls in what kids have learned.

Results for some of the states that participated in Common Core-aligned testing for the first time this spring are out, with overall scores higher than expected though still below what many parents may be accustomed to seeing.

The California Department of Education on Friday began restoring historical test data that it deleted from the most accessible part of its website earlier this month, following criticism that it did so to discourage the public from making comparisons to the results of new tests aligned to the Common Core standards.

The ACLU’s report suggests that districts are ignoring the LCFF law and diverting billions of extra dollars meant to help poor kids who desperately need a boost.