The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence was created by Senate Bill 91, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in July 2013 to help school districts carry out the state’s new school financing law and achieve the goals that districts outline in their Local Control and Accountability Plans.
Those of us who argue for the imperative of increasing skills are not staking out that position because we believe it will close the gap between the rich and the middle—or between the exorbitantly rich and the merely rich. Rather, we take that position because higher levels of skills will improve the economic position of those around and below the middle of the current earnings distribution. On average, more education does translate into more-valuable skills, and the results of our simulation exercise support that view. At the same time, they make it clear that increasing the share of working-age men that have college degrees will do very little to decrease the overall level of earnings inequality.
Better education would lift the earnings of men in the bottom half of the income scale but wouldn’t be enough to erase inequality between the rich and poor, according to a new paper.
Education groups, led by the influential California Teachers Association, have complained for years that the state is near the bottom in per-pupil spending, but with recent and sharp increases in spending, California has climbed rapidly in state-to-state comparisons.
State education officials moved Wednesday to dramatically recast California’s system to evaluate school quality by suspending the use of standardized test scores as the major yardstick in favor of a broader array of measures.
In the years ahead we can expect these trends to continue, or even accelerate. There is little reason to believe that states like California or New York are going to re-industrialize or reform their planning systems to help reduce housing prices. They will remain increasingly bifurcated between a very well-educated, affluent population clustered around the most elite industries and an underclass of poor, undereducated people. California, for example, ranks 14th in percentage of college graduates, down from 7th in 1970 but in terms of high school non-graduates it has soared from 44th to 2nd.
The UC system will not expand enrollment of California freshmen and transfer students in the fall unless more state revenues are appropriated and will cap enrollment of out-of-state students at UCLA and UC Berkeley, UC President Janet Napolitano said Tuesday..
Assemblyman Mike Gatto has proposed legislation that would start a process for a new University of California campus to specialize in technology fields. The campus is envisioned as the UC equivalent of the private California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The district and the teachers union announced this month that they had reached an impasse in contract negotiations. Each side argues that the other is being unreasonable. The union is seeking a pay raise of 8.5%; the district has offered 5%.
Although couched in dense education jargon, the letter essentially accuses WestEd of ignoring the uniform achievement standards it says state law requires in favor of squishier measures, and offers an alternative version.
In 2014 teacher pension systems had a total of a half trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities — a debt load that climbed more than $100 billion in just the last two years. Across the states, an average of 70 cents of every dollar contributed to state teacher pension systems goes toward paying off the ever-increasing pension debt, not to future teacher benefits.
California’s legislative analyst on Tuesday proposed a new system for funding school facilities: grants to districts based on enrollment.
Slowly, quietly – but unmistakably – California’s education establishment is dismantling or softening state and federal testing-based “accountability” systems that were imposed on public schools more than a decade ago.
This may come as a shock to those of us who still associate homeschooling with fundamentalists eager to shelter their kids from the evils of the secular state. But it turns out that homeschooling has grown more mainstream over the last few years. According to the most recent statistics, the share of school-age kids who were homeschooled doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 1.7 to 3.4 percent. And many of those new homeschoolers come from the tech community.
San Jose’s metro area leads the U.S. as an advanced-industries hub, but the crucial expansion and improved competitiveness of this high-tech workforce could be challenging, the Brookings Institution says in a new report.