In January, the State Board of Education asked the accountability advisory committee to study whether a single index – the API – was the best measure of school performance or whether a broader system would be more effective. Such a system could include measures like absenteeism, suspension and expulsion rates, course-taking patterns, test scores, graduation rates and other factors to evaluate how well schools are serving students.
For the second straight year, California will ask the federal government to exempt it from using scores on the new assessments that students will take this spring to measure progress in math and English language arts, a key requirement under the No Child Left Behind law.
But there was wide variation across the state. Areas such as Stockton, Fresno and the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles ranked among the bottom 10 of the country’s large metro areas, showing the geographic disparities of high-value jobs in California.
The goal is part of a newly announced initiative targeting an estimated 1 million degree gap in the state economy by 2025. While more than 900,000 CSU students earned degrees in the past decade, the six-year graduation rate for freshmen hovers around 51 percent.
Across the state, report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.
The Master Plan for Higher Education in California, produced in 1960, was a visionary document for its time, but must be updated to reflect the changed economic, demographic and financial environment of the current century. California’s economic future will depend on the outcome.
Determined to shed long-term state debt, Gov. Jerry Brown wants the state to cease issuing K-12 school construction bonds, leaving school districts to pay the tab for building and renovating schools. A coalition of school districts and the building industry has responded with plans to go straight to voters with a $9 billion state school building bond in 2016.
California’s watchdog agency recommended on Wednesday that the legislature repeal a new law that caps the size of school district budgets, warning that over 91 percent of the state’s districts would have violated the new rules if they had been in place in 2014.
Proponents of the degrees say the programs could provide the state with thousands of workers in technical fields at a lower price. A four-year degree at a community college would cost about $10,000 in tuition, roughly half the cost of attending a Cal State campus, according to estimates.
The growing skills gap is one of the most persistent challenges a”ecting thriving and lagging state economies—the disparity between the skills companies need to drive growth and innovation versus the skills that actually exist within their organizations and in the labor market. This disconnect, expected to grow substantially as the boomer generation retires, causes workers and companies to miss out on realizing their full potential. A sizable skills gap impacts virtually every aspect of the economy, thereby affecting our national competitiveness and, in turn, causing the economy to fall short of its potential.
The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path.
After about two decades of a typical curriculum in its middle school and high school, Boys Town is overhauling its class offerings to refocus on Father Flanagan’s original vision of vocational classes, which are increasingly in vogue. Now, they have a fancy new name: career-readiness courses.
Housing developers are pushing a state bond because, without it, their share of school construction costs — passed on to home buyers — would double. School construction has been funded one-third each by local property taxpayers, developers and the state.
Taught by local construction workers, young men and women on the margins learn how to operate heavy equipment at Job Corps’ sprawling Meadowview center before they move to “The Ranch,” Operating Engineers Local 3’s Rancho Murieta training grounds. There, they receive seven weeks’ more paid instruction with the opportunity to apprentice with the union and work with local construction firms.
School-construction and home-building groups Monday launched an effort to qualify a $9 billion school bond for the November 2016 ballot, only days after Gov. Jerry Brown released a budget plan that minimized the state’s role in paying for building new classrooms and modernizing existing ones.