Strike or no strike, after a deal is ultimately reached on a contract for Los Angeles teachers, the school district will still be on a collision course with deficit spending because of pensions and other financial obligations. School systems across California are experiencing burdensome payments to the state pension fund while struggling to improve schools. […]
Teachers in America’s second-largest school district began to strike Monday, pushing this city into the nationwide wave of growing educator activism and raising the pressure on a district already under financial strain. The strike comes after nearly two years of contract bargaining between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the United Teachers Los Angeles […]
AMERICA’S AGEING economic boom can still produce pleasant surprises. Companies added an astonishing 312,000 new jobs in December, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported on January 4th, and raised pay at the fastest clip in years. For the third of working-age Americans without any college education, such spells of rapid income growth have been exceedingly […]
Facing a $36 million deficit and a possible state takeover, the top budget officer at the Sacramento City Unified School District has a sober message for his counterparts around California. Sacramento is “just one of the first dominoes,” said John Quinto, the district’s chief business officer. By any measure, Sacramento City’s distress is worse than […]
School districts laboring under higher mandated expenses would receive a surprise windfall — pension-cost relief — in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first proposed state budget for 2019-20, which will also provide big spending increases for early and higher education. Using surplus money from the state’s General Fund, Newsom would wipe out $3 billion of districts’ rising […]
Gov. Newsom proposed a state budget yesterday that would give CalPERS an extra $3 billion to pay down debt and CalSTRS a potential extra $5.9 billion, most to pay down debt but also some for relief to schools hard hit by doubling pension costs. “We are investing an historic amount and doing what no previous […]
Mayors and governors of both parties tout German-style apprenticeships as an alternative pathway to employment, in the face of ballooning college tuition and the need for career options for noncollege graduates. Support for increasing hands-on training comes from all corners—Democrats and Republicans, business and labor, the Trump and the Obama administrations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel […]
The Trump administration is looking into ways to help workers, but experts say the retraining problem is hard to fix. The key program is Trade Adjustment Assistance, installed in the 1960s, which provides extended unemployment benefit payments and job training to workers who the government determines lost employment due to overseas competition. Multiple studies have […]
Possessing a college degree in California is more valuable than ever. It often indicates whether someone has a stable job and if their employer offers paid vacation or health benefits. For many, the degree is the difference between poverty and the middle class. And its value, since at least 2000, has only increased year after […]
Early childhood education. A top-tier national ranking for K-12 per-pupil spending. A data system that would track kids from nursery school through state universities. California’s Legislature won’t reconvene until 2019, but the Christmas wish list for public schools is already long and pricey. On the first day of session, Democratic lawmakers introduced two major education […]
The Sacramento City Unified School District announced Wednesday it expects to run out of cash by November 2019 after months of financial crisis. In a statement sent to the community, the district said unless major savings are found, it will be unable to pay employees and make necessary purchases. The statement suggested that moving forward […]
A prudent investor would never consider buying shares of a company and then ignoring how the firm is performing in the marketplace. By the same token, it would be foolhardy for the state to spend $70 billion each year to educate six million K-12 students but stubbornly refuse to monitor whether those kids are receiving […]
Californians could soon get two years of community college for free, enough to earn an associate’s degree. In 2017, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the California College Promise, waiving the first year of community college tuition for full-time students. Assembly Bill 2, announced Tuesday, would add a second year to that program. “When […]
Democrats return to the California Capitol on Monday with their strongest political advantage in decades poised to fulfill a huge item on their list of pent-up demands: Vastly expanded access to preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. Their plan comes with a big price tag, a problem that has doomed past proposals, most recently with outgoing […]
A Stanford University and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) report entitled Getting Down to Facts II comes ten years after an initial look at California’s education system taking into account all the changes over the past decade. Most newsworthy out of the report was the finance item declaring the need for a 38% increase […]