Having witnessed teaching “fads” since the 1950s and running charter schools as Oakland mayor, Gov. Jerry Brown doesn’t expect his own key education policy — called the Local Control Funding Formula — to close the academic performance gap between African Americans and Latinos and other student groups
The state’s new minimum wage law, signed into law Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown, is expected to give a boost to Silicon Valley’s burgeoning robot and automation industry as businesses seek to replace increasingly expensive workers.
Posing an ongoing challenge for California educators trying to tackle a critical teacher shortage area, the number of credentials issued to new math and science teachers in California continues to decline, according to new figures released Monday by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
Anyone can hang out a shingle and purport to be a medical vendor or caregiver by sending a letter to the state – no proof required. Unscrupulous providers can run up tens of thousands of dollars in bills for meaningless drug tests, salves and medical equipment, knowing that injured workers never will lay eyes on the bill.
Assuming wages rise 2 percent per year across the board — a rough estimate, but faster than they have risen in recent years either nationally or in California — then in 2022, about 40 percent of California workers will be in “significantly affected” occupations and 30 percent will be in “highly affected” ones. (Both figures are fairly typical of the U.S. overall.) But as the table below shows, there is huge regional variation. In San Francisco and San Jose, only about 10 to 15 percent of workers are in highly affected occupations. In the San Joaquin Valley area of Visalia-Porterville, that figure is close to 50 percent.
The academic-dominated approach is not working, especially for economically disadvantaged students. Of this group, about 20 percent of teenagers don’t graduate from high school at all. Of those who do graduate, about half matriculate to some form of college. But many are not ready: two-thirds of low-income students at community colleges start in remedial classes. . . The common outcome of our current strategy—“bachelor’s degree or bust”—is that a young person drops out of college at age 20 with no post-secondary credential, no skills, and no work experience, but a fair amount of debt. That’s a terrible way to begin adult life, and it’s even worse if the young adult aims to escape poverty.
“Manufacturing has not gone away,” said Ann Marie Allen, who is coordinating the grant. “It is still here and thriving, but it has changed. It requires individuals who are trained in higher tech and higher skilled jobs.”
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.
The Employment Development Department said the statewide unemployment rate fell by two-tenths of a point, to 5.5 percent. Employers added 39,900 jobs during February, compared with a loss of 4,000 jobs in January.
Most cities are economically weak actors with limited ability to affect the critical forces driving their economies. Furthermore, changes in the structure of the economy often have changed the composition of urban leadership in ways that break the link between personal and community success and create an additional bias in favor of subsidized real estate development as a civic strategy. Less dependent on the local market, this local leadership increasingly identifies with a global community and its concerns in ways that have lowered the civic priority placed on inclusive economic development and entrepreneurship. To change these trends, local leadership should focus on inclusive local economic success first and make policies that reflect that priority and address areas where local government can make an impact. Creating an entrepreneur- and business-friendly local regulatory environment is a key piece of this effort, and the delivery of high-quality basic public services is vital.
California’s farm industry kept growing in 2015 despite a fourth year of drought, adding 30,000 jobs even as farmers idled huge swaths of land because of water shortages.
More top corporate leaders said they expect to cut employment at their firms in the next six months than add jobs, according to the Business Roundtable’s first-quarter CEO Economic Outlook Survey, released Tuesday. The group’s members are chief executives at the country’s largest firms.
The jobless rate declined or held steady in all but nine states in the 12 months through January, the Labor Department said Monday. Nationally, the rate fell eight-tenths of a percentage point to 4.9% over the year. Of the states that saw their unemployment rates increase, most are closely tied economically to energy production.
California has a lot to crow about. In the last four years the state has accelerated to become one of the fastest growing in the nation, according to the latest quarterly report from the California Chamber of Commerce Economic Advisory Council.