Governor Gavin Newsom proposed adding $10 million to help college students with emergency housing costs but stopped short of expanding the state’s Cal Grant program to cover full expenses of rent and food of all needy students. Newsom did not embrace the massive financial aid increase that some legislators and advocates want to cover students’ […]
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 […]
With all precincts reporting but not all ballots counted, voters passed school construction bond measures in 89 of 112 K-12 and community college districts. And they passed parcel taxes in eight of the 13 school districts that had placed them on the ballot to create new sources of revenue or to extend existing parcel taxes. […]
The plight of teachers in the half-dozen states who went out on strike over wages last spring resonated across the nation. A near-majority of people now favor raising teachers’ pay — a significant increase over a year ago — according to a poll by the education journal Education Next. An exception, though, is California — […]
Despite some incremental progress, Los Angeles Unified officials continue to “evade” the requirement of the state’s education funding formula to spend substantially more on schools serving low-income children and other students who generate additional revenue for the district, authors of a study released on Tuesday wrote. In their fourth annual analysis of spending in the […]
But rather than hang a banner and declare victory, legislators and education advocates who support Brown’s funding formula are ready to set the next target: an aspirational goal of committing more than $35 billion in new K-12 dollars to the funding formula — enough to raise California’s current per-student spending of $11,149 by about $6,500. […]
Led by strong scores in 8th-grade reading, California moved closer to the national averages in reading and math, continuing a decade-plus trend of generally slow but steady improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The closely watched assessment released its 2017 results for 4th and 8th grades on Tuesday. . . . In 4th-grade […]
California’s continuation high schools are meant to give students a last chance to get back on track for graduation, but state data reveal that many of the schools struggle with a basic challenge: Getting students to attend each day. Nearly 60 percent of continuation high school students were considered chronically absent during the 2016-17 school […]
Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to link over $3 billion in funding for California’s community colleges to the number of low-income students they enroll and to student outcomes in general is coming under increasing scrutiny — and is likely to face more in the coming months. Currently California’s community colleges receive nearly all of what are […]
California’s high school graduation rates have increased significantly in recent years, but the percentage of those students who complete their college education continues to lag, with long-term implications for the state’s future. That is the stark conclusion of a new report by California Competes, a policy and advocacy organization focusing on the state’s system of […]
California will continue to lag behind other states in providing enough child care slots and diverse preschool options for all its nearly 2.5 million children under the age of 5 until it develops a more unified system that provides affordable care and makes it easier for families to enroll. That is a key recommendation in […]
California’s sweeping education reforms championed by Gov. Jerry Brown have resulted in higher graduation rates and especially sizable gains in math among low-income students in the 11th grade, according to a new study. . . . The Learning Policy Institute’s Tanner said that because math scores increased more among low-income children than all children, if […]
Another prominent education research and advocacy organization that disapproves of California’s approach to school accountability has ranked California’s new system at the bottom nationwide in a report released Tuesday.
The low score by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute reflects a core disagreement over how best to identify and work with schools needing help. California education leaders are unapologetic about the route they’ve chosen, and they say the Fordham analysis contains a key error.
Like Bellwether Education Partners, which harshly criticized the state’s approach in an August analysis, Washington, D.C.- and Ohio-based Fordham gives high grades to states that will rank schools with an A-F letter grade or a similar method that’s understandable at a glance. States will use rankings to select the lowest-performing schools, as required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
California’s public schools should be doing much more to prepare students who don’t go to college to enter the workforce, according to registered voters who responded to a Berkeley IGS/EdSource poll. But they are divided in their assessment of how well schools are doing in providing that preparation.
They also expressed strong support for community colleges and other institutions to offer more vocationally oriented apprenticeship programs that may not lead to a college degree but prepare students for specific jobs.
By the end of this month, CSU will drop math and English placement tests the system has been using for years and for the first time rely on multiple measures such as a student’s high school grade-point average, grades earned in math and English, and test scores on standardized tests like the SAT, ACT or Smarter Balanced assessments to determine whether incoming freshmen are placed in courses that include remedial work. . . .In fall 2018, CSU will also launch a new approach to teaching students who need extra academic help. Starting next fall, those students will enroll in credit-bearing classes while simultaneously receiving additional remedial support — a move aimed at allowing students to more quickly catch up on key math and English skills and avoid spending money and time on courses that don’t count toward their degrees. The “supportive course models,” as CSU is calling them, could include additional instruction, stretching one-semester courses over two terms, or “co-requisite classes” that pair remedial work with college-level content.