Jessica Calefati

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and 19 other states’ chief law enforcement officers issued a letter urging him to save a program that protects nearly 800,000 young immigrants from deportation.

Update:  Assembly Bill 19 was signed into law in 2017, paving the way to free community college for full-time, first-year students.  California’s economy is one of the world’s largest, and according to a new report, the state needs 1 million more workers with bachelor’s degrees by 2030 to keep up with economic demand. The Public […]

Researchers studying California’s new school funding system wish they could track the huge sums of money the state has sent to struggling students, and analyze what districts spent it on. They can’t because the financial data needed to do so isn’t available. Given that limitation, they’ve tried to figure out whether the four-year-old Local Control […]

California’s new system for funding public education has pumped tens of billions of extra dollars into struggling schools, but there’s little evidence yet that the investment is helping the most disadvantaged students. A CALmatters analysis of the biggest districts with the greatest clusters of needy children found limited success with the policy’s goal: to close the […]

California's K-12 public schools currently receive more than $7 billion annually from the federal government. The budget plan President Donald Trump released last week would cut at least 6 percent of those funds. Here's what you need to know.

Following through on a pledge to undermine so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, the Trump administration has asked California to prove it's cooperating with immigration enforcement—or risk losing some federal grants.

Most Californians in a new poll say they are concerned about the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, and two-thirds want public schools to become "sanctuary safe zones."

Californians have overwhelmingly rejected private school voucher initiatives twice in the last 25 years, but a new poll shows this deep blue state has renewed interest in a policy championed by the Trump administration.

Vowing to fight public school profiteering, Democratic state lawmakers have introduced legislation that would either block or seriously limit for-profit companies’ ability to operate charter schools in California. The two proposals seek to address a growing concern among legislators that Wall Street-traded companies managing some of the state’s charters are raking in mountains of state […]

Every person has a right to inspect any public record during a public agency’s normal business hours. That’s what the California’s Public Records Act promises, with a few exceptions, but it’s not what I got in January when I visited two Los Angeles County school districts and asked to review their budgets.