K-12 Education

Sweeping reforms have pumped billions of dollars into high-needs school districts. So why has the needle been so slow to move?

California state Sen. Bill Dodd has introduced legislation to help schools make up instructional time and state dollars lost to closures for climate-driven emergencies such as wildfires. The increasingly pressing issue was the topic of a CalMatters series last year.

A critical state audit has made oversight of spending on disadvantaged students a first order of business for California lawmakers. 

Small rural schools have long had a hard time competing for state school bond money. But that may change with the state bond on the ballot in March.

Some 800,000 kids have lost as much as three weeks of class time this autumn. Public schools cherish local control in California, but they're asking the state to step in.

Updated Nov. 19, 2019 California voters have resoundingly approved tens of billions of dollars in state school construction bonds over the last two decades. But a new survey suggests that voters have yet to similarly warm up to the latest and heftiest proposal to come before them: a $15 billion state bond for public schools, […]

Seven years into California's school funding overhaul, the state can't tell whether billions are going to the high-need students they're supposed to help.

California just became the first state in the nation to push back the start of the school day, the better to let adolescents get the sleep they need at that age. But just how that new law will work is open to question. For one thing, it won’t start right away in most schools. It doesn’t appear to ban early morning ‘zero periods’ when many schools schedule important electives. It exempts rural schools without defining the term ‘rural.’ And it doesn’t necessarily mean school will end later, which means those extra minutes of snoozing will have to come out of some other part of the school day, such as lunch.

Five years into the state's new, more rigorous standardized testing system, scores are moving in the right direction. The bad news? Progress remains glacially slow.

A student population roughly the size of Santa Clara was kept home by the PG&E blackout. Then the Saddleridge Fire hit at the other end of California.