K-12 Education

A powerful teachers union and advocates of charter schools, battling to shape the future of California schools, ended in a stalemate this year in Sacramento.

Editors note: Assemblymember Shirley Weber was nominated to be California Secretary of State on Dec. 22, 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, filling the seat vacated by the governor’s appointment of the previous secretary, Alex Padilla, to the US Senate. After this profile, Weber also led a successful effort in 2019 to change the rules for […]

Update:  The only teacher shortage bill signed into law in 2017 was Assembly Bill 1157, which is designed to encourage school districts to turn surplus property into employee housing. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed AB 45, to provide money for teacher rental housing, and AB 568, to give teachers six weeks of paid maternity leave. The […]

Update: Senate Bill 328 to delay school start times stalled in the Assembly during the Legislature’s final days. The author said he’ll revive the proposal in 2018, the second in a two-year legislative session.  Coaxing groggy teenagers out of bed and onto an early morning school bus is a challenge for many parents. Democratic state […]

Like many of his peers, Kaleb Long is mature enough to stay home alone, but not quite old enough for a part-time job. Had he not enrolled in Rosemont High School’s summer learning program, the 13-year-old predicts he would have spent his Sacramento summer alone, sleeping in and playing video games. Instead, he took six […]

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 […]

Across ethnicities and economic status, girls outperform boys on English in standardized tests.

Sandra Lowe reminisced about the good old days as she addressed a roomful of Democratic activists at the California party’s annual convention last week in Sacramento. It used to be, the teachers union leader told the crowd, that it didn’t take much to win a school board race: a short statement in the election handbook, […]