Education

When former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell was termed out five years ago, the popular politician could only watch as a state budget deficit eroded his signature priorities to reduce class size and improve the performance of Latino and African-American students. These days, O’Connell, 64, spends his time hopscotching the state advising school […]

Gov. Jerry Brown campaigned up and down the state in 2012 to pass a temp orary measure known as Proposition 30, which raised the sales tax for four years and income taxes on high earners for seven years. It generated $8 billion a year to educate California’s 6.2 million elementary and secondary school students. This […]

Gov. Jerry Brown will propose another healthy budget on Thursday that will be vetted and adopted by the Legislature in June. That’s good news for K-12 public education, which accounts for more than 40 percent of state funds. So why aren’t school district officials jumping up and down? One reason is the growing pension contributions […]

One of the biggest winners in Gov. Jerry Brown’s January budget was public schools, which has enjoyed a rapid funding rise in recent years. The governor proposed a $71.6 billion education budget in the fiscal year that starts this July. That marks a 51 percent increase in the minimum funding for California’s public schools — according to the formula set by […]