During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 90-minute, superlative-saturated monologue on the virtues of his revised 2021-22 budget this month, he boasted of an historic high in public school spending. State aid and local property taxes would push per-pupil spending to $14,000, he said, and with federal funds, it would top $20,000 for the first...
How Do FUSD Black Students Spell School Success? R-E-A-D-I-N-G
Branya Robinson, a soon-to-be fourth-grader at Storey Elementary, has been reading a history book that highlights the accomplishments of African American women. Most people know Josephine Baker as a wildly popular American dancer in Parisian nightclubs in the 1930s. Branya says there's more to Ms. Baker's life story: "I learned...
Walters: Brown’s Big School Reform Falls Short
Los Angeles Unified is the state’s largest school district and the vast majority of its 400,000-plus students are poor, non-white and/or not completely fluent in English. It is, in other words, precisely what former Gov. Jerry Brown had in mind when he and the Legislature overhauled school districts’ finances, giving...
The Achievement Gap: California’s Disparities in Education Explained
Few goals in education have been as frustrating and urgent as the effort to fix the deep, generational disparity in achievement between the haves and the have-nots in California schools. It is an article of faith in the K-12 school system that every student — regardless of race, creed, wealth or color...
Walters: California’s Stubborn ‘Achievement Gap’
Sooner or later, reality rears its ugly head and that seems to be happening with the state’s very expensive — but apparently failing — efforts to close a yawning “achievement gap” among the state’s nearly 6 million elementary and secondary school students. Early in the decade, as Jerry Brown began his second...
Walters: California’s Big Educational Dilemma
California’s largest, most important — and perhaps most troubled — governmental program is the education of nearly 6 million elementary, middle and high school students. Federal, state and local taxpayers are spending more than $100 billion each year on the assumption, or hope, that the state’s 944 school districts, ranging...
As California Spends Billions on High-Needs Students, Calls Grow for More Oversight
Seven years after California started pumping billions of dollars into schools with the neediest students — an attempt to narrow a chronic academic achievement gap — a new state audit has found that the state’s landmark school funding law isn’t adequately ensuring that targeted money is actually going to the disadvantaged students...
Report: Clovis, Sanger Districts Among Best at Closing 'Achievement Gap'
Clovis and Sanger unified school districts are among seven in California that are making the most progress in closing the so-called "achievement gap" for students of color and those in poverty, according to a new report released Tuesday in Sacramento. The Learning Policy Institute, a research nonprofit that aims to...
Girls Outscore Boys on Tech, Engineering, Even Without Classes
SEATTLE — Though less likely to study in a formal technology or engineering course, America's girls are showing more mastery of those subjects than their boy classmates, according to newly released national education data. Known as "The Nation's Report Card," the latest findings made public Tuesday from the National Assessment...
Walters: Why Is Our 'Achievement Gap' so Stubborn?
California has poured tens of billions of additional dollars into its public schools this decade on the assumption – or hope – that they would close the state’s stubborn academic “achievement gap.” Former Gov. Jerry Brown championed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that gives school districts with large numbers...