When Gavin Newsom succeeded Jerry Brown as California’s governor two years ago, it re-ignited the Capitol’s long-running conflict over charter schools, which receive public funds but operate independently of traditional public school systems. As mayor of Oakland, Brown had founded two charter schools, the Oakland Military Institute and the Oakland...
Should Low-Performing Fresno Charter School Get More Time to Improve?
A charter school in downtown Fresno classified as low-performing could get another two years to show academic improvement under a recommendation by the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools office. It's the latest chapter in the troubled history of Kepler Neighborhood School, a TK-8 elementary school on Broadway Street. Three years...
Video Shows Rare Central Valley Tornado Touch Down on Monday
[aggregation-styles] Washington Post Lots of people move to California for its picture-perfect weather, and most of them probably don’t expect tornadoes to be part of the deal. But the atmosphere was in a mood Monday, when a pair of rare tornadoes snaked their way down from turbulent skies in northern...
Sick of 2020? This Hotline Allows People to Scream and Hang Up
[aggregation-styles] Fox Los Angeles LOS ANGELES - After an incredibly difficult and challenging year, many have the urge to let out their frustrations — and sometimes a simple scream is all that is needed to feel better. A new hotline, Just Scream, allows people to do just that — call,...
Was 2020 the Worst Year Ever? Historians Take a Look Back
[aggregation-styles] USA Today There are no words. Wretched, vile, appalling don't cover it. Grim, ghastly, abominable are weak. When it comes to the year 2020, the year of COVID, of quarantine, of unemployment, of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, of forest fires and hurricanes and non-stop election madness, of closed...
Hell and 2020 Are Latest Couple on Match.com Commercial
[aggregation-styles] The Wrap Satan and 2020 are a perfect match in a new ad for dating website Match.com, the result of a unique collaboration between actor Ryan Reynolds and pop artist Taylor Swift. From Reynolds’ Maximum Effort production company, the commercial plays out like any other app-date between two people...
Pandemic Reveals Need for Schools to Utilize Technology for Online Classrooms
When the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close this spring, it exposed the California Legislature’s lack of wisdom in approving a two-year moratorium on the expansion of distance learning in charter public schools. It’s not the decade of the 1990s or 2000s, it’s 2020. We are a fifth of the...
Walters: Finally, a School Data System Emerging
California has a very fragmented approach to education — a collection of institutional silos that only occasionally communicate with each other and often are more competitive than cooperative. That fragmentation is very visible in the perpetual conflicts between traditional K-12 schools and parent-directed charter schools, and in the battles among...
US Adds 145,000 Jobs; Unemployment Holds at 3.5%
WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added 145,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.5%, signaling that the job market remains strong at the start of 2020 even if hiring and wage gains have slowed somewhat more than a decade into an economic expansion. Friday’s snapshot from the...
Democrat Julián Castro Drops out of 2020 Presidential Race
AUSTIN, Texas — Former Obama housing secretary Julián Castro, the only Latino in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race, on Thursday ended his campaign that had pushed the field on immigration and swung hard at rivals on the debate stage but never found a foothold to climb from the back...