A principal at a Stanislaus County middle school told a teacher on the first day of classes to stop handing out a one-page, illustrated explanation of gender identity called The Gender Unicorn. The Modesto Bee reported that the principal at Denair Middle School happened upon the science class as the...
Walters: New Bill Reignites California's 'Reading Wars'
For decades – close to a century, in fact – America’s educators and politicians have argued furiously over how best to teach children to read, pitting advocates of “phonics” against those of “whole language,” a conflict dubbed "reading wars." Phonics stresses fundamental instruction in the letters and letter combinations that...
Walters: Does Spending More on Schools Pay Off?
As Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first budget was being wrought, the perennial issue of spending on K-12 education was thrashed out once again. The education establishment – professional educators, their unions, their political allies and sympathetic academicians – complained anew that California schools are being shorted the money they need to...
Walters: New State Budget Has Some Big Caveats
California’s political leaders, Democrats all, are touting a new state budget that expands spending on services for the state’s poor while building reserves. That’s true, as far as it goes. However, there are some very big caveats in the $213 billion 2019-20 budget, the first by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The...
Proposed Sales Tax on Business Services Has Horrible Timing
California’s elected leaders are enjoying the fruits of a go-go economy, with record surpluses and record spending on education. So, naturally, there’s talk of tax increases. Californians have enjoyed nearly 10 years of economic growth, and one of the biggest beneficiaries has been the state budget. Since the depths of...
Teachers Look Online for Climate Change Info, Find Propaganda
When science teacher Diana Allen set out to teach climate change, a subject she'd never learned in school, she fell into a rabbit's hole of misinformation: Many resources presented online as educational material were actually junk. "It is a pretty scary topic to take on," said Allen, a teacher at...
California Must Reform Charter Schools. Here’s How.
In education circles in California and nationally, the fundamental question is this: How do we ensure all public schools are high quality? In Sacramento, much of the debate focuses on charter schools, as the Legislature considers several related bills related to them. What’s too often lost in the discussion is...
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...
California’s Public School Chief Says Education No Place for Competition
Tony Thurmond seems to be exactly the man that his most loyal backers hoped (and his opponents feared) he would be. In a discussion with CALmatters’ education reporter Ricardo Cano at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in March, he talked about how his mother, an immigrant from Panama, died when he...
Walters: School Spending Popular, Taxes Not so Much
For years, even decades, polling has consistently found that Californians’ highest political priority is public education. That trend continues in a new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, conducted in the wake of teacher strikes for higher salaries in three urban school districts. PPIC found that three-quarters of...