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Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to entice thousands of new teachers into the classroom, concentrate school improvement in the most impoverished neighborhoods and use competitive grants to challenge districts to form partnerships and develop best practices to raise achievement. He outlined his ideas for addressing the teacher shortage and stepping up school improvement in an 85-page document his administration released late last month. The “omnibus education trailer bill” offers the first look at how he plans to spend more than $1.5 billion in his 2020-21 K-12 budget.
Newsom is proposing the biggest investment in staff development since the $1.25 billion that former Gov. Jerry Brown provided districts for training and materials in 2013-14 to implement the Common Core standards. It is the most proposed for new programs since the $500 million Brown put toward the short-lived Career Pathways Trust, a program in which community colleges, districts, county offices of education and universities worked with businesses to establish consortiums whose mission was to plan for future needs of a regional workforce..
Budget hearings in the Legislature may elicit more details. Administering agencies will write the rules and criteria for distributing the funding after the programs are approved. Newsom will get pushback from some legislators and education groups who will argue the state should be putting less money into new programs, like the $300 million proposed for community schools — which address the physical and mental health of students through partnerships with community services — and more into the main source of districts’ general spending, the Local Control Funding Formula. It’s getting the minimum 2.3 percent cost-of-living increase — not enough, by the Legislative Analyst’s Office’s calculations, to cover rising pension, employee health care and special education expenses.
Here are some themes that emerge from the trailer bill:
What follows are summaries of a dozen programs outlined in the main trailer bill and a few smaller ones.
Legislation that would remove one of the last tests teachers are required to take to earn a credential in California passed the Senate Education Committee.
Part-time instructors, many who work for decades off the tenure track and at a lower pay rate, have been called “apprentices to nowhere.”
A bill to mandate use of the method will not advance in the Legislature this year in the face of teachers union opposition.
Nearly a third of the 930 districts statewide that reported data had a higher rate of chronic absenteeism in 2022-23 than the year before.
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Richard Moore 4 years ago4 years ago
And not one word about school libraries. CA has the worst level of school library staffing in the nation. Only state without school staffing standards for libraries.