This week: The Legislature passes a bill making the start of the school day for middle and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. And Gov. Jerry Brown signs legislation banning for-profit charter schools in California.
This week: The movement away from remedial math and English courses — which do not count toward the credits needed for a degree and can derail many students — at California’s 114 community colleges and the California State University system.
This week: The 5-year, $16 million grant awarded to California’s CORE Districts to prepare low-income African-American and Latino students for success in college. Plus key bills on the governor’s desk, including a ban on for-profit charter schools and three measures to make schools safer.
This week we look at the push in Sacramento to give school districts the option of substituting either the SAT or ACT for the current 11th grade Smarter Balanced assessments.
This week: efforts to reconstruct playgrounds to become more welcoming and accessible to all children.
This week: the battle between health advocates, who want to convince more cities to tax sugary drinks, and the powerful beverage industry, plus the reasoning behind, potential benefits from and challenges facing California’s new online community college
This week: Louis speaks with Carl Cohn about his experiences during a 50-year career as a leader in California education. Cohn will retire next month as the first executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a small state agency with the vital role of guiding county offices and school districts on the state’s new system of school improvement.
This week: Louis and John speak with John Deasy, the former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, who on June 1 became superintendent of Stockton Unified, a 40,000-student district 1/15th as big as L.A. Unified. Louis and John also play an excerpt from Gov. Jerry Brown’s remarks to California Community Colleges’ board of governors in which he urges them to pursue the promise of a new online college.
This week: Conservative groups launch a campaign to persuade teachers and hourly school workers to drop out of their unions following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision. And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos approves California’s plan for the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
This week, John Fensterwald interviews Jonathan Raymond, president of the Stuart Foundation and the former superintendent of Sacramento Unified School District, about his new book, Wildflowers: A Superintendent’s Challenge to America. It is a treatise about “whole child education” and what schools can — and must — do to make sure that every child thrives.
