December 2, 2011, 12:05 AM
A task force that has been selling a sweeping package of reforms aimed at increasing student success in the California Community Colleges has removed several proposed changes from the plan in an attempt to assuage concerns about cuts to special services and negative consequences for some students....
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May 31, 2011, 12:05 AM
The governor's office and the California Department of Education are pondering whether to participate in a new version of the federal "Race to the Top" competition. The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that California and eight other states could vie...
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April 1, 2011, 12:05 AM
An unexpected byproduct of 41 states adopting common curriculum standards is that California schools won't be limited to textbooks and other instructional materials developed specifically for the state. Some state education experts are saying that the "common core" standards, as...
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March 18, 2011, 12:05 AM
Billionaire Bill Gates' critique of the nation's public schools is flawed. That is the view of Richard Rothstein, a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley and senior fellow at the Earl Warren Institute at Berkeley Law School. Rothstein has...
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January 25, 2011, 12:06 AM
As schools in California brace for another difficult year, new forces have emerged that are poised to reshape the education landscape in California. In recent months, most attention has focused on traditional power centers of educational politics in California, including the governor,...
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January 13, 2011, 12:05 AM
Former state Sen. Gloria Romero, the author of a controversial law that allows parents to force major changes in their children's school, said she won't support amending the law to make the process more open, despite a roiling controversy over use of the law in Compton. "If...
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January 6, 2011, 12:05 AM
In one of his first appointments, Gov. Jerry Brown has chosen Bill Honig, a once nationally acclaimed education leader who was effectively frozen out of the reform movement in the state for nearly 20 years, to serve on the State Board of Education. Before the era of term limits, Honig...
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December 21, 2010, 12:05 AM
Michael Kirst, a Stanford emeritus professor and a confidant of Jerry Brown for more than thirty years, is the leading candidate to become president of the State Board of Education, according to education sources. It would be the same position Kirst occupied 35 years ago during the first Brown...
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December 14, 2010, 12:05 AM
The number of Californians seeking to become teachers has plummeted by 45 percent over a seven year period – even as student enrollments are projected to rise by 230,000 over the next decade and as many as 100,000 teachers are expected to retire. Teaching is clearly becoming a less and...
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November 12, 2010, 12:05 AM
Gov.-elect Jerry Brown will face substantial challenges in implementing many parts of his education platform, arguably the most detailed of any California governor in recent memory. The platform [PDF] received little attention during the election campaign. Instead, most discussion of...
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November 10, 2010, 12:05 AM
As part of his campaign pledge to "make government more efficient and effective," Gov.-elect Jerry Brown has promised to do away with the secretary of education position, a fixture in governors' cabinets since the early 1990s. He plans to rely more on the state Board of...
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October 15, 2010, 1:27 AM
For the past year, the Los Angeles Unified School District has contracted with an outside consulting firm that has been doing its own "value-added" analysis of how effective schools are contributing to student outcomes. The researchers with the firm, Education Strategy Consulting,...
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October 5, 2010, 12:05 AM
More than 200 colleges across the country, including all California State University campuses, have been using a controversial technique to judge the effectiveness of college instruction on student performance. For the past three years, CSU's 23 campuses have participated in a little...
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September 28, 2010, 1:55 AM
Passions ran high on the best way to evaluate teacher effectiveness at the first public discussion held in the wake of the Los Angeles Times' pathbreaking series, which included publishing the names of 6,000 elementary school teachers and ratings of their "effectiveness" in...
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September 27, 2010, 12:18 AM
Regardless of where you stand on the controversy triggered by the Los Angeles Times series rating the effectiveness of 6,000 teachers based on their students' test scores – and publishing their names – what is undeniable is that it had more of an impact than few education...
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