“Many teachers have left the profession and gone into other work of various kinds because they could make more money. Frequently the best teachers are the ones who have left the profession because they have been able to command exceptional salaries elsewhere.” (H/T Tom Gantert.) The above quote is taken from the front page of the...
California Policy Center filed an amicus brief in Castellanos v. California, detailing the flaws in the ruling and urging the appellate court to reverse the trial court decision and restore the people’s will on Proposition 22. CPC is also launching Democracy for All, a new coalition of pro-democracy groups working to protect direct democracy and...
Editor’s note: This is the second article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” Perhaps the biggest example of misguided water policy in California are the escalating restrictions on indoor water consumption....
According to a study released in mid-May by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, “one in six students attend a school where over 90% of their peers were of the same race in the 2018-19 school year.” The publication of the report was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme...
Editor’s note: This is the first article in a series on California’s water crisis. You can read the entire series including recent updates in his new book “The Abundance Choice, Our Fight for More Water in California.” In October and again in December, as the third severe drought this century was entering its third year,...
There are two big days for a California governor, January 10 when the budget is presented and the May Revise when a few months of additional data and debate have passed. They’re both political documents, allowing governors to play with numbers. Few governors have been as sporting in that enterprise as Gavin Newsom. Last week,...
This article originally appeared in For Kids and Country. It has been a decade since the landmark Vergara lawsuit was filed, and its denial in the courts has led to ongoing failure in California schools. Back in 1975, I lost my 6th-grade teaching position in New York City. As a newbie, it was explained to...
This article originally appeared in For Kids and Country. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) was always a bad idea, and now that it is politicized, it’s a nightmare. As a longtime teacher, I have seen firsthand that education is a fad-filled field. Culturally responsive education, inventive spelling, new math, experiential learning, balanced literacy, etc. are educational...
This article was originally on For Kids and Country. In California, parents are abandoning the k-12 system, college enrollment is down, and now the state is trying to lure 4-year-olds to transitional kindergarten. According to just released data from the California Department of Education, the state has lost 110,000 students this school year, and has fewer...
Until the current elite owners can demonstrate to the middle-income and those on fixed incomes that their EV’s are the family workhorse vehicle, the average citizen may not be receptive to be mandated by Newsom into an EV. A year and a half after California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to phase out...
This article originally appeared in the California Globe. In response to a recent California Policy Center analysis that provided an updated calculation of the average pay and benefits for full-time firefighters working for cities in California, one commenter claimed that it has become difficult to recruit firefighters. The accuracy of this claim carries significant implications. When employers...
The organization behind some of California’s most out-there education initiatives announced it’s splitting from the national group that helped it promote the “parents are terrorists” campaign. In a low-profile statement, the California School Boards Association says its leadership approved the divorce from the National School Boards Association on March 26. In the press release, the...
The California Union Watch Twitter account (@CalUnionWatch) has been tracking government union contributions over the first quarter of this year (January 1, 2022 through March 31, 2022). Here are the five biggest union contributors from this year so far. We will be only focusing on state-level elections. 5. California Professional Firefighters The California Professional Firefighters...
As another summer of wildfires approaches, it is in the interest of every Californian to understand that California’s firefighters’ union, the California Professional Firefighters, is one of the most politically powerful unions in the state. This union has the power to help solve the growing problem of wildfires in California, but to more effectively do so...