During an otherwise quiet September morning some years ago, I received a curious call from then-California Gov. Jerry Brown’s legislative team. We had just finished the legislative session, and this junior staffer was deciding on whether to recommend the governor sign or veto a bill sitting on his desk. I knew the drill after working...
The Thursday night debate between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Florida’s Ron DeSantis was over before the Klieg lights went up. The facts of California’s decline are evident to everyone but the most disingenuous. As the old saying goes, “Facts is facts,” and on the facts, DeSantis had the debate won by Wednesday. All that...
Parents are abandoning schools in large numbers, but teachers are not. School reopening time is almost upon us, and large numbers of parents have opted out of government-run schools. Over the past two school years, k-12 enrollment has declined by nearly 3%, or about 1.3 million students nationwide, according to a recent study by the American...
Educators don’t get much for their $1,200 yearly dues. In the aughts, after blindly being a dues-paying National Education Association member for years, I opened my eyes, and discovered that I’d been wasting my money. The teachers unions were primarily about politics, all of which went in a leftward direction. One in-your-face example at the...
Most U.S. cities are experiencing an administrative and financial crisis. This appears to be at odds with the confident tone of recent budget hearings where most of the attention was placed on how to spend remaining 2021 federal relief funds and so called “discretionary funds.” Cities have been able to adopt viable budgets this year...
Many American schools of education are not worthy of existing. On June 29, the California Department of Education, in cooperation with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the State Board of Education, announced the first-ever release of statewide teacher assignment data. The report revealed that as of the 2020-21 school year, “83.1 percent of teacher...
Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse engulfs the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies, and in 2020 fossil fuel continued to...
SCOTUS declares that if a state subsidizes private education, it cannot disqualify religious schools. The latter case revolves around Maine’s town tuitioning law, which allows parents living in districts that do not own and operate elementary or secondary schools to send their children to public or private schools in other areas of the state, or even...
“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,...