A recent guest editorial published by Bakersfield.com entitled “California’s defunding of public education” makes the case that a “pension contribution maneuver” has left school districts up and down the state with shrinking budgets. The author, Shaohua Yang, gets many of his facts right. For example, he writes that “California 2019 per-capita income tax ranks the fifth highest...

Wiki Commons The second-largest public school district in the United States is in turmoil. Los Angeles Unified School District, with over 600,000 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade at over 1,000 schools, may not be open for the business of teaching on August 18. How to handle the COVID-19 pandemic is the issue, and there is...

***Watch a mini-documentary on the creation of OCCA HERE*** In barely one month, 360 elementary school students will begin attending a new charter school that offers a dramatic departure from the failed public education model in California. The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) will open its doors to kindergarten through 5th-grade students, and apart from the...

Across California on May 1, tens of thousands protested in defiance of the lockdown orders. In Sacramento, the west lawn of the state capitol building was filled with protesters, with thousands more marching along the sidewalk surrounding the capitol grounds. Additional thousands driving their cars and honking their horns created three hours of total gridlock on...

If you’re suffering a bad-news hangover, I have a cure — and it’s not a shot of tomato juice and some equally bad or worse news. It’s actual great news: In just one year, a historically failing elementary school in a tough part of Anaheim has produced an educational turnaround that would be called a...

Sacramento — Teachers’ union leaders hoping to discount the runaway academic success of charter schools have claimed charters lure the best-performing kids, leaving traditional, union-run public schools to handle poor-performing and struggling students. In its statement launching the anti-charter “Kids Not Profits” campaign, for instance, the California Teachers’ Association claimed that charters “cherry-pick the students...

Union dues take a large bite out of the paychecks of California teachers. We estimate that newly hired, full-time teachers will pay $37,000 in dues over a 30-year career. Further, if new teachers could fully opt out of the union and instead save their dues in an Individual Retirement Account, they would each have $228,000...

Sacramento — News reports last week suggest the city of Oakland may be ready to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the teenage woman at the heart of a sex-abuse scandal that rocked Oakland’s and other nearby police departments since 2015. All things considered, the city is fortunate. The reported settlement is just under $1...

Sacramento — Supporters of charter schools, homeschooling and other forms of school “choice” are so used to fighting in the trenches against the state’s muscular teachers’ unions that they often forget how much progress they’ve made in the last decade or so. Recent events have shown the degree of progress, even if they still face...