This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. California schools dodged a steep revenue cut on Tuesday as voters permanently extended an income tax on the wealthy. Prop. 3, put forth by the state’s largest teachers union, won with 59% of the vote compared to 41% against. The measure makes permanent...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. The Nov. 3 ballot is long and filled with consequential races. But one thing most voters in California won’t see: much ado about school boards. About half of California’s school board candidates are most likely running unopposed, according to a recent USC report,...

A Sacramento charter school that the state auditor blasted last year for allegedly wrongly receiving $180 million is seeking a new home – and a new name – in Sutter County. Highlands Community Charter and Technical Schools, which serves adults at a half dozen campuses in Sacramento, is seeking to sever ties with its oversight...

In school lunchrooms around Lake Tahoe, students line up for a red, hairy fruit called a rambutan. On pozole day, they shout, “We want more!” And when the salad bar runs dry, they ask the staff to refill it – over and over. This brings joy to the cafeteria crew, but Gage Gautheier recently bestowed...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. It’s not quite the “Mississippi Miracle,” but California’s reading scores have been inching upwards since the state poured billions into changing the way students learn to read. A shortage of literacy coaches, however, may be preventing students from improving even more. In 2013,...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. California librarians were stunned when a last-minute budget change stripped K-12 schools of a trove of research materials, potentially leaving thousands of students without resources to do reports, projects or homework assignments. Without notice to schools or librarians, the Legislature last week canceled...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. At Pinedale Elementary in Fresno, there’s almost no classroom aides, after-school tutors or behavioral counselors. Literacy activities and parent workshops are scarce. Field trips? Almost non-existent. The school survives on one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state: $16,700 a year, nearly...

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. The primary for the state’s top K-12 schools job is in less than a month, but judging from the polls, it’s debatable whether anyone is paying attention. A whopping 32% of voters are undecided with just a few weeks...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday proposed paring down the responsibilities of California’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction and shifting more power to the State Board of Education. “California can no longer postpone reforms that have been recommended regularly for a century,” Newsom said, referring to...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. The past few years, California has been all about the ABCs, 1-2-3s and the wheels on the bus, investing more than $5 billion in early childhood education. But kindergarten, a staple of elementary schools for more than a century, remains optional. Despite nearly...