John Affeldt
Kudos to Jerry Brown for proposing to end the inequities in California school funding – and shame on the districts that seek to fossilize the advantages they have enjoyed for decades now.
Brown is the first governor in recent times to acknowledge what the education community and funding experts have known for years: Our public schools are funded irrationally and inequitably based on outdated formulas bearing no relation to student need. As the Getting Down to Facts studies and the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence acknowledged, similar sized districts with similar student demographics receive widely varying amounts of state support for no rational reason. A recent Education Trust–West analysis concluded that California’s highest poverty districts receive $620 less per student from state and local sources than the state’s wealthiest districts. Individual district comparisons evidence disparities running to thousands of
Obama’s expanded preschool plan likely to be costly - by Lillian Mongeau
President Barack Obama has yet to issue any cost estimates for his proposal to expand access to preschool for 4-year-olds, but there is one certainty should Congress approve the program: It will be expensive. California currently serves about one in five of the state’s low-income 4-year-olds in state-funded preschools at a cost of $3,820 per student, according to the California Department...
Community colleges to release scorecard rivaling the president’s - by Kathryn Baron
Students planning to attend one of the nation’s 4,500 colleges and universities have a new interactive College Scorecard touted by President Obama in his State of the Union address as a tool “to compare schools based on a simple criteria – where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” Community college leaders say the focus on costs and graduation rates is a flawed lens for...