Heather Hough, executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), talks about a closely watched measure to increase school funding. California’s Proposition 15, which would increase funding for public schools and local governments by changing tax rules for commercial...

English learners, like their peers, have lost a large portion of instructional time due to the rapid shift to online learning caused by COVID-19. However, data indicates that the digital divide amongst underserved students, including English learners, has led to...

Deep into the pandemic, some districts are finding an alarming percentage of students are missing from the virtual classroom—with the worst absentee rates occurring among homeless students, foster youth, English learners, Black students and high school seniors. Two San Francisco...

How do education stakeholders, political leaders and policy experts view California’s school funding system and what would it take to come together around a comprehensive, coordinated effort to increase funding in California? In this new Adventures in Ed Funding episode...

The 1978 passage of Proposition 13 was part of a nationwide anti-tax wave, spurred by residents’ frustration with high inflation and soaring property taxes. It was a pivotal moment in California history when, critics say, individual needs overruled those of...

Arizona State University Professor Geoffrey D. Borman has great empathy for middle schoolers. He knows how painful the transition can be when elementary students have to make the jump to junior high school. The stresses of navigating grades, mental well-being...

With K-12 revenue having cratered, school administrators, policymakers, and school funding advocates are now devising strategies to help school districts survive the coronavirus-sparked recession.

Learning in the pandemic has its challenges, but for a lot of students the problem is more fundamental: They are missing out on school altogether this fall, or showing up sporadically. Schools that have opted for virtual learning are struggling...

The massive, expensive fight over Proposition 15 is decades in the making. The so-called split roll initiative would be a partial but major reversal of Proposition 13, which in 1978 changed the way commercial property taxes are calculated—and reshaped all...

When Sacramento City schools started back up again just before Labor Day this year, parents were scrambling to figure out their kids’ online learning schedule for the fall. The teachers union and the Sacramento City Unified School District still hadn’t...

Social-emotional learning or SEL has become the latest educational catch-phrase. SEL has been broadly defined as “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills, such as interest and engagement, and has been recognized by policy-makers and the broader public as a set of skills...

Despite colleges dropping their testing requirements because of the coronavirus, students continue to sign up for the exams, believing that a score is the key to admission. Whether standardized admissions tests will become yet another casualty of the pandemic is...

Deeply-grooved roadblocks to racial equity in K-12 education — and ways to surmount them — were the focal point of a compelling, livestreamed Berkeley Conversations event with four experts on Monday. Prudence Carter, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of...

Headaches, anxiety and exhaustion caused by never-ending video meetings are no longer exclusively for adults trying to work from home during the pandemic. Some schools have started the fall semester with remote-learning setups that mimic what a full day of...

Anticipating that the coronavirus would create a turbulent and financially unstable year, the Legislature agreed in June to fund schools at the same levels of student attendance in 2020-21 as in 2019-20. Most school districts welcomed the predictable funding.

When schools reopen for the 2020–21 school year, they will look dramatically different than before the pandemic. Whether in person, online, or some combination of the two, it will be critical that each student receives rigorous instruction and the academic...

Wanted for the new school year: high-quality remote-learning experiences to engage and benefit all students. In the current pandemic reality, educators can improve learning, we believe, by finding better ways to use and structure students' work time. That's true whether...

There is little that is likely to be regular about the coming school year. Hermosa and most other districts in California are beginning the year exclusively with distance learning.

This week's Lunch Bites episode focuses on utilizing strategic frameworks from Community Schools, a relationship-based way to approach student growth. Our guests are Hayin Kimner, an education policy advisor, and Gustavo Morales, the Program Manager of The CA Labor Management...

With Covid-19 cases still on the rise in much of the country, the remote learning experiment that started last spring will continue in most schools across the nation. But even as teachers, students and families prepare to go back to...

When California State University faculty first proposed requiring applicants to complete a math or quantitative reasoning course in their senior year of high school, they specifically recommended that the system “investigate the impact these requirements may have on the success...

Weeks of racial justice protests and the coronavirus pandemic have together drawn much-needed attention to the race-based disparities embedded in our institutions, from policing to health care. These disparities are also deeply rooted in our communities and schools.

Today, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and Results for America released two new EdResearch for Recovery briefs from leading education researchers addressing important COVID-related challenges facing policymakers, educators, and parents: distance learning and supporting immigrant students during COVID-19...

Live online class time is most effective when it is built around small-group peer interactions and direct teacher-to-student feedback, according to a new research brief from Policy Analysis for California Education. The researchers also found that students need reserved time...