Four years after a torrent of school ''reforms'' began to sweep across the country amid fears that American public education was lagging, schoolchildren in almost every state are facing tougher academic standards and billions of dollars have been pumped into...

Financing California’s public education system is complex, difficult and expensive. This school year the system—which includes 1,000 districts, nearly 4.5 million students and 200,000 teachers—will receive $15.3 billion in general fund revenues, including $395 million from the state lottery. The...

Two privately funded studies, issued this fall, highlight the progress and problems of California’s schools and make numerous and expensive suggestions for improvement. Those studies and their recommendations: Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research group based at Stanford...

California faces a critical shortage of classroom space to accommodate a deluge of new public school students expected in the next decade. The state Department of Finance has forecast an enrollment jump of more than one million students—a 26.5% increase—in...