March 14, 2023 | USC Price

School board members facing death threats. Protesters disrupting meetings over vaccines and sex education. Activists demanding schools ban books and critical race theory. Welcome to the new front in America’s culture wars: local school boards. Often obscure and largely nonpartisan...

October 1, 2021 | USC Rossier News

The abrupt switch to remote instruction caused by the pandemic has created potentially irreparable setbacks for the students who can least afford the disruption—low-income students of color, English learners, students with disabilities and others who have been historically underserved. The...

August 24, 2021 | USC Rossier News

School board meetings aren’t typically associated with shouting matches, protests and arrests. But at forums across the country, school districts have experienced an uptick in heated rhetoric and aggressive behavior. Frustrated community members are using meetings to voice their opposition to school...

July 23, 2021 | USC Rossier News

A recent poll by Policy Analysis for California Education and USC Rossier confirmed what many educators, parents and students likely already know: The public has become increasingly polarized about issues in education. The poll found that the majority of voters...

Moving Forward from COVID-19

Voters’ Opinions on Educational Equity Initiatives in California
Commentary author
Summary

COVID-19 and its concomitant school closures are affecting students in many ways; there is good reason to expect the pandemic will adversely impact educational equity. New PACE research uses data from the 2020 PACE/USC Rossier annual voter poll to report on CA voter attitudes towards educational equity policy initiatives. A majority of voters supported a focus on ending racial inequality in educational outcomes and specific initiatives to do so, suggesting that voters may also support a targeted approach to mitigating the pandemic’s adverse effects on CA students who have been hardest hit.