Schools should be safe, nurturing, and welcoming environments for all students. Frequently, exclusionary school discipline practices, which remove students from the classroom--even for minor infractions of school rules--through suspension or expulsion, prevent students from participating fully in their education. Suspensions, expulsions, and other…

In 2005-06 almost half of the pupils in California's public schools were Latinos, but Latinos only received about 15 percent of the BA degrees awarded by public and private colleges in the state. Texas has a comparable Latino population, but does significantly better than California in getting Latino students through college. The implication of…

After decades of focusing on expansion and access, California's institutions of higher education are now being handed a more difficult charge: to dramatically increase the number of college graduates with diminishing state funding. There is a growing consensus that the United States needs to ratchet up its production of college graduates to turn…

Is the United States getting it wrong when it comes to educating tomorrow's innovators in critical fields? It has been known for years that the only way to compete globally in information technology, engineering, nanotechnology, robotics and other fields is to give students the best educational opportunities possible. But do individuals have a…

This report provides the latest available data and analysis of California's teaching workforce and the challenges confronting the state's educators and policy-makers. While the report finds progress toward reducing the shortage of teachers, it raises concerns about low student achievement and the implications for the state's ability to meet the…

Over the past decade, the standards-based reform movement in education has focused attention on the responsibility of schools and school systems to produce results in student learning. Nationally this focus is most evident with the implementation of accountability provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. However, even…

There is evidence that increasing the compensation of child care workers improves the quality of child care. This study was funded by the Child Development Division of the California Department of Education to identify policy options addressing the improvement of compensation for staff working in child care and development programs. The report…

The "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" examines what is arguably the single most powerful authority over the teaching profession: state government. This California edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ's) "State Teacher Policy Yearbook" is the first of what will be an annual look at the status of state…