California Board Of Education

An Inglewood elementary school principal and a politically active Silicon Valley entrepreneur have been appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to fill vacancies on the California Board of Education. Nancy Ichinaga, 69, has won national notice for the long record of achievement at Bennett / Kew Elementary School, where all of the students are poor and one-fourth are not fluent in English.

Reporting from Sacramento Less than one week after being named to the state Board of Education, Bill Honig has withdrawn his name from consideration, according to the governor's office. Honig, who served on the state board during Jerry Brown's first tenure as governor and went on to be elected state superintendent of public instruction three times, was among the new governor's most controversial early appointments. Honig resigned as state superintendent in 1993 after being convicted of conflict-of-interest charges involving state education payments received by his wife's nonprofit organization.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Monday reappointed state schools chief Bill Honig's main antagonist on California's Board of Education, a move Honig called an outrage designed to please conservatives. "The only reason he got (re)appointed is essentially because of the power of the right," Honig said of Wilson's decision to give Joseph Carrabino a new four-year term. "He's symbolic for whatever reason to their interest."

In one of Gov. Jerry Brown's first official acts this week, he sacked the majority of the state Board of Education, replacing several vocal proponents of charter schools, parent empowerment and teacher accountability. A broad range of educators, policy makers and others say the move was widely believed to be the handiwork of the California Teachers Assn., which heavily supported Brown in his gubernatorial campaign. The union's support will be vital if he, as expected, places measures on the June ballot to temporarily raise taxes to ease the state's budget deficit.

The California Board of Education on Thursday selected the Educational Testing Service to continue administering the state's mammoth testing program. The New Jersey-based ETS, which for three years has produced and distributed exams taken annually by nearly 5 million California students, would continue its work through the 2008-09 school year under the plan. The company tentatively pegged the cost at nearly $170 million, although the final price still needs to be negotiated.

In a stormy meeting that intensified the battle over control of California education policy, the State Board of Education on Friday voted to hire its own lawyer to resolve conflicts with State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Few people have worked harder than Joe Nunez to sabotage Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political fortunes. A high-ranking teachers union official, he helped engineer the governor's embarrassing defeat in the special election last year. So to Republicans, it was nothing short of infuriating and confounding that Schwarzenegger would appoint Nunez to the state Board of Education. He handed a Democrat and avowed enemy one of the most prestigious patronage jobs in government.

Advocates of breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District plan to appear before the California State Board of Education today hoping to forestall adoption of regulations they see as a disguised attempt to keep the district whole. The state board, the agency which will decide whether any plan to carve up the nation's second largest school district goes to the voters, is scheduled to consider rules for evaluating how breakup proposals would affect school demographics.

In a meeting punctuated by an angry outburst from state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, California's Board of Education on Friday vowed to move quickly to develop emergency regulations to implement Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education measure approved by voters. Although opponents are seeking to block the measure in court, the board said it will push ahead and meet weekly to iron out by Aug.

SACRAMENTO -- The California Board of Education on Wednesday voted unanimously to postpone the state's high school exit exam for two years, citing concerns about low passage rates and a desire to give struggling students a better opportunity to learn material on the test. The graduation requirement, an important part of Gov. Gray Davis' education reforms, was scheduled to take effect for the Class of 2004.

The state Board of Education will ask the attorney general to investigate complaints of misconduct surrounding a parent petition drive to turn over a struggling Compton elementary school to a charter school operation, the board president said Wednesday. The petition drive at McKinley Elementary School, the state's first test of a new law that empowers parents to make sweeping changes at low-performing schools, has been mired in charges and countercharges of deceit and intimidation since signatures, said to represent 62% of the school's parents, were submitted to the Compton Unified School District last week.

Reporting from Sacramento The state Board of Education took up the controversial issue of teacher evaluations Wednesday, unanimously voting to create an online database to share information about local, state and national efforts to measure educators' effectiveness. The board also asked the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Fresno school districts to propose specific ways the state can support local efforts to create more meaningful evaluation tools, including the value-added method of using students' test scores to rate teacher performance.

The California Teachers Assn., one of the state's most politically powerful unions, suffered a rare rebuke Thursday when Republican state senators blocked the confirmation of a union leader to another term on the state Board of Education. The Senate rejected Joe Nunez, the CTA's deputy executive director and a chief architect of public labor unions' successful campaign against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2005 effort to upend Sacramento politics.

Supporters of a state Senate bill that has mired educators in a debate over how best to teach English in schools pledged Wednesday to block funding for the state Board of Education until the question is resolved. The defiance was in response to statements by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week that he would not support SB 1769, which would allow districts broader discretion in buying textbooks for California's 1.6 million English learners.

A state Assembly budget panel moved Tuesday to strip funding from the state Board of Education and to allow school districts broader discretion in buying textbooks for students. The action, led by the Assembly's caucus of Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander and African American legislators, comes a day after a divided board voted to adopt new textbook guidelines for elementary and middle schools that detractors contend are ineffective for students who speak little or no English.

A divided state Board of Education on Monday adopted far-reaching new guidelines for reading and English language arts textbooks aimed at California's elementary and middle school students, despite objections that the materials do not do enough to help students struggling to learn English.

The California Teachers Assn., one of the state's most politically powerful unions, suffered a rare rebuke Thursday when Republican state senators blocked the confirmation of a union leader to another term on the state Board of Education. The Senate rejected Joe Nunez, the CTA's deputy executive director and a chief architect of public labor unions' successful campaign against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2005 effort to upend Sacramento politics.

Few people have worked harder than Joe Nunez to sabotage Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political fortunes. A high-ranking teachers union official, he helped engineer the governor's embarrassing defeat in the special election last year. So to Republicans, it was nothing short of infuriating and confounding that Schwarzenegger would appoint Nunez to the state Board of Education. He handed a Democrat and avowed enemy one of the most prestigious patronage jobs in government.