California Education

A bill that would make kindergarten compulsory for California children cleared the state Senate Education Committee on Wednesday on a 9-4 vote. AB 634 will next be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee in late August, after legislators return from their summer recess. The bill, which the Assembly has already passed, was written by Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City) at the behest of Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction.

"There was a time when only wise books were read, helping us to bear our pain and misery." --Czeslaw Milosz * "A classic is a book nobody wants to read and everybody wishes to have read." --Mark Twain * America's culture war has been fought on many battlefields over the last decade, but few have been as bitterly contested as the question of which books public school students ought to read.

Kindergarten is no longer child's play. By the end of their kindergarten year, California pupils are now expected to be able to locate a book's title, table of contents, author and illustrator. They are expected to be able to write about experiences and people, recognize when an estimate is reasonable and use information to make a graph.

Gov. Gray Davis' administration warned Sunday that a Republican demand for a continuation of a sales tax cut probably will result in deep reductions in state spending on needy schoolchildren and other education programs. GOP lawmakers are withholding their support for California's 2001-02 budget over the sales tax issue, which has emerged as a lightning rod in stalled budget negotiations.

A geisha, a fruit bat and explorer Meriwether Lewis have more in common than it appears. The three are subjects of best-selling books that hadn't been written when the California Department of Education last put out a recommended reading list more than a decade ago. But books in which they are featured--"Memoirs of a Geisha," "Stellaluna" and "Undaunted Courage"--made the cut for a new list that the agency will soon publish.

At the Transitional Learning Center, homeless children go to a separate school housed at a social services complex for the city's poorest residents. In three cozy classrooms beneath a freeway overpass, students from kindergarten to sixth grade get counseling, new clothes and lots of attention. In the East Bay city of Richmond, by contrast, the school district goes to great lengths to help children stay in the same school they attended when their families had homes.

Only about four in 10 ninth-graders--and just one-fourth of Latino and African American students--passed California's high school exit exam in March when it was administered for the first time, the State Board of Education said Thursday. Though the first test was taken voluntarily by freshmen, state officials and educators say the results spotlight severe educational weaknesses.

The bell rings at Dorsey High School and students spill out of their classrooms. A girl sips a Coke at her locker. Two sweethearts embrace. Others mingle on the grassy quad. A little relaxation between classes, right? Wrong. These students are technically in class, thanks to a bureaucratic edict that treats "passing periods" as an instructional activity in California's schools.

Drew Chaffee, an 18-year-old from San Juan Capistrano, typifies the new face of home schooling. The Eagle Scout has conventional interests: He rows on a local crew team and plays guitar. He has conventional parents too. David Chaffee, his dad, is an Orange County Superior Court judge. His mom, Delaine, is a former teacher who quit to raise her children.

The rate at which California students graduated from high school inched up again last year, continuing a six-year trend, according to data released by the state Wednesday. About 68.7% of the class of 2000 received diplomas last year, up from the previous year's 68.3%, figures from the California Department of Education show. Once again, Orange County bested the state as a whole, climbing from an estimated 72% in 1999 to 73.2% last year.