Education

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says her future son-in-law is not a high school dropout as the press is reporting. The former Republican vice presidential nominee also issued a statement about the birth of her first grandchild. Palin said Wednesday that Levi Johnston, 18, is enrolled in high school through a correspondence program. Palin said some media outlets also are erroneously reporting that her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, is a high school dropout.

Once upon a time, A&R were the sexiest letters in the music industry's alphabet. Executives in the artists-and-repertoire division of every major record label were charged with discovering and nurturing new acts, setting them on the path toward gold and platinum albums and Grammy Awards. These high-powered talent brokers would spend their nights scouring nightclubs and street corners after days combing through stacks of homemade recordings in their quests for pop music's next big thing.

It's inevitable that California public schools soon will be whacked with hefty program cuts. And that's a shame because students recently have been making significant gains. A decade of academic advancement due to class-size reduction, tougher curriculum, higher standards, testing, accountability and other reforms could be stalled -- even reversed -- by the necessity to cut spending. But there's no way around it.

California's historic leadership in higher education is in decline, with the state failing to provide a new generation of low-income, heavily Latino and immigrant students with the college prospects their parents and grandparents enjoyed, according to a study released Thursday.

For as long as he can remember, Dario Serrano's life was all screeching tires and echoing gunshots, babies' cries and barking dogs, a symphony, as he puts it, of "hood rats and gangsters," of "vatos and payasos" -- dudes and numskulls, loosely translated. By high school, he'd pretty much given up on himself. He bounced around between three schools. He started selling pot, though he always seemed to smoke more than he sold. His GPA fell to 0.

As her colleagues attended a budget-signing ceremony in Sacramento, state Assembly Speaker Karen Bass was a world away as she visited her alma mater in West Los Angeles on Friday morning to address a younger but no less demanding group. Inside a music classroom at Hamilton High School, less than 36 hours after state legislators ended months of intense budget negotiations, she pressed headphones to her ears and bobbed her head, a bewildered half-smile creeping across her face.

The government proposes to take on a greatly expanded role in making college affordable and in ensuring that students earn degrees or credentials. Pell Grants would be tied to inflation for the first time since their inception, providing annual raises for recipients. The grant program also would be turned into a entitlement program with guaranteed funding, like Social Security or Medicare.

On some days, former Colombian rebel Wilmar Quintero says, he feels like a research monkey. He recently spent his morning taking "psycho-social" tests, sitting through an hourlong accounting course and meeting with victims of this country's endemic violence at the Peace and Reconciliation Program training center in Medellin. But he's not complaining.

It won't have professors, not in a traditional sense. And no tuition either. Still, the University of the People, a Pasadena-based venture envisioned as the first global, online, peer-to-peer university, will be a real institution of higher education, its founder says. Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur behind the idea, said the response has been overwhelming since news of his in-the-works university started spreading earlier this year.

With President Obama calling math and science education the key to good jobs in our future economy, Congress was told Wednesday that a pilot program in Los Angeles schools has started to show promising results in computer science.