Posts Tagged: English
Recent News
The first standardized school testing since the pandemic has confirmed what parents knew all along – Covid shutdowns and remote learning hurt student performance and wiped out years of improvement. Repairing the damage won’t be easy. “Pandemic learning loss” presents a unique set of problems for which educators have no playbook.
News
In the last decade, numerous California school districts have adopted propane-based school buses in an attempt to eliminate costs and toxic emissions. Since 2013, the Elk Grove Unified School District near Sacramento has added 16 propane buses to its fleet and expects up to 12 more in the next month.
News
Linda Escalante, an environmental activist and a legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, has been named to the California Coastal Commission, the powerful regulatory body with jurisdiction over 1,100 miles of coastline.
News
There are five people alive today who each served more than a quarter-century in the California State Legislature. Four of the five served as the leader of a house during their time in Sacramento. The last member of the quarter-century club is 97-year-old Wadie Deddeh, who moved to the United States in his late 20s, rose to power as chair of the Revenue and Taxation committee, and retired from the Legislature in 1993.
News
Field Poll: Likely voters are giving strong initial support to two state ballot propositions, one to extend a recent income tax hike on high income residents (Proposition 55). and another to offer new parole opportunities for non-violent offenders (Propositon 57). While voters are also backing a third initiative to increase cigarette taxes (Proposition 56), it leads by a narrower margin.
News
“Now in half the homes in California, people speak a language other than English in their own homes.” We checked the second part of Buchanan’s statement, about the percentage of Californians who speak a foreign language at home. It’s a claim that was close to correct on the numbers, but wrongly implies that half the state does not speak English.
Opinion
OPINION: A lot of well-meaning, smart and politically savvy professionals cringe at the idea of putting together Spanish language advertisements. In seminars and forums they twist in circles trying to convince the audience and themselves that Hispanics can be easily reached in English. While the reasons may vary, in reality these are just excuses to mask an underlying concern: the fear of screwing up.
News
Some 2.6 million of California’s eligible voters — about one in nine — speak only limited English and many of them can’t get election information in their native languages, a problem that is playing out in low turnout numbers for Asians and Latinos, according to a new study.
News
Field Poll: Support for the death penalty as a punishment for serious crimes in California is now at its lowest point in nearly fifty years. The latest Field Poll finds 56% of voters in favor of keeping the death penalty and 34% opposed. The 56% supporting continuation of the state’s capital punishment laws is down from 69% in 2011. Throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s eight in ten California voters favored keeping the death penalty.
Masked students outside their closed school, which shut down because of COVID-19. (Photo: Falon Koontz, via Shutterstock)
