Needed: Modern-Day Rosie the Riveters

Ami Rasmussen, interior assembly technician. Photo: Deanne Fitzmaurice

By Surnia Khan, CEO of the Women's Foundation of California

Some of us remember Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, her goggles, her uncanny biceps, the larger-than-life rivet gun in her lap. Most of us, however, remember a different Rosie, her red bandana, her clenched fist and her in-your-face, flexed bicep.

Though both Rosies were a propaganda tool created during WWII to recruit women to work, one thing is undeniable: these Rosies revolutionized the U.S. workforce. Between 1940 and 1945, six million women entered the workforce and, as a result, forever changed the course of our economy, politics and nation.

Today, women comprise 47 percent of our workforce and our numbers are growing. In addition to being primary caretakers for our families, women are becoming primary income-earners, too. According to the Pew Research Center, women are sole or primary breadwinners in more than 40 percent of our households. And if we want women and our families to thrive, we need to dramatically change our workforce policies and workplace conditions.

This month we have a unique opportunity to showcase how women are a critical part of our workforce and economy. Women Can Build: Re-envisioning Rosie is a photography exhibit that celebrates modern-day Rosie the Riveters and invites Los Angelenos, policymakers and the businesses community to work together to give women equal opportunities in the manufacturing industry.

The exhibit was created by Jobs to Move America to accompany a sobering study by the USC's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity.

The study titled "#WomenCanBuild: Including Women in the Resurgence of Good U.S. Manufacturing Jobs" finds that women comprise just 30 percent of the manufacturing industry workforce and that the majority are employed in lower-paying, clerical positions instead of middle class-sustaining jobs.

Furthermore, the study finds that the pay disparity is significant in the manufacturing industry: women make just 74 cents for every dollar men make.

This research is important because manufacturing jobs—and in particular transportation equipment manufacturing jobs—are poised to grow in California due to significant federal and local investments in mass transit systems, including bus and rail. In places like Los Angeles County, voters are taxing themselves to build out their transportation systems. And then there's the voter-approved, albeit highly controversial, California's high-speed rail system and all the jobs that would be needed to build it.

We know that the manufacturing industry is poised to expand and we must ensure that women are poised to enter these new jobs that will pay a living wage.

But if we look at the employment data over the last five years, the outlook is less than encouraging. Post-Great Recession, women entered low-wage and part-time jobs in great numbers and continue to be underemployed. Two-thirds of all minimum wage workers are women and nearly one in five women in California lives in poverty.

The study and the exhibit point out the elephant in the room: California must create opportunities for women to equitably participate in this manufacturing boom—and our economy.

If women are to enter traditionally male-dominated industries like manufacturing, we need to recognize and remove barriers currently in their way. One of the barriers is psychological -- we need to help women see that they can do manufacturing jobs, the way the propaganda machine of the 1940s showed women they could build planes and tanks. Hence the exhibit.

"Women might think they can't lift anything heavy, but they'd be surprised that they can do this—better than half the guys…I want to prove to my girls that they can do anything they put their minds to and commit to. I want to lead by example, to them and to other women," said Ami Rasmussen, US Army veteran, a mother of two teenage daughters and one of the fifteen Rosies featured in the exhibit.

In addition to showing women that they can indeed build as well as men, we must remove the biased, outdated and unresponsive public policies that make it difficult for women to enter male-dominated (and traditionally higher-paying) industries in the first place.

We need to find policy solutions to issues such as unequal pay for equal work, lack of affordable, reliable childcare, unregulated scheduling and lack of paid family and sick leave. A groundbreaking coalition of California women's rights and poverty advocates is tackling many of these important policy challenges at this very moment and the Women's Foundation of California is proud to be one of the members.

We hope more women, especially young women, will be motivated to enter these traditionally male jobs and earn middle class, family-supporting wages.

via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/surina-khan/needed-modernday-rosie-the-riveters_b_7337312.html

Criminal Justice Reform A Bipartisan Issue Amongst 2016 Presidential Candidates

The Incredible, Bipartisan, Kumbaya Moment for Criminal Justice Reform

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, the state built 38 new prisons, and the state’s annual corrections expenditure jumped jumped by $1 billion to $2.4 billion, a 71 percent increase. That’s what it was to be tough on crime. No one would ever describe Bush’s successor, Rick Perry, as a softie or a liberal, but in his 15 years as governor, Perry became a prison reformer: signing laws to benefit juvenile of fenders, approving new standards for forensic crime labs, and increasing compensation for exonerated prisoners. At a Conservative Political Action Conference panel in March 2014, Perry criticized tough sentencing guidelines and praised drug courts that help steer addicts clear of prison. “You want to talk about real conservative governance?” he said. “Shut prisons down. Save that money.”

Perry is one of 23 contributors to a book just published by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. It is a surprising sort of kumbaya moment as the 2016 campaign gets underway, a rickety bridge across America’s partisan chasm. Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice Reform includes essays from a wide range of congressional representatives and public figures, Republicans like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Texas Senator Ted Cruz—and Democrats like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley. Perry calls for other states to “follow the successful example of Texas [to] eliminate our incarceration epidemic”—he, as well as Walker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former Virginia Senator Jim Webb seek to expand drug treatment as an alternative to prison. Paul, Cruz, and Clinton want to ease mandatory minimum sentencing. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee wishes to treat drug addicts, eliminate financial waste, and “address character.”

This is quite something to witness.

“We have to take a step back and see if there’s a better approach with a lot of these non-violent drug crimes.”
Former Senator Rick Santorum

And more than any individual chapter in Solutions, it is the foreword written by Bill Clinton that most powerfully depicts the momentum of change. In his first presidential term, Clinton signed into law an omnibus crime bill with a three-strikes sentence. (Hillary Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, as first lady advocated these “tough measures.”) President Clinton puts it delicately and a little defensively here—“By 1994, violent crime had tripled in 30 years. Our communities were under assault”—of course mindful of his legacy. But he does not absolve himself. “It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at what worked, what didn’t, and what produced unintended, long-lasting consequences,” he writes. “Too many laws were overly broad instead of appropriately tailored… Some are in prison who shouldn’t be, others are in for too long, and without a plan to educate, train, and reintegrate them into our communities, we all suffer.”

In an interview Wednesday with Christiane Amanpour, the 42nd president again took a measure of responsibility for over-incarceration. “We cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison,” he said.

Also last week, Rick Santorum—a Republican about as politically distant from Clinton as can be—made a parallel remark. Speaking to Bloomberg's David Weigel in South Carolina, Santorum said, “We have to look at the huge rates of incarceration and the ability of a person to be successful in society. We have to take a step back and see if there’s a better approach with a lot of these non-violent drug crimes.”

Criminal-justice reform now seems to be a thoroughly bipartisan issue. Last summer, Paul joined with Booker to introduce a bill to make it easier for nonviolent criminals to get jobs after prison. In September, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, proposed a sentencing-reform bill that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. “Making smart reforms to our drug sentencing laws will save the taxpayers billions of dollars,” Lee said. That would be $4.36 billion, to be exact, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In February, Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, introduced legislation that would help ex-convicts with their transition back to civilian life following prison: the Corrections Oversight, Recidivism Reduction, and Eliminating Costs for Taxpayers in Our National System (CORRECTIONS) Act.

Also in February, Koch Industries—a massive private company owned by the conservative Koch Brothers—helped launch the nation’s largest criminal-justice reform effort, in apartnership with the liberal Center for American Progress—whose president, Neera Tanden, served as policy director for Hillary Clinton’s previous presidential campaign. Strange bedfellows, but these are days of harmony.

The Kochs have framed the push around fiscal conservatism. Policies that push down prison populations would save the government billions. Speaking recently at Columbia University, Hillary Clinton concurred. “The price of incarcerating a single inmate is often more than $30,000 per year—and up to $60,000 in some states. That's the salary of a teacher or police officer,” she said.

Certainly the emphasis on cost-cutting helps in making this a bipartisan issue. But seeing criminal-justice reform as mainly a cost-cutting strategy has its problems. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig of the New Republic has written about the GOP’s prison reform plans, noting that a “2014 National Research Council report found that, in a number of states, the criminal justice system has become the main distributor of healthcare, drug abuse treatment, mental health services, job training and education for the most disadvantaged populations in America.”

The trick now is putting plans forward that provide these services more effectively and efficiently to the prison population, even with today’s focus on cost-cutting, and to guarantee that such resources are available to the general population. As Bill Clinton said to Amanpour this week, “We wound up...putting so many people in prison that there wasn't enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives.”

Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor, worked in Bill Clinton’s administration until he resigned in protest against the president’s signing welfare-reform legislation. (His wife, Marian Wright Edelman, the president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, employed Hillary Clinton when she was fresh out of law school.) In a phone interview, Edelman told me that, while he values the bipartisan push toward criminal-justice reform, the “devil is in the details.” He pointed to the Republican push toward budget cuts. “It’s quite inconsistent,” he said, to push to reduce prison populations in the name of criminal justice, and to simultaneously “want to cut food stamps, and Medicaid.” Talking about police misconduct and the need to overhaul the criminal-justice system is one thing, addressing the ongoing cycles of poverty another.

Edelman grants, and appreciates, “a certain degree of bipartisan agreement around certainly aspects of what happens to ex-offenders.” Reading Solutions, it’s hard not to revel in the pleasing accord: presidential debates might have a soft spot after all. But of Republicans who are putting forward criminal-justice reforms, Edelman said, “Let’s say, good, and let’s hold their feet to the fire.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the month that a Conservative Political Action Conference panel featuring Rick Perry took place.

Via: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-11/the-incredible-bipartisan-kumbaya-moment-for-criminal-justice-reform

Los Angeles Lifts Its Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.

The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.

“The effects here will be the biggest by far,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was commissioned by city leaders to conduct several studies on the potential effects of a minimum-wage increase. “The proposal will bring wages up in a way we haven’t seen since the 1960s. There’s a sense spreading that this is the new norm, especially in areas that have high costs of housing.”

The groups pressing for higher minimum wages said that the Los Angeles vote could set off a wave of increases across Southern California, and that higher pay scales would improve the way of life for the region’s vast low-wage work force.

Supporters of higher wages say they hope the move will reverberate nationally. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced this month that he was convening a state board to consider a wage increase in the local fast-food industry, which could be enacted without a vote in the State Legislature. Immediately after the Los Angeles vote, pressure began to build on Mr. Cuomo to reject an increase that falls short of $15 an hour.

“The L.A. increase nudges it forward,” said Dan Cantor, the national director of the Working Families Party, which was founded in New York and has helped pass progressive economic measures in several states. “It puts an exclamation point on the need for $15 to be where the wage board ends up.”

The current minimum wage in New York State is $8.75, versus a federal minimum wage of $7.25, and will rise to $9 at the end of 2015. A little more than one-third of workers citywide and statewide now make below $15 an hour.

Los Angeles County is also considering a measure that would lift the wages of thousands of workers in unincorporated parts of the county.

Much of the debate here has centered on potential regional repercussions. Many of the low-wage workers who form the backbone of Southern California’s economy live in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Proponents of the wage increase say they expect that several nearby cities, including Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Pasadena, will also approve higher wages.

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But opponents of higher minimum wages, including small-business owners and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, say the increase approved Tuesday could turn Los Angeles into a “wage island,” pushing businesses to nearby places where they can pay employees less.

“They are asking businesses to foot the bill on a social experiment that they would never do on their own employees,” said Stuart Waldman, the president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, a trade group that represents companies and other organizations in Southern California. “A lot of businesses aren’t going to make it,” he added. “It’s great that this is an increase for some employees, but the sad truth is that a lot of employees are going to lose their jobs.”

The 67 percent increase from the current state minimum will be phased in over five years, first to $10.50 in July 2016, then to $12 in 2017, $13.25 in 2018 and $14.25 in 2019. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees will have an extra year to carry out the plan. Starting in 2022, annual increases will be based on the Consumer Price Index average of the last 20 years. The City Council’s vote will instruct the city attorney to draft the language of the law, which will then come back to the Council for final approval.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, had proposed a slightly different increase last fall and later negotiated the details with the Democratic-controlled Council. Mr. Garcetti said Tuesday that he would sign the legislation and that he hoped other elected officials, including Mr. Cuomo, would follow Los Angeles’s path.

“We’re leading the country; we’re not going to wait for Washington to lift Americans out of poverty,” Mr. Garcetti said in an interview. “We have too many adults struggling to be living off a poverty wage. This will re-establish some of the equilibrium we’ve had in the past.”

New York City does not have a separate minimum wage, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has spoken out in favor of higher wages statewide. “Los Angeles is another example of a city that’s doing the right thing, lifting people up by providing a wage on which they can live,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement “We need Albany to catch up with the times and raise the wage.”Continue reading the main storhe push for a $15-an-hour minimum wage is not confined to populous coastal states. In Kansas City, Mo., activists recently collected enough signatures to put forward an August ballot initiative on whether to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2020. The City Council is deliberating this week over how to respond and could pass its own measure in advance of the initiative.

As the Los Angeles City Council considered raising the minimum wage over the last several months, the question was not if, but how much. The lone councilman who voted against the bill — a Republican — did not speak during Tuesday’s meeting.

Still, for all their enthusiasm, some Council members acknowledged that it would be difficult to predict what would happen once the increase was fully in effect.

“I would prefer that the cost of this was really burdened by those at the highest income levels,” said Gil Cedillo, a councilman who represents some of the poorest sections of the city and worries that some small businesses will shut down. “Instead, it’s going to be coming from people who are just a rung or two up the ladder here. It’s a risk that rhetoric can’t resolve.”

Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.

Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.

And while labor leaders and the coalition of dozens of community groups celebrated in the rotunda of City Hall after the vote, they acknowledged there was a long way to go.

“This says to Los Angeles workers that they are respected, and that’s an important psychological effect,” said Laphonza Butler, the president of Service Employees International Union-United Long Term Care Workers here and a leader of the coalition. “To know that they have a pathway to $15, to getting themselves off of welfare and out of poverty, that’s huge. This should change the debate of the value of low-wage work.”

Prop. 47 Expungement Clinic & Resource Fair in LA!

Date: Friday May 22, 2015

Time: 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Location: SSG - HOPICS 

5715 S. Broadway 

Los Angels, CA 90037

* Items to bring*

1. Any court documents that are relevant to Prop. 47 felony
> These can be obtained in the courthouse in which you were convicted

2. Live scan result - If available

3. Rap Sheet - If available
>  There will be opportunities to look up criminal records from LA County 
>  Bring identification for the free live scan service that will be available on site 
*i.e. Drivers License*

Kevin de León joins immigrants to advocate for health care expansion

Health care for undocumented immigrants wasn’t part of Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget proposal last week, but that hasn’t slowed the campaign for SB 4. The proposal – a priority of legislative Democrats that currently sits in the Senate Appropriations Committee as lawmakers consider the expected annual cost of between $175 million and $740 million – tops the agenda for the 19th annual Immigrant Day. 

Immigrant rights advocates will be at the Capitol to lobby for SB 4, as well as AB 622, which would prohibit employers from using the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of current workers or applicants who have not yet received a job offer; AB 953, to expand limits on racial profiling; and a $20 million budget proposal to assist Californians applying for citizenship or deferred action.

The day will kick off at 9:15 a.m. with an interfaith ceremony on the west steps of the Capitol, followed by a rally at 9:45 a.m. featuring state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, and Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville.

Via: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article21135027.html

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article21135027.html#storylink=cpy

Statewide Day of Action Budget Revise Press Conference & Rally

Join us May 14 & 15, 2015 for

Statewide Day of Action

Budget Revise Press Conference & Rally

Sacremento - May 14

State Capitol, South Steps

When: 11:00 am or

Following Budget Release

Contact: Pete Woiwode, 510-504-9552

pete@communitychange.org

Los Angeles - May 14

300 S. Spring Street, 90013

When: 12:00 pm

Contact: Aurora Garcia, 562-519-3106

agarcia@communitychange.org

San Jose - May 15

1381 S. First street, 95110

When: 10:00 am

Contact: Pete Woiwode, 510-504-9552

pete@communitychange.org

Riverside - May 15

3737 Main street, 92501

When: 1:00 pm

Contact: Maribel Nunez,  562-569-4051

mnunez@communitychange.org

PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Education

SAN FRANCISCO, April 22, 2015—As California schools begin administering new online standardized tests, most public school parents say they have heard nothing about them, according to a statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). 

A majority (55%) say they have heard nothing at all about the Smarter Balanced Assessment System, which replaces paper-based tests. The new tests are based on the Common Core math and English standards. About a third of public school parents (36%) have heard a little about the tests, and just 8 percent say they have heard a lot. Latino public school parents (54%) are much more likely than white parents (32%) to say they have heard about the tests.

While concerns have been raised about whether all schools have enough computers, bandwidth, and technology staff to effectively administer the online tests, most public school parents say they are very confident (29%) or somewhat confident (42%) that their local schools do.

Other states have found that the switch to the Common Core standards and new tests significantly reduced student scores. How do California public school parents expect students to score on the Smarter Balanced tests? A plurality (42%) predict that scores will be about the same as those on past tests, while 29 percent expect scores to be higher and 23 percent predict that they will be lower.

More generally, Californians are divided about whether standardized tests are accurate measures of a student’s progress and abilities, with 51 percent very or somewhat confident that this is true, and 46 percent not too confident or not at all confident. But few say there is too much testing in their local schools (24% too much in elementary and middle schools, 22% too much in high schools).

A year after the Common Core State Standards were implemented, 66 percent of public school parents have heard of them (43% a little, 23% a lot), while a third (32%) say they have heard nothing at all. White public school parents are nearly three times as likely as Latinos to say they have heard a lot (38% vs. 13%).

A third of public school parents (34%) say their child’s school or district has provided them with information about the Common Core standards and that this information has been adequate. But 20 percent say they have received inadequate information, and the largest share of parents (42%) say they received no information about the standards.

"Many public school parents are in the dark when it comes to Common Core," said Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO. "Local schools need to do a better job of keeping parents informed as the state implements the new English and math standards.”

Based on what they’ve read and heard about Common Core, 47 percent of adults and 57 percent of public school parents favor the standards. There is a partisan divide, with Democrats (49%) much more likely to be in favor than independents (37%) or Republicans (30%).

Concerns have been raised about teachers’ readiness to teach the new standards—concerns that are shared by California adults (73% very or somewhat concerned) and public school parents (80% very or somewhat concerned). But Californians are optimistic that Common Core will meet two goals: Most (57%) are confident that implementing the standards will make students more college or career ready, and most (57%) are confident that the standards will help students develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. Public school parents express even higher levels of optimism (71% confident about each goal).

Baldassare summed up: "Most Californians are hopeful about the effect of Common Core on improving student achievement, but many worry that teachers are not fully prepared to implement these new standards in the classroom.”

Across racial/ethnic groups, Latinos are much more likely than other groups to express confidence that Common Core will make students more college and career ready (75% Latinos, 65% Asians, 58% blacks, 44% whites) and help students develop critical thinking and problem solving skills (77% Latinos, 60% blacks, 51% Asians, 45% whites). Yet Latinos are also the most likely to express concerns about teacher preparedness to implement the standards (80% Latinos, 79% blacks, 70% Asians, 67% whites).

Most Expect New Funding Formula To Boost Achievement

As the state implements a new system for financing schools—the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)—most Californians say they have heard nothing about it (75% adults, 69% public school parents). Across racial/ethnic groups, Latinos (30%) are the most likely to have heard a little or a lot about the LCFF, followed by Asians (27%), blacks (20%), and whites (19%).

When they are read a brief description of the LCFF, strong majorities of adults (70%) and public school parents (73%) favor it. Among those who have heard at least a little about the LCFF, 75 percent favor it.

The LCFF allocates extra money to districts with more English Learners and lower-income students. Californians have long expressed the view in PPIC surveys that school districts in lower-income areas of the state lack the same resources—including good teachers and classroom materials—as those in wealthier areas. Today, 82 percent hold this view, which is consistent with their support of the LCFF. A majority (59%) also say they are very concerned that students in lower-income areas are less likely than other students to be ready for college when they finish high school. About half of Californians (48%) say they are very concerned that English Learners score lower on standardized tests than other students.

The LCFF allows local districts more control over spending decisions, and it gives additional funding to districts with more lower-income students and English Learners. How confident are Californians that districts receiving the extra money will spend it to support these students? Most adults (56%) are at least somewhat confident, and public school parents (66%) are especially likely to express this view. Will the LCFF improve academic achievement of English Learners and lower-income students? Strong majorities of adults (68%) and public school parents (78%) say it will, at least somewhat. Latinos (85%) are much more likely to expect improvement than Asians (67%), blacks (62%), and whites (59%).

The LCFF requires each school district to get input from parents in designing a Local Control Accountability Plan. While 42 percent of public school parents say they were given information about how to get involved, most (54%) say they did not receive any. Lower-income parents (51% of those with household incomes under $40,000) were much more likely than wealthier parents (37% of those with incomes of $40,000 or more) to say their child’s school or district provided them with information.

Among the parents who received information about participating, most (72%) say they were not involved in the process. Notably, public school parents with lower household income are more likely than those with higher incomes to be involved (25% with incomes under $40,000 vs. 8% $40,000 or more).

State Funding For Schools Is Up, But Most Say It’s Not Enough

California funding for K–12 public education has been rising in recent years, but 60 percent of all adults and 70 percent of public school parents today say current state funding for their local public schools is not enough. Among likely voters, 54 percent say there is not enough funding. Asked to identify the most important issues facing public education today, Californians are most likely to mention lack of funding (16%) and quality of teachers (12%). Public school parents are most likely to mention lack of funding (18%), large class sizes (13%), and quality of teachers (12%).

How do residents think California K–12 education compares to that of other states? About a third of adults (35%) say California’s spending per pupil is lower than average and 26 percent say it is higher than average. Only 29 percent correctly say that spending per pupil is average. Asked about K–12 test scores, 46 percent correctly say California’s results are lower than average (11% higher than average, 38% average).

How can California significantly improve the quality of public schools? Just 9 percent say increased funding alone will do this, while 38 percent prefer using existing funding more wisely. The largest share (49%) prefers that the state do both.

The survey also asks a series of questions about ways to fund education projects.
A state bond for school construction projects: 66 percent of adults and 55 percent of likely voters say they would vote yes if there were a measure on the ballot.
A local bond for school construction projects: 65 percent of adults and 53 percent of likely voters would vote yes if their local districts put a measure on the ballot. (A 55% majority vote is required for passage.)
A local parcel tax for schools: 57 percent of adults and 49 percent of likely voters would approve an increase in local parcel taxes to benefit local schools. (A two-thirds majority vote is required for passage.) Half of adults (50%) think it is a good idea to replace the two-thirds requirement with a 55 percent majority vote to pass local parcel taxes for local public schools. However, only 44 percent of likely voters express support—short of the majority vote required to make the change.

More Key Findings
Half approve of Brown’s job performance—page 14
The governor’s approval rating is holding steady (50% adults, 53% likely voters), as is the legislature’s (42% adults, 36% likely voters). Approval of the way both the governor and legislature are handling of K–12 education is lower.
Local schools get record-high ratings for college, career preparation—page 18
Most adults (58%) say their local public schools are doing a good to excellent job of preparing students for college, and 48 percent rate their schools as good to excellent when asked how well they are preparing students for the workforce.
Half give local schools an A or B—page 20
While 53 percent of all adults give their neighborhood schools good grades, blacks are much less likely than other racial/ethnic groups to do so (blacks 38%, whites 50%, Latinos 59%, Asians 63%).

via: http://www.ppic.org/main/pressrelease.asp?i=1751