California
California would take a step toward having counselors rather than police respond to people experiencing mental health crises under a bill backed by gun-violence prevention groups…
House impeachment manager and intelligence subcommittee chairman, Rep. Swalwell (D-CA), has filed a federal lawsuit against former president Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Rudolph Giuliani and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), claiming they should be held liable for injuries and destruction caused by their incitement of the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol…
San Francisco school officials plan to reopen classrooms for younger students beginning 4/12…
The $1.9 trillion federal stimulus package includes a temporary expansion of the child tax credit…
On Wednesday, 3/10, the group organizing the recall of Governor Newsom announced it had collected over two million signatures…
Mike Bloomberg spends over $600,000 to defend California flavored tobacco ban…
Coronavirus
School closings have been controversial since the pandemic erupted…
A new study on air circulation in buses demonstrates that wearing masks reduced the overall particle count released in the bus by an average of 50 percent or more depending on mask quality, and reduced the dispersion distance by several feet…
A NBER paper on the impact of Saga Education's tutoring found that students who received Saga tutoring learned as much as an extra two and a half years of math in one academic year for the relatively low cost of between $3,500 and $4,300 per participant per year tutoring…
Policy Analysis for California Education released a new study that examined 250,000 oral reading fluency scores for students in first through third grade last spring and fall in over 100 school districts across 22 states…
President and Administration
In his first prime-time address from the White House on Thursday, 3/11, President Biden said that he would order states to make all adults eligible for the vaccine by 5/1 and that a return to normalcy was possible by 7/4…
Economists at Goldman Sachs raised their GDP growth expectations for the U.S. economy to 8 percent for 2021 in a note to clients yesterday, 3/14…
State tax administrators oppose changing the April 15 federal tax filing deadline, saying any adjustment by the Treasury Department would completely upend the state tax filing season…
The Pentagon is set to approve an extension of the National Guard deployment at the U.S. Capitol for about two more months, defense officials said Tuesday, 3/9…
Congress
The House voted on two gun-related measures on 3/11…
Democratic lawmakers said they would introduce a new bill addressing a rise in hate incidents directed at Asian Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic…
America’s largest business lobby says it will not pull support for members of Congress based solely on whether they voted against certifying President Biden’s election win in Arizona and Pennsylvania, providing cover for 147 Republican lawmakers who supported former president Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud…
Last week, the House passed Democrats’ wide-ranging overhaul of labor laws, inching President Biden closer to fulfilling a campaign promise and coinciding with Amazon workers’ ongoing push to unionize an Alabama warehouse…
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the number four GOP leader, is the latest senator to drop the retirement bombshell, announcing last week that he will not run for reelection in 2022…
Education
Following President Biden's signing the American Rescue Plan into law, the Department of Education (ED) announced additional details on how it will support schools in safely returning to in-person instruction…
A recent analysis found that an estimated 12 million students lack internet service or make do with a patchwork of short-term fixes to participate in remote learning…
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has accepted the resignation of Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Gen. Mark Brown…
American adults with a bachelor’s degree live longer than those without one, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Princeton University…
On Tuesday, 3/9, officials from 11 states - including California - asked Education Secretary Cardona to reverse two Trump administration policies they say keeps them from being able to regulate private servicers of student loans…
Even as colleges and universities expanded in-person instruction this spring, undergraduate enrollment continued to tumble…