Recent News

Ever since President Obama's emphasized universal early childhood education in his State of the Union address, the chattering class has gleefully proclaimed its potential to be a game-changer for America. There is no doubt early childhood education leads to short-term academic success and perhaps long-term student sociability - but the same studies cited by advocates show that universal preschool is no magic path to help a student navigate 13 years of substandard K-12 education. The president mentioned a cost-benefit analysis…

The aerospace industry is worried. Its most important customer, the Department of Defense, might have to cut more than $40 billion from its budget this year because of automatic spending cuts, otherwise known as the sequester, which - without congressional action - will begin Friday. Such cuts would be "catastrophic for our industry and our nation," Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens said last year. Lawmakers agree. "I implore you, no, I beg you, to stop this from happening," Rep. Buck McKeon,…

Calling her fiscally “brilliant” SF Mayor Edwin Lee named Carmen Chu (MPP ‘03) as the city’s Assessor-Recorder. “Carmen’s exemplary budgetary skills as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors have benefited the entire city,” says Mayor Lee. The assessor-recorder administers the property assessment system of the City and County of San Francisco. Read the full story here.

Professor Robert Reich discussed why raising the mimimum wage is a "no-brainer" with NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Our leaders often peddle the role of family. Yet with the specter of a federal government shutdown, Washington has put our most vulnerable citizens on life support. While the White House expands preschool, Washington shrinks Head Start. California's poorest kids deserve better. A brain child of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Head Start has served more than 30 million low-income preschool children since 1965. Head Start cuts, which will trim the number of slots by about 7 percent, will do damage.…

In his State of the Union Address this month, President Obama called for a much- needed increase to the federal minimum wage. Almost four million American workers are paid at or below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for their work, adding up to about $15,000 per year, per person for a full-time, 40 hour per week job. This doesn’t come close to covering the cost of living for a single person, let alone a family. In the food retail…

Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. Republicans say it will cause employers to shed jobs, but that’s baloney. Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum…

What would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have. Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average.…