While most people get caught up in the high-profile workings of Sacramento or Washington D.C., the issues that impact their daily lives are actually hashed out most often at the local level. Comstock’s sat down with League of California Cities Executive Director Carolyn Coleman, one of the state’s fiercest advocates for the power of local control.

Education in entrepreneurialism grooms mini moguls and prepares students for the modern workforce. As demand rises, local programs are expanding to reach more youth and instill the lessons of smart business.

It’s not just budding entrepreneurs benefitting from early exposure to the world of business.

Californians in November will weigh billions of dollars’ worth of ballot measures for low-income housing, children’s hospitals and more. But one of the biggest asks will be mostly invisible to most voters—100 or more local proposals to sell bonds for school construction projects that, if passed, could total more than $12 billion in local borrowing in coming years.

In 2017, Aaron Watkins launched a rental service called STEMtrunk because he doesn’t believe educational toys should be left behind. He calls his Yuba City-based startup “Netflix for learning toys” because it works with the same subscription-based concept.

William Cordeiro, the new dean of Sacramento State’s College of Business Administration, brings with him a unique accomplishment: He helped start a college campus.

Delayed college graduation is costly to students, schools and local economies. Both Sac State and Los Rios implemented measures to help students graduate faster. Can they move grads through without diminishing the quality of education? Results look promising. 

Los Rios Community College District Vice Chancellor of Education and Technology Jamey Nye offers his insight into on-time graduation rates. For more from Nye, check out “Fast-Tracked” in our September issue. Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll email you when it’s available online.

Once known mainly as a bankruptcy-stricken foreclosure capital with high crime rates, Stockton today is drawing national attention for its millennial mayor, Michael Tubbs, and his experiments with universal basic income and avant-garde violence-prevention policies.

When it comes to charter schools, people seem to either love them or hate them. We sat down with Ting Sun, executive director of the Natomas Charter School and a member of the California State Board of Education, to talk about the role charter schools play in modern education.

Principal architect Jason Silva, of Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture, conceptualized the facade of the new Powerhouse Science Center in Sacramento to represent humanity’s place in the universe. The facade will be sectioned by multiple planes, creating continuous vector lines that extend across the building and site.

The legalization of adult-use marijuana in November 2016 created an opportunity for California to rethink drug education programs, as a portion of the tax revenue from the new commercial cannabis market must go to education programs.

For the last dozen years, the UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has fostered hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs out of the classroom setting and into the real world. Comstock’s sat down with Senior Program Manager Niki Peterson to learn how her institute is helping turn the Capital Region into a world-class incubator for innovation.

With interest in MBAs flat or falling across the nation, can modernization help programs keep up with student interest? We take a look at how the region’s education programs are innovating their offerings.

Diane Miller, president of Wilcox Miller & Nelson, offers her insight into executive recruitment.

Anne Bown-Crawford, executive director of the California Arts Council on the arts as an economic driver. 

California’s public universities will get an infusion of cash to increase enrollment, smooth students’ progress toward graduation and repair aging buildings under a state budget agreement reached Friday by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders.

The message popped into UC Berkeley sophomore Varsha Sarveshwar’s inbox a few days before the start of her Introduction to General Astronomy course in the fall of her freshman year. It contained the usual details about class times and textbooks. But then there was something surprising: a plea from the professor to skip the first day of class.

Samuel Lauderdale grew up as the youngest of three brothers in a single-mother, low-income household. He was always a good student, until high school was on the horizon. He started hanging out with kids that sold drugs and got bad grades, and says he “wasn’t necessarily getting in trouble,” but would “fight a lot.”