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.

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

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.

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.