This week: the battle between health advocates, who want to convince more cities to tax sugary drinks, and the powerful beverage industry, plus the reasoning behind, potential benefits from and challenges facing California’s new online community college

This week: Louis speaks with Carl Cohn about his experiences during a 50-year career as a leader in California education. Cohn will retire next month as the first executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a small state agency with the vital role of guiding county offices and school districts on the state's new system of school improvement.

This week: Louis and John speak with John Deasy, the former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, who on June 1 became superintendent of Stockton Unified, a 40,000-student district 1/15th as big as L.A. Unified. Louis and John also play an excerpt from Gov. Jerry Brown's remarks to California Community Colleges' board of governors in which he urges them to pursue the promise of a new online college.

This week: Conservative groups launch a campaign to persuade teachers and hourly school workers to drop out of their unions following the U.S. Supreme Court's Janus v. AFSCME decision. And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos approves California's plan for the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

This week, John Fensterwald interviews Jonathan Raymond, president of the Stuart Foundation and the former superintendent of Sacramento Unified School District, about his new book, Wildflowers: A Superintendent’s Challenge to America. It is a treatise about “whole child education” and what schools can — and must — do to make sure that every child thrives.

This week: the podcast is devoted to exploring the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, in which the court struck down as unconstitutional the fees that teachers and other public employees were forced to pay to their unions as the cost of being represented by them.

This week: Former rivals Newsom & Villaraigosa vow to work together to defeat Republican Cox in the race for Governor, CA Community College system shifts to "performance-based budgeting" & the story behind $300M in new funds for low-performing students in the budget.

This week: John and Louis discuss the financial outlook for education in Gov. Jerry Brown's final state budget, which includes enough money to reach the goal Brown set for his K-12 funding formula and forgo tuition increases for Cal State and UC.

This week: an entire episode devoted to the June 5 CA primary results with special guests Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley IGS Poll & Professor Fernando Guerra, an expert on L.A. politics at Loyola Marymount University.

This week: What the leading candidates for state superintendent of public instruction have to say about how to keep schools safe, how to attract effective teachers to low-performing schools, whether to declare a moratorium on charter schools & more