Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed a landmark shift in California's middle school mathematics testing, asking the State Board of Education to test every eighth grader in the state in Algebra I and dispensing with the General Mathematics Test. "The state has been moving towards a goal of preparing every eighth grade student in Algebra for some time," said CCST Executive Director Susan Hackwood. "Acknowledging that this is the standard to which California's students should be held is the right thing to do."

On Thursday, June 12, CCST presented the "Racing for the Future" Workforce Investment Board Online Toolkit to the California Workforce Association at the CWA Board meeting. The Toolkit, located at wibtoolkit.net, is the culmination of a CCST project developed as part of a workforce development project funded by a U.S. Department of Labor initiative called "Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development" (WIRED). The website includes a variety of materials designed to assist WIB partners in addressing workforce needs.

California's ambitious climate change policies need to take into account not just the need for and impact on energy production and ensuring the water supply, but how the two issues relate to one another. Energy and water related policies are highly complex issues that are inextricably intertwined, and need to be examined in concert, rather than separately, according to a nationwide team of research laboratories.

Professional Science Master's (PSM) degree programs merit further support and expansion, according to a recent National Research Council (NRC) report by the Committee on Enhancing the Master's Degree in the Natural Sciences. The report drew in part upon the experiences of the California State University System (CSU), which has engaged in a systemwide effort to develop PSM programs, and previous research by CCST.

This special anniversary retrospective documents CCST's growth and accomplishments in the twenty years since it was founded by a unanimous Assembly Concurrent Resolution, and looks ahead to the challenges that California and CCST are likely to face in the years to come.

Jeffrey R. Koseff, Director of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, was the dinner speaker at the May 2008 CCST Council meeting. His talk was titled "The Water-Energy Nexus: California's Grand Challenge." Koseff has been instrumental in developing the vision for the interdisciplinary work on environmental issues at Stanford University. Koseff's research area falls in the emerging interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics and focuses on the interaction between physical and biological systems in natural aquatic environments.