David Montes de Oca

Chief of Improvement,

CORE Districts

David Montes de Oca is chief of improvement at CORE Districts. He has enjoyed over years in public education. Montes de Oca supports the design and expansion of developing district capability and capacity as improvement organizations. He previously worked for the Oakland Unified School District as senior deputy chief of continuous improvement, and as associate superintendent of quality, accountability, and analytics; prior to that, he managed school turnaround and school redesign. Montes de Oca is a founding board member of several arts and education-based nonprofits; has served as adjunct faculty in education leadership at Cal State University; was principal at Urban Promise Academy, and a K–12 teacher for Santa Cruz City Schools across the Pasadena and Glendale Unified School Districts.

updated 2025

Contributing topics

Continuous school improvement & support

Understanding, measuring & improving student outcomes

Contributing initiatives

CORE-PACE Research Partnership

Publications by David Montes de Oca

January 2018

"Seeing the Whole Elephant"

Changing Mindsets and Empowering Stakeholders to Meaningfully Manage Accountability and Improvement

The shift towards multiple-measure dashboard accountability has potential for promoting more meaningful learning, but also comes with challenges. Lessons learned from research on CORE Districts show that a shift to flexibility and capacity building…