Leah Faw

lfaw
Leah Faw
Researcher,
Policy Analysis for California Education, Stanford University

Leah Faw is a qualitative researcher at Policy Analysis for California Education who works with PACE Research Practice Partnerships. Her scholarship explores issues of educational policy at the intersections of schools and cities, families, labor, and culture. Her dissertation explored homeschooling through the lens of mothers’ labor and role as educators; she has published on district hopping, feminist educational history, and the representation of schooling in popular culture. She is also co-chief emerita of the Berkeley Review of Education and worked as a researcher on the Central Valley School Discipline Learning Project. Faw received both her MA and PhD in education, with a focus in policy, organizations, measurement, and analysis (POME), from the University of California, Berkeley.

updated 2025

Publications by Leah Faw
2019–20 Through 2022–23
This report examines the CORE Districts’ Breakthrough Success Community (BTSC), which focused on improving ninth-grade on-track rates through evidence-based changes in daily practice. Some schools effectively adapted BTSC strategies, fostering…
How California Districts Create Access and Coherent Systems
California’s ambitious investment in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (UTK) reflects a commitment to providing access to UTK for all 4-year-olds in public schools by the 2025–26 academic year. However, the implementation of transitional…
Improvement Team Leads’ Perspectives on Fitting Improvement Work to Their Sites
This chapter in an edited book focuses on the work of two improvement network hubs in California as they tried to support participating districts and schools to improve the proportion of students “on-track” for post-secondary success. California has…
CORE’s Approach
Educators face a dilemma of staying up-to-date with evidence-based practices while dealing with superficial ideas. Continuous improvement methods can help in testing new ideas but if seen as add-ons, they may not yield sustained improvement. This…