The PACE Annual Conference in January 2024 will bring together California policymakers, researchers, and education leaders to address critical questions about the state's public education system and explore transformative actions for improvement at all levels, from early childhood through higher education.

This webinar will present findings from two forthcoming publications on community schools: the PACE brief “Community Schools: A Coronavirus Recovery Strategy;” and “Creating Strong Community Schools: The Role of California Counties in Providing Technical Assistance” by the Learning Policy Institute. The webinar will also feature perspectives from leaders at the school and county levels who will speak to what it takes to launch and sustain community schools.

California supports the learning of 1.3 million English students and has the highest proportion of EL students in the nation. With the adoption of the California English Learner Roadmap by the State Board of Education and the passage of Prop 58, state support has grown for improved services. Consideration of the needs of the diverse EL student population is essential as it evolves at all education levels. In this seminar, PACE researchers present the needs of California's EL students, barriers to their success, and potential tools districts can use to support their EL populations.

ESSA makes sweeping changes to the way school performance is measured, and shifts decisions about how to define school quality and how to support struggling schools back to states and districts. The CORE Districts’ innovative accountability system is aligned with both LCFF and ESSA requirements, and includes many measures that the State Board of Education is considering for inclusion in CA's emerging accountability system. In this seminar Heather Hough, Rick Miller, and Noah Bookman provide an overview of what has been learned in the first year of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership.

With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, California state policymakers are tasked with determining the subgroup threshold for school-level reporting. To inform this decision, this policy brief explores the implications of utilizing various subgroup sizes using data from the CORE Districts. In this seminar, PACE authors present findings that the 20+ subgroup size presents clear advantages in terms of the number of students represented, particularly in making historically underserved student populations visible.

In this seminar, USC Assistant Professor Morgan Polikoff reviews the problems with the Academic Performance Index and offers a series of straightforward, concrete suggestions designed to improve the API and the identification of low performing schools in California. The suggestions, which include tracking the achievement of individual students, using multiple years of achievement data, measuring growth and level of student achievement, and accounting for school level and size, are drawn from his research on the design of accountability systems in the state and nationwide.