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.

PACE’s annual conference brings together nearly 300 California policymakers, researchers, and education leaders to discuss new research and approaches to improving educational outcomes for California’s students, from early childhood through higher education.

PACE’s inaugural conference is the premier event for policymakers, researchers, advocates and other leaders working to define and sustain a long-term strategy for comprehensive policy reform and continuous improvement of California’s education system. Our full-day conference will engage with three key education policy issues: school funding adequacy, teacher policies and cross-system-alignment. Registered participants will learn about the key policy debates and research based best-practices through conference plenaries and workshops.

CA adopted Common Core State Standards and state and local leaders are now engaged in the implementation process. PACE has organized this conference to review the current state of CCSS implementation in California, what we have learned, and what challenges we will have to face going forward. The conference will feature presentations from state officials who are guiding the implementation effort from Sacramento, local leaders who are wrestling with the challenge of implementing CCSS in their schools and classrooms, and researchers who are monitoring the progress of CCSS in districts across CA.

The QEIA, one of California’s most ambitious intervention programs for low-performing schools, is now in its sixth year of full implementation in nearly 400 schools across the state. In this seminar, Jane Robb and Courtney Malloy will share findings that examine the extent of QEIA program implementation, explain why QEIA works in some schools while other schools continue to struggle, investigate the various impacts of QEIA and uncover promising practices that can be shared with all schools.

In this seminar, Patricia Gándara, Gary Orfield, and Kimberly King present research findings on a series of reports designed to analyze the impact of fiscal cutbacks on opportunity for higher education in the CSU system. CSUs educate a greater number of Latino and African American students, enroll a much larger undergraduate student body than the University of California system overall, and many CSU students are first-generation college students struggling to get an education in difficult times.

The CAHSEE has been criticized as being unfair to English Learners, special education students and some racial groups, as well as being ineffective in raising student achievement. Some have called for eliminating passage of the CAHSEE as a graduation requirement for CA students. In this seminar, Julian Betts discusses whether the requirement and funding for intervention is helping or hurting students academically, with a focus on who has been failing the exam, how early we can identify students at risk of failing, and when school districts might intervene to help students at risk of failure.

As CA continues to wrestle with the challenges of providing sufficient funding for schools, understanding the relationships among school funding, effective school resources, and outcomes is essential. In this seminar Norton Grubb addresses four principal questions: (1) What kinds of school resources make a difference to outcomes? (2) Why is the relationship between spending per student and outcomes so weak? (3) Why are outcomes so inequitable? (4) And what should CA do now, in both school finance and other areas of school policy, to avoid further damage to the state’s education system?