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.

Two years after schools returned to in-person learning, the state’s Smarter Balanced scores show disappointingly little improvement. Nearly two-thirds of California students failed to meet math standards for their grade level, and more than half fell short of the standards for English. But while the pandemic was devastating for families, students and schools, test scores were languishing even before Covid. EdSource’s Anne Vasquez and John Fensterwald hosted this webinar along with PACE Heather J. Hough and a panel of educators and policy experts to explore this topic and more.

Declining student enrollment is leading to a loss of revenue in many California school districts. To address ongoing budget shortfalls, many districts have consolidated or shuttered schools, and others are contemplating doing so. In this session, Carrie Hahnel (Bellwether) and Francis A. Pearman (Stanford Graduate School of Education) will discuss new research exploring the racial dimensions of school closures and how to address them.

Newcomer students have long been an underserved group in California’s school systems. Newcomers require specialized curricula and instruction to succeed in school as well as access to social services to meet even their basic needs. Unfortunately, most newcomers have not experienced schooling that adequately addresses their unique needs and drop out at a disproportionately high rate. There are thus significant opportunities to improve education for newcomers in California through policies, data systems, curricula, programs development, and collaborations.

PACE’s 2023 conference marks many important milestones: our first in-person annual conference since the start of the pandemic, the 10-year anniversary of the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, and the 40-year anniversary of PACE’s founding.

What works to support students through the pandemic? How can the state and local districts best meet the needs of newcomer English Learners to California? What strategies can policymakers and district leaders implement to build bridges between a child’s early learning experiences and the early grades? Researchers, policymakers, and educators ask these kinds of questions all the time and yet making timely, effective connections between research, policy, and practice can seem like a herculean task.

Districts across California are working on three discrete but related challenges as they address the impacts of COVID-19 on teaching on learning: 1) What do we do now to support student learning before school year ends; 2) What can we do in the Summer to mitigate the disparate impact of distance learning; and 3) What should we be designing for the Fall to best meet the needs of students, teachers and families. Expanded learning providers are critical partners for all three challenges.

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.

The rapid onset of the health and economic crisis accompanying COVID-19 has presented an array of challenges for school districts and county offices across California. To aid in both local and state decision-making, PACE and Pivot Learning have been documenting promising practices at school districts in California. In this webinar, researchers and local superintendents will highlight how two districts initially addressed students’ immediate needs and how they are approaching strategic planning for the months ahead.

Improving education equity is one of the most important goals of CA's education system, and undergirds the state's policy structures. How money is allocated to districts and how districts and schools are held accountable for student outcomes. The state's current measurement approach is insufficient for understanding the extent to which our education systems are providing equitable opportunities for CA's students. This webinar presents findings from a landmark report by the National Academies, which provides the architecture for a system to help policy makers address educational equity.

This webinar was the first of a three-part webinar series on special education featuring new research on the status of special education in California and paths forward for organizing schools to better support students with disabilities. This webinar covered issues related to transitions into and out of special education services for students: Early Identification, Transitions into Preschool, Transitions Into and Between Identification Categories in K-12, Post-Secondary Transitions, and Work-Based Learning for students with disabilities.

Sound, timely data is critical to making good decisions about schooling policy and practice. Despite California’s investments and improvements in a statewide data system, important data from CALPADS are still fragmented and generally inaccessible to district-level personnel while the system is not geared toward helping districts measure progress toward specific goals in real time. Stronger data systems can be found both outside and inside the state. In this seminar, we reveal key findings about California’s data systems and the challenges and opportunities for improving them.

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.

Policy Analysis for California Education and the Learning Policy Institute invite you to an event on how schools can be organized to support the whole child, featuring a series of panels with leading researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.

In this webinar, researchers and practitioners in the CORE districts will discuss both SEL measurement and practice, based on this just-released report and new quantitative work coming soon on the validity of the SEL measures used within CORE.

The Invisible California is a new series from Pivot and PACE that highlights the educational needs of some of the most underserved parts of California. Join us in LA and Sacramento as we discuss the results of our research study on the educational and community landscape of the Antelope Valley, an area of Northern Los Angeles County the size of Rhode Island. The paper focuses on the rapid growth and stunning demographic changes of the school districts and communities of the region.

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is excited to invite you to The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) Implementation and Impact Conference. Panels will address three key sets of issues: Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement California’s Infrastructure of Support for Schools and School Districts What Have We Learned After Four Years of LCFF Implementation?

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.

In this seminar Morgan Polikoff reports findings from his research on school and district textbook adoptions in math, English language arts, and science. He presents quantitative evidence from SARCs and statewide longitudinal achievement data on the spread of new materials, timing of implementation, distribution across districts and schools, and impact on student outcomes. This with insights via interviews of district leaders on policies, practices guiding local curriculum adoption decisions in CA, alongside the utility of SARC data, and challenges scholars face using them for research.

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.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) makes sweeping changes to the way school performance is measured. Using the innovative measurement system developed by the CORE Districts in California, our CORE-PACE Research Partnership will present the research findings from, "Identity Crisis: Multiple Measures and the Identification of Schools under ESSA."

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.

To address the issues of truancy and chronic absenteeism, Michael Gottfried has partnered with Attorney General Kamala Harris to develop strategies to reduce truancy among elementary school students in public schools throughout California. These “Truancy Reduction Pilot Projects” include a two-phase study on elementary school early intervention and prevention practices in a handful of model school districts throughout the state. In this seminar, Gottfried will present findings from the first, pre-implementation phase of the study.

In this seminar, Ilana Umansky and her colleagues present policy recommendations for improving the educational outcomes of English learner students in California, based on research from the educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes of EL students conducted in a set of California school districts over the last five years. Their research sheds light on critical issues including EL classification and reclassification policies, the effects of English immersion and bilingual education, and EL students’ access to learning opportunities.

Parents play an important role in their children’s education, but there are substantial differences in the home learning experiences of children by socioeconomic status. In this seminar, Susanna Loeb and Ben York discuss the results of a randomized control trial of READY4K!, a text messaging program for parents of preschoolers designed to help them support their children’s literacy development. Given the extremely low cost and widespread use of text messaging, texting proves to be an attractive alternative for supporting parents.