By investing more than $2 billion in early childhood education, Governor Gavin Newsom has placed early learning high on California’s education policy agenda. Early learning programs represent the initial rung of the state’s education ladder, but many questions remain. What happens following preschool to sustain learning gains? To what extent do early learning programs align with early elementary grades in areas such as instruction and teacher professional development? What are the challenges in creating alignment?

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) fosters accountability through districts’ use of Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) and District Dashboard metrics aligned to the state priorities. The state’s new system of support is designed to assist districts whose Dashboard results have fallen short of expectations and is intended to advance both equity and excellence by helping districts shift from a culture of compliance to one of support and continuous improvement.

Join PACE and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education for a special event on November 22, 2019: Toward a Vision of Equity in College Access: Re-evaluating College Admissions.

In this seminar, Pivot Learning will discuss two case studies aimed at better understanding the ways in which California districts’ budget challenges impact their ability to serve students. The cases explore this impact in two unique locations: the Sacramento City Unified School District and Marin County. These reports find that, in Sacramento, increasing health care costs and poor business practices have led to deficit spending and cuts to programs and services.

Since 2014-15, the CORE districts have surveyed students in grades 4-12 on their social-emotional learning (SEL). School and district leaders use these measures in the context of CORE’s multiple measures data system to understand and improve student and school outcomes. Because SEL measurement at scale is so new nationally, studying the properties of these measures and their use has been a strong focus research coordinated by the CORE-PACE Research Partnership.

In line with LCFF and California’s ESSA plan, districts and schools across the state are increasingly seeking to use continuous improvement to identify areas of focus and to shape their approach to addressing performance gaps and improve student outcomes. For many districts, this raises two critical questions: 1) How do we support educators in learning continuous improvement? And 2) What school and district conditions facilitate continuous improvement work? As part of its work in the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, PACE spent the 2018-19 school year studying improvement efforts in the CORE districts and how the CORE capability-building programs and other supports are helping their districts and school take up continuous improvement. In this seminar, Alix Gallagher (PACE) will present lessons learned about these critical questions from the most recent research report and case studies, and Rick Miller (CORE districts) will discuss how these findings are influencing CORE’s approach moving forward.

The costs of employee and retiree health and welfare benefits have increased rapidly in recent years and districts require employees to pay relatively little of these costs. As a consequence, the cost of these benefits represent a growing share of district budgets. Many districts have accumulated large unfunded liabilities in the form of health benefits promised to their retirees. These financial pressures divert resources from other district priorities and may become worse if revenues stagnate or decline.

A key aspect of California’s new policy approach is a multiple measures data system that includes local measures of school performance. As school districts across California consider what to measure and how to measure it, there is much to be learned from the CORE districts. In this webinar, PACE will highlight two of CORE’s innovative data approaches: their school impact model and student surveys of social-emotional learning.

Sound, timely data is critical to making good decisions about schooling policy and practice. However, despite California’s investments and improvements in a statewide data system (the California Longitudinal Pupil Assessment and Data System, or CALPADS), important data are still fragmented and not generally accessible to district-level personnel; additionally, the system is not geared toward helping districts measure progress toward specific goals in real time. Examples of stronger data systems can be found both outside and inside the state.

Over the past 10 years, California's PreK-12 public school system has seen transformative changes in almost every arena, from academic standards and accountability to resource allocation through the funding formula. The Getting Down to Facts II project brought together over 100 of the country's top education scholars to examine these changes and assess our progress. The project's 36 studies, released this past fall, focused on student success, governance systems, personnel issues, and school finance, and together, they can help build a common understanding of where we are that can be used to guide further improvements.