Venue: UCCS Conference Room A, 1130 K Street (basement level), Sacramento

Venue: UCCS Conference Room A, 1130 K Street (basement level), Sacramento

Income inequality among the families of school-aged children in the US has grown sharply over the last 40 years. How has rising income inequality affected patterns of educational outcomes?

Venue: Los Angeles

Venue: Department of General Services Auditorium
Address: 1500 Capitol Avenue, Sacramento, CA, 95814, United States

Policymakers in California have begun to look beyond the API and ask how to hold schools accountable based on a broader set of information about performance. One strategy for doing so is through a system of school inspections, a common accountability policy in many other countries. This seminar will discuss the benefits of school inspections and explore the main policy decisions for designing such a system, with a particular focus on England’s approach.

As California implements the Common Core State Standards and discusses ways to better link K-12 and postsecondary education systems, it is critical to understand how well the state’s current postsecondary and career readiness standards relate to each other and to the Common Core. The panelists will discuss initial findings from a project focused on whether college and career readiness standards in the Health Sciences (entry-level in postsecondary, entry-level in the workforce, and exit-level in high school) require the same levels and types of knowledge and skills.

The Early Assessment Program (EAP) is an academic preparation program developed jointly by the California Department of Education (CDE), the State Board of Education, and the California State University (CSU).

Recent news headlines have drawn attention to budget cuts that districts pursue in response to the state’s revenue shortfalls. But policymakers and state agencies need to consider more than episodic revenue declines or relative rankings of districts. Instead, policymakers need to consider how state fiscal conditions are changing a given district’s performance over time. The state’s volatile tax base and centralization of school finance are associated with long-term unpredictability in state aid in California.

Venue: Stanford University - Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
Address: 326 Galvez Street, Stanford , CA, 94305, United States
Learn about how promising digital tools and resources are now available to help you strengthen teaching and learning in middle grades mathematics, and the policy changes that California must make to take advantage of these new opportunities. Policy leaders and experts in education technology will share and discuss what’s becoming possible with the proliferation of digital technologies in California schools.

Since 2009 the Department of Education has allowed local school boards to reallocate $4.5 billion in previously regulated categorical aid, now folded into the Tier 3 ‘block grant’. The UC-RAND research team reported earlier on case studies of 10 districts’ response to flexibility. This second PACE seminar will feature the results of their statewide survey of district chief financial officers and their analysis of statewide expenditure data. To what extent were Tier 3 dollars swept into district general funds? Which programs were hit hardest as re-allocations occurred?

To improve the preparation of California high school students for postsecondary education and careers, in 2006 the James Irvine Foundation launched a major initiative to develop what is now called the Linked Learning approach. The Foundation asked PACE to inform this effort by gathering evidence on the cost of Linked Learning programs. This seminar presents the results. The Linked Learning strategy is based on previous studies, mainly on evaluations of career academies.

Educational assessment policy must produce measures of performance that are fair and accurate for all students in order to convey clear and helpful information to educators, parents, and the students themselves. Achieving these objectives is especially challenging when it comes to the nation’s 5 million K-12 public school English learners (ELs). English learners are linguistic-minority students not sufficiently proficient in English to be able to benefit adequately from regular classroom instruction and demonstrate their knowledge and abilities using English.

The career technical education (CTE) mission of the California Community Colleges is a vital part of the agenda to increase college completion and shore up economic competitiveness; yet this area of college academic programming gets too little emphasis and support. There is growing evidence of high market value of certificate and associate degree programs in select areas. There is also evidence that career-oriented programs can increase student motivation and improve outcomes, helping to meet workforce, equity, and productivity goals for California postsecondary education.

At this event, Patricia Gándara and Gary Orfield, Co-Directors, The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and Kimberly King, Assistant Professor, California State University, Los Angeles, presented research findings on a series of reports designed to analyze the impact of fiscal cutbacks on opportunity for higher education in the California State University system (see article on the research series in Diverse Issues in Higher Education).

A panel of education researchers and policy experts convened in Washington DC on May 16 to explore the findings of a new report that makes the case for bold new student testing models that are fairer and more valid than their predecessors. The report, The Road Ahead for State Assessments, was released by the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).

Recognition of the importance of school leadership has led to increased attention to recruiting and preparing school leaders. Yet, principal preparation and development programs tend to emphasize the role of principals as instructional leaders. In this seminar, Professor Susanna Loeb, Executive Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis program at Stanford University, discussed the findings of her leadership studies that highlight the importance of organizational leadership and the development of organizational structures for improved instruction.

In July of 2008 the State Board of Education passed a motion to make the Algebra I CST the sole 8th grade math test of record for federal accountability purposes, increasing the policy pressure for schools to place more students into that course in 8th grade. That decision was put on hold by the courts, leaving districts and schools without clear direction. With all good intentions, many more schools are placing all their students in Algebra I to ensure equal access, regardless of their prior math preparation. Yet other schools and districts take a more customized approach to placement.

Despite increasing awareness on the part of educators about the importance of addressing the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs), there has been almost no systematic attention to supporting school and district leaders. Instructional strategies for addressing the language and content needs of ELLs has been working itself steadily into the mainstream – through teacher preparation standards, teacher induction program standards, and various prominent professional development programs.

A great deal of recent attention has been focused on policies that affect the employment relationship between school districts and teachers. Although there is broad agreement that teacher quality is related to student achievement, there is far less agreement about the degree to which school districts and administrators are constrained in making policies that affect the employment and working conditions of teachers. In this seminar, William S.

The podcast for our January 21st seminar, "Experiments in Deregulating School Finance" is now available. The presenters were Bruce Fuller, Professor of Education and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Imazeki, Professor of Economics, San Diego State University; Brian Stecher, Acting Director of Education Research, RAND Corporation; and Thomas Timar, Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Applied Policy in Education, University of California, Davis.

On January 12th, Pivot Learning Partners, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and Full Circle Fund sponsored a one-day conference for school district teams with an interest in redesigning their teacher/principal evaluation systems in the larger context of strengthening teacher/principal effectiveness. In addition to listening to a panel of experts, team members had the opportunity to network with other district leaders from across the state.

The podcast for our December 17th seminar, "Learning from L.A.: Policy Levers for Institutional Change" is now available. The speaker was Charles Taylor Kerchner, Research Professor, Claremont Graduate University.

The podcast for our November 19th seminar "Strategic School Funding for Results" is now available. The presenters were Jay Chambers, PhD, Senior Research Fellow and Managing Director, American Institutes for Research; Jim Brown, Senior Advisor, Pivot Learning Partners; Steve Jubb, Director of Innovation and District Redesign, Pivot Learning Partners. The speakers were introduced by David N. Plank, Executive Director of PACE.

A partial podcast for our October 15th seminar "The Fresno-Long Beach Learning Partnership: Lessons for Policy and Practice" is now available.

21st Century Assessments: Implications for California - A policy forum co-sponsored by SCOPE and PACE
The United States’ shrinking graduation rates and slipping ranking on international assessments have prompted the Obama administration to encourage states to develop different student assessments — ones that reliably measure the higher-order thinking that will keep our students competitive in the 21st Century global economy.