The coronavirus pandemic has pushed California and the nation into uncharted waters, especially with the impact on our schools.

California schools are some of the nation’s poorest funded, with the state ranked 39th in the country in education spending. Recent...

There are 725,000 K-12 students in California who receive special education services -- and a new report says that the state has a long way to go to adequately meet the needs of these kids. With us to break down...

Special education in California should be overhauled to focus on the individual needs of students, with better training for teachers, more streamlined services and improved screening for the youngest children, according to a compilation of reports released today. Those were...

Special education in California should be overhauled to focus on the individual needs of students, with better training for teachers, more streamlined services and improved screening for the youngest children, according to a compilation of reports released today.

This brief identifies the steps necessary to realize an integrated system of care, reviews two current approaches, and makes recommendations—including specifying policy reforms that would promote interagency collaboration, integration, service delivery, and improved outcomes for California’s children, both with and...

School climate and student engagement surveys can tell us a good deal about important contributors to student success. They can illuminate students’ sense of belonging at school and their sense of themselves as learners. They can shed light on bullying...

In 2014, the CORE Districts—a consortium of eight of the largest school districts in California serving more than one million students—began measuring students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) as part of a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver enabling CORE to develop...

This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in their effect on students’...

Students have the greatest stake in their education but little to no say in how it is delivered. This lack of agency represents a lost opportunity to accelerate learning and prepare students for a world in which taking initiative and...

Distinguished Professor George Farkas presented his latest research findings at the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) group in Sacramento on August 13. The meeting title was PACE Policy Research Panel on Special Education: Organizing Schools to Serve Students with...

Researchers who examined data from five large California school districts have concluded that measures of students’ personal strengths and interpersonal skills are not reliable enough at this point to include in states’ and districts’ school accountability systems.

Transforming Education and Policy Analysis for California Education partnered to analyze data from over 500,000 students across 8 districts in California. This brief provides benchmarking data that is designed to allow practitioners to compare their aggregated data across grade levels...

The new RAND Corp. survey results come as Congress proposes $260 million in funding for SEL programs and whole-child initiatives.

A recent WestEd event brought together representatives from healthcare, philanthropy and justice to discuss how partnerships with school and district leaders can improve prevention.

Since 2015, CORE (California Office to Reform Education) school districts have been doing districtwide surveys to measure students’ social and emotional learning (SEL). This is the first time social and emotional learning has been measured at scale, said Heather Hough...

In The 74, writer Kate Stringer reports on how the Long Beach Unified School District and other CORE Districts are tracking students’ growth in both academic and social-emotional skills. Long Beach Unified is part of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, established in...

The increasing focus on school climate and students' relationships to their peers and their schools is a potentially powerful catalyst for school improvement and student achievement. How to measure school climate and students' social and emotional development with confidence? For...

Education Week article by Evie Blad describes a report coordinated by the CORE-PACE Research Partnership. The report looks at the experiences of the Fresno Unified School District, part of the CORE districts, a group of California school systems that regularly...

Education dive features PACE research that address the needs and opportunities for social emotional learning (SEL) to include the role of clubs and other after-school activities that help to broaden and extend social-emotional skills such as empathy and communication.

As pressures grow on schools to address students’ physical and mental health, including the stress and trauma they may experience in their homes and neighborhoods, many California educators are acknowledging that they don’t have the resources they need to respond...

As U.S. public schools become increasingly diverse racially, culturally and economically, they are turning to social emotional programs to better serve the different ways in which students interact with and invest in schooling and their education. Social emotional learning (SEL)...

California ranks at or near the bottom of all states when it comes to the percentage of students with access to health and mental health care at schools. Yet, with $90 in added annual spending per student—which would total about...

PACE and the Learning Policy Institute hosted an event on how schools can be organized to support the whole child, which featured a series of panels with leading researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Topics included:

• A new framework on how...