Social-emotional learning or SEL has become the latest educational catch-phrase. SEL has been broadly defined as “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills, such as interest and engagement, and has been recognized by policy-makers and the broader public as a set of skills...

I started my career as a trial attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, vindicating students’ legal right to belong in school. My experiences taught me a lot about the corrosive effects of students being “othered” based on race...

California’s largest school district on Wednesday publicly released new data measuring how its students progress from year to year. Los Angeles Unified, which serves more than 600,000 students, published what are known as academic growth data as part of a...

Los Angeles Unified on Wednesday is expected to become the latest California school district to publicly share data showing how its students improve year to year, a move the district expects will provide deeper insights into how individual schools are...

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...

Each spring, California public school children in grades 3-8 and 11 take a set of tests known as the CAASPP (the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress). In summer, families receive the results electronically. In autumn, schools and districts...

As local educational agencies throughout California strive to boost student outcomes by way of continuous improvement strategies, a new research analysis of the state’s eight CORE districts explores which conditions best support that continuous improvement in districts and schools. The...

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’...

Every year, California schools are evaluated on a variety of measures, everything from students’ math and English skills to suspension rates and chronic absenteeism. When things don’t go well, school districts scramble to put new programs in place that will...

As thousands of incoming high school freshmen fret about the start of a new chapter, some California schools are relying on summer bridge programs to help students adjust to the new academic environment.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spotlighted a continuous improvement grant to the CORE Districts, a network of California school districts, and its research partnership with PACE at its school improvement showcase in Baltimore this week, reports EdSource. The CORE...

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.

You’ve seen the headlines and watched the TV segments. The largest college admissions scandal in recent memory has implicated Hollywood celebrities and industry titans who allegedly went to extraordinary lengths to get their children into elite colleges. While this scandal...

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.

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...

The development of social-emotional skills within the CORE districts, a network of urban California school districts that serve more than 1 million students A new Policy Analysis for California study, " Trends in Student Social-Emotional Learning: Evidence from the CORE Districts,"...

Nowhere is a data-informed approach to social-emotional learning more pronounced than in California's CORE Districts, which embarked on a groundbreaking effort in 2013 to capture a more holistic vision of student success and school quality. There, eight of the largest...

Students’ reports of whether they have developed a growth mindset continue to climb steadily throughout their K-12 years, but their assessments of their social awareness skills and feelings of self-efficacy drop sharply beginning in middle school, according to a recent...