After ending my fourth term as president of the California State Board of Education in 2019, I have begun to reflect, in my sixth decade of education policy, about what I did right and what I should have done differently...
PACE co-founder Michael W. Kirst, former president of the California Board of Education (1977–1981 and 2011–2019), highlights in a new PACE commentary findings from his Learning Policy Institute report Standards-Based Education Reforms: Looking Back to Looking Forward, which analyzes the evolution of standards-based reforms in the United States. Kirst issues a call to action: California needs a strategic and tactical roadmap to improve instructional capacity in classrooms statewide. The commentary offers four recommendations: return the CDE to its former role of providing technical assistance on how to implement subject matter standards; strengthen COEs for effective capacity building; reorient the district role to focus on instructional capacity; and design the roadmap for targeted district support. Without a unified strategy, California risks more uneven progress. A comprehensive, coordinated approach is essential to equipping educators with the tools they need to deliver equitable, standards-aligned instruction to all students.
Falling enrollments and gloomy economics point to the inevitable: Many school districts in California will close schools over the next decade. So far, they have been mainly elementary and middle schools, but high schools, spared until now, won’t escape, a...
In 2013–14, California enacted an ambitious—and essential—reform to improve educational equity by directing state resources to districts and schools that educate large numbers of economically disadvantaged students. The reform is called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF); it allocates funding to school districts based on student characteristics such as socioeconomic status and provides greater flexibility to use the allocated funds than the previous school funding formula allowed. In addition to the LCFF, which is based on average daily attendance (ADA), districts receive funds based on the proportion of students they serve who are English learners, income eligible for free or reduced-price meals, and foster youth. The equity multiplier, a new policy passed in 2023, is designed to provide even more funding for disadvantaged students.
The San Francisco Unified School District calls the LCAP its “most important plan.” That’s because the Local Control and Accountability Plan will map out how SFUSD serves its highest-need students: English language learners, foster and homeless youth and socioeconomically disadvantaged...
By directing funding to the state’s poorest schools and targeting racial disparities statewide, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing the biggest changes in a decade to the state system of funding and governing schools. His plan would be an implicit acknowledgment...
Most newcomer students enter school with very low or beginning English language proficiency (ELP), but their language skills can develop rapidly under the right conditions, according to the first in a new series of briefs by Policy Analysis for California...
Right now, school district and charter school leaders, working with parents and the community, are starting to draft their Local Control and Accountability Plans. State law requires new plans every three years and annual updates to show how they plan...
USC Rossier Professor of Education Policy discusses strategies for engaging local stakeholders, her experience as a researcher and how COVID-19 will impact funding for education.
When then-Governor Jerry Brown signed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) into law in 2013, California’s leaders were hopeful that this legislation would set high expectations for flexibility, transparency, and equity within school districts. In a new report, “English Language...
