en years ago California’s K-12 education system had the equivalent of a physical exam. Education experts from 32 universities and research organizations across the country studied its inner workings and effectiveness. They examined the state’s school finance and governance systems...

A decade ago, an academic research team produced a massive report on the shortcomings in how California’s K-12 schools educate about 6 million children and adolescents. The “Getting Down to Facts” report was issued just as a very severe recession...

English Learner (EL) students have been a key part of California’s K–12 system for decades. They currently make up about 21 percent of the public school population. English Learner status is meant to be temporary, and indeed, reclassified English Learners...

The Policy Analysis for California Education Policy Research Panel on Special Education has released a series of policy briefs summarizing key findings from the project Organizing Schools to Serve Students with Disabilities.Distinguished Professor George Farkas's article - "Achievement Gaps and...

PACE’s inaugural conference is the premier event for policymakers, researchers, advocates and other leaders working to define and sustain a long-term strategy for comprehensive policy reform and continuous improvement of California’s education system. Our 2017 full-day conference will engage with...

In school accountability, flashlights work better than hammers. That’s the oft-repeated argument of California’s CORE districts, a data collaborative now serving over 1.8-million students. It’s generally recognized that the practice of using data to bash schools—commonly known as naming and...

English-language-learner services are designed, in theory, to prevent educational inequity, but for some students the specialized services may be reinforcing it. A new study out of the University of Oregon found that designating early elementary students who are close to...

When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, it was celebrated as relief from its predecessor, but as regulations emerge it’s beginning to look like its evil sibling of the discredited No Child Left Behind Act’s name-and-shame policy...

California’s K–12 students struggled on the new statewide Smarter Balanced assessments (SBAC) last year. The results highlight the challenges facing students and teachers as the state shifts to computer-based tests on new curricula with higher standards for achievement. Disadvantaged groups...

The education of English learners (EL) continues to be a topic of great interest across the country. But there has been little research to identify what steps to take in order to best serve this diverse group of students. In...

Many young children grow up without supportive home learning environments. One often cited study found that by the age of four, poor children hear about 30 million fewer words than wealthy children.[i] This fissure manifests in great differences in children’s...

What can states and districts do to improve opportunities and outcomes for English Learners (ELs)? The question is asked and answered often; just this past fall, the U.S. Department of Education released a sprawling toolkit to help states and districts...

Ilana Umansky, Stanford CEPA alumni, on Improving the Opportunities and Outcomes of California’s Students Learning English: Findings from School District-University Collaborative Partnerships.

Recent policy changes in California’s education system have opened up a unique opportunity to improve educational opportunities for the state’s 1.4 million English learner students (ELs). The implementation of new state standards including new English Language Development standards will require...

California's 1.4 million English Learner children are often pigeon-holed and trapped for years in a school system that also impedes their academic progress and blocks their path to college. That’s the conclusion of a report released this week and published...

A 1998 voter referendum that strictly limited bilingual education in California's public schools has weakened educational efforts and held back non-English-speaking children, according to a report led by the UO's Ilana Umansky. The report's nine co-authors are calling on California...

Researchers studying a group of California school districts are highly critical of the state’s system for providing services to English language learners in a report released this week.

After nearly two decades, bilingual education in California could stage a resurgence if the state Senate approves a bill in August that would put the issue on the ballot in November 2016.

An education committee recommended Tuesday that the state stop docking the test scores of districts that don’t offer Algebra I in 8th grade. The recommendation by the Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee would reverse a decade-old practice and could...

Similar to indices used by other states, the API is a composite measure of student achievement ranging between 200 and 1000. The goal is an API of 800. Schools with APIs below 800 can meet their annual targets if they make up at least 5% of the difference between their API score and 800—akin to the school-level growth-to-proficiency model used in NCLB’s Safe Harbor provisions. While only California uses these exact measures, many states have adopted API-like techniques in their new NCLB-waiver accountability systems. We assessed the API (and year-to-year changes in API) as a measure of school performance, as well as a means of identifying low performing schools. we made several suggestions for revising API. Our goal was to not only propose changes that could be implemented relatively easily, but also those that would markedly improve the identification of schools in need of intervention and/or additional support.

Almost all the politics of education concerns rearranging adult power and privilege. Relatively little political energy is spent consciously designing a contemporary system of public education. That should change.

By focusing political energy on how students learn rather than the...