According to the Community Schools Playbook, a project of the Partnership for the Future of Learning, “Many community schools stay open year-round, from dawn to dusk, and on weekends. The most comprehensive community schools are academic and social centers where...

Schools across San Francisco embody elements of community schools, which aim to assess students’ needs and bring in outside services ranging from dental care to Medi–Cal assistance to arts and music programming while building deeper connections to students and families...

The pandemic has given us all a taste of forced isolation. We’ve seen how it can leave individuals feeling lonely, scared and depressed. Imagine if that was your permanent experience. For many students with disabilities, isolation is the standard practice...

Most educators and parents would agree that the sweeping virtual instruction thrown together overnight at the beginning of the pandemic wasn’t nearly as effective as in-person learning for most students. So, does that mean K–12 educators and policymakers should write...

n coming weeks, California will embark on a massive undertaking to convert several thousand schools in low-income neighborhoods into centers of community life and providers of vital services for families as well as students. Known as community schools, they will...

After racist incidents at two schools in the Sacramento City Unified School District in 2021, officials have hired a race and equity liaison to oversee the ongoing investigations. Long-time civil rights attorney Mark Harris was chosen last week to look...

Policy-relevant research is essential to understanding the complex ways these practices, policies, and norms systematically and differentially shape students’ experience of school—and how they can be changed. But this type of scholarship is not incentivized within academia, and few formal...

Funding for schools and community colleges will rise to more than $100 billion for the first time under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for next year, as state revenues continue to surge amid a pandemic that is filling hospitals and...

California’s K–12 students experienced significant academic setbacks during the 2020-21 school year of mainly remote learning, showing growing achievement gaps, lagging progress in math and English, increased chronic absenteeism and a slight decline in the statewide graduation rate, according to...

Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar provides an update on school reopening amid Omicron and updates on the district’s vaccine mandate ahead of its January 31st deadline.

The California Department of Education (CDE) today released student performance data that provide baseline indicators of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted schools and students. The 2020–21 data affirm both the challenges created by the pandemic and California’s commitment to...

The 2021-22 school year was supposed to have been a rebound to normalcy, with Covid in the rear-view mirror. Instead, midway through, the year has been “shock and overload,” with teachers and administrators “working harder and losing ground,” as Mike...

If the Assembly’s Democratic leaders have their way, next year’s state budget will dedicate $10 billion out of a projected $30 billion surplus to repair and expand K-12 school districts’ facilities. The money would put a big dent in building...

Enrollment at Coachella Valley K-12 public schools has declined by approximately 1,000 students since this time last year and much more than that since before the pandemic began. Declining enrollment since 2019-20 could result in Desert Sands Unified losing approximately $13.8 million, Coachella Valley Unified losing $9...

Want to better understand how curriculum decisions are made? Need a rundown of the immunizations required to attend school? Or perhaps you’d like to learn more about health education or ethnic studies in California. These are some of the topics...

It didn’t take long before the consequences of the pandemic shone a spotlight on the growing inequities within our communities and systems. Existing disparities in housing and food security, education, and health care, for example, grew wider between socioeconomic and...

Mayor London Breed is pushing an ambitious school board oversight plan that threatens to withhold city funding from classrooms if Board of Education members don’t change their behavior. San Francisco classrooms, under a proposed change to city law, could lose...

In 2013 students of color at the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, known as UCLA SEIS, wrote a letter to the school’s leadership, reporting a “hostile racial climate” on campus. The students...

How can policymakers design evidence-based policy that improves student outcomes and access to educational opportunity? How can researchers and practitioners collaborate effectively to implement evidence-based, data-driven interventions, close achievement gaps, and address disparities in school discipline? Researchers, policymakers, and educators...

A new poll provides insight into the issues that a new Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent may face. Lower-income and Black families of students attending L.A. Unified schools feel less supported by the state’s largest school district, according to the poll, while a majority of the families, regardless of income or race, support a public annual evaluation of the new superintendent. The poll data also shows significant disparities in how families feel about the mental support offered to their children.

It’s been eight years since then-Gov. Jerry Brown restructured California’s school funding formulas to direct billions of dollars to the state’s neediest students. But, in 2019, state Auditor Elaine Howle confirmed what critics had been saying for years: State and...

California’s landmark funding reform law needs to be fixed to help meet its promise of raising the achievement of underperforming student groups, conclude two recently published research studies. The co-authors of a third report, after examining recent research and interviewing...

In the broadest sense, LCFF embraced the conventional wisdom that altering the flow of money would profoundly affect educational outcomes. However, from its inception, LCFF has been awash in controversy—not over its concept, but rather its implementation. The latest attempt...

The Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, ushered in a new era of school funding in California when it was adopted in 2013. It’s regarded by many as the most significant resource equity reform the state has ever enacted. But...

As Los Angeles Unified begins interviewing candidates for yet another superintendent, it must face a tough question: Has its unusual board governing structure blurred the lines between board member and superintendent and contributed to the steady churn in district leadership...