Many studies show that positive school climate and low levels of student bullying and violence are associated with improved academic performance. Currently, scientists and policy makers interpret this robust finding as evidence that climate improvement and violence reduction cause academic improvement. Nevertheless, this causal link has rarely been tested.

Relationships to teachers are fundamental to the educational success of middle and high school students. Compared to those with more strained social connections, adolescents who have positive relationships with their instructors feel better about school, behave better in class, and achieve more in their studies. But improving teacher-student relationships poses a substantial challenge. Teens often lack the motivation to develop close personal ties with their teachers – and teachers often find themselves preoccupied with conveying the Common Core curriculum, prepping their charges for standardized tests, and administrative duties at school.

Principal turnover is an important national issue with as many as 18% of principals in the United States exiting their schools in a single year, and there is evidence that this rate has been recently increasing. Principal turnover is associated with lower student achievement, higher teacher turnover, various direct and indirect financial costs and decreased morale among teachers, staff, students, and parents. Researchers and policymakers in general have studied principal turnover using a predictive approach: can we identify the factors that are likely to predict whether or not principals are likely to leave their schools? Many studies have produced meaningful results toward answering this question; however, most of them are predicated on the assumption that there is only one type of principal who is exiting their schools.

Public charter schools are theorized to succeed more than traditional public schools because of a bargain struck between schools and charter-granting entities: charter schools are given greater autonomy from the standard rules and regulations and, in return, are held more accountable. Early theorists expected that this dynamic would operate in two ways. At the system-level, charter schools would have the latitude to experiment with new approaches to education. If they performed well, they could maintain their charters; if they did not, they could lose them.

Proponents of teacher evaluation and tenure reform often argue that if we could identify the least effective teachers in the profession and somehow replace them with teachers of average effectiveness, the improvements in student outcomes would be substantial. However in many of the lowest performing, highest poverty schools, where rates of teacher turnover are high across the board, the larger challenge may be identifying and retaining their most effective teachers, who are typically replaced by teachers whose measured effectiveness is well below average..

Michael Kirst discusses the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the CA overhaul of accountability based on local control of education policy.

Current and former “English learners” (ELs) make up about 40 percent of California’s public-school student population. Establishing and implementing equitable policies and programs that simultaneously facilitate English proficiency and academic excellence for this group is of the utmost importance for the future wellbeing of California. In a new paper, Karen Thompson, Ilana Umansky, and I focus on what robust research suggests about effective policies concerning (1) EL reclassification, (2) use of native language, (3) access to the core curriculum, and (4) assessment and accountability. Here, I provide a brief overview of our policy conclusions.

In light of evidence that high quality early learning experiences can improve low-income children’s school readiness and future academic success, a number of recent proposals at the federal and state levels would expand public early childhood education (ECE) programs.

Enrolling a third of undergraduate students nationally and the majority of students with family incomes below $32,000, community colleges hold the promise of supplying the nation with the needed skilled workforce and economic mobility for the next generation. They offer credentials in different fields of study and of varying lengths: some short-term certificates require a semester or two to complete, while Associate Degrees generally require two years to complete and long term certificates take between a year and two years.  In the last few years, the availability of administrative data has allowed researchers a more nuanced understanding of community college credentials in several states.

Community Colleges across the nation have taken the lead in offering online courses to hundreds of thousands of students.  Online courses offer students freedom and flexibility to take courses at their own leisure.  Faculty are better able to track their students’ progress, and community colleges can offer more courses to more students without having to pay for added classroom infrastructure.  Administrators may see this as a way to offer affordable courses to working students, students in remote areas, and students with families.  Previous research has indicated that students who learn content online are just as likely to retain knowledge as students who have taken courses face to face.  Thus, with the advent of online learning has also brought into question by what measures do we define success and what are the best modalities of instruction for students.

On average, English learners (ELs) perform far worse than non-ELs on academic tests. More specifically, the math and reading gap between ELs and non-ELs is roughly one standard deviation. There has been a long-running debate over whether bilingual education is more beneficial than English-only instruction for ELs’ academic development. While there is slightly more empirical support suggesting that bilingual education is superior to English-only instruction for ELs, little of the research had come from randomized experiments or rigorous quasi-experiments, most had looked at short-term rather than long-term outcomes, and few had rigorously compared different types of bilingual instruction.

In over 20 years since the first charter law was signed in Minnesota, states and districts, particularly in large urban centers, have restructured public schools. School choice proponents argue that parents deserve to have a choice in their children’s education. Several studies have documented that out of the different restructured spaces, charter schools have been the least supportive in providing teachers with sustainable working conditions and employee rights.  Even though charter schools were founded as places where autonomy and innovation would flourish, the flexibility granted to charter school operators has not automatically been extended to its teaching force.

It is now well-known that LGBTQ students often have a hard time in school, including feeling unsafe and being bullied, and those experiences are strongly linked to academic, mental health, and other problems for LGBTQ youth. For over a decade now, schools have been trying strategies to create safer schools for LGBTQ and all students.

School counseling site supervisors play a critical role in the clinical training of school counselor interns and are an important link between counselor education and professional practice. While it is a state requirement in California that school counselor site supervisors must be qualified, credentialed school counselors, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) along with both state and national school counselor organizations have not yet created specific standards or guidelines for the preparation and practice of this supervisor role.

Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a growing interest in the potential for school-based interventions that target executive function to improve academic achievement.  Executive function can be thought of as the set of cognitive skills required to direct behavior toward the attainment of a goal, including the ability to prioritize and sequence behavior, inhibit dominant responses, maintain task-relevant information in mind, resist distractions, switch between tasks, use information to make decisions and create abstract rules and handle novel situations.

Given that community colleges are open-access institutions that serve a diversity of students with a range of skills, they need some means of identifying students’ readiness for college-level work. This typically happens via placement testing during college matriculation. Subsequently, we estimate that about 80 percent of all incoming California community college students are placed in developmental/remedial courses during the assessment and placement process (based on our calculations from the CCCCO Data Mart and data from a large urban community college district).

In the wake of the federal government’s 2010 Race to the Top initiative, states and local school districts have dramatically revised their teacher evaluation systems. These new systems incorporate more rigorous performance evaluation through the use of multiple measures of teacher performance and multiple ratings categories aimed at differentiating teacher effectiveness. By the start of the 2014-15 school year, 78% of states and 85% of the largest 25 districts and DC revised and implemented new systems. California is among the few states that have not instituted statewide teacher evaluation reforms.

Racial and ethnic disparities in academic achievement pose challenges to educational equity in the United States. One feature of schools that may be related to these gaps and that has garnered increased attention of late is school climate, which refers to feelings of safety and connectedness, opportunities for meaningful participation, and the quality of relationships between students and staff. While climate is typically understood as a characteristic of schools, there is some evidence that students within the same school may experience safety, support, and relationships differently based on their race and ethnicity.

Leading public health organizations recommend that children receive 60 minutes of daily physical activity and that elementary schools provide at least 30 minutes of daily physical activity during school hours. California mandates 200 minutes of Physical Education per every 10 school days (20 minutes per day) in elementary schools, though there is currently not a mandated number of minutes of physical activity during school. To provide children with the recommended 30 minutes of daily physical activity during school, some schools are providing opportunities for physical activity in the classroom in addition to Physical Education and recess.

Using nine years of finance data from California, we describe charter school spending for various purposes (e.g., instruction, administration, pupil support, and operations) and compare spending patterns for charter schools and traditional public schools. We also explore how school characteristics (e.g., total enrollment, percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunch and geographic location) explain differences in spending patterns.

Middle schools are a critical stage in the educational sequence that starts in preschool and culminates for many youth in higher education. High quality and equitable middle schools are essential if all adolescents are to achieve their highest educational potentials. Blacks, Latinos/as, and other disadvantaged minority youth are more likely than Whites or Asians to earn lower grades and standardized test scores in middle school. Such persistent racial differences in achievement suggest too many youth are failing to reach their potential while in middle school. 

Approximately one in five children in the United States speak a language other than English at home, and approximately half of this group are in the process of acquiring English. Current accountability systems require that states establish targets for students’ English proficiency development. However, these targets are not always empirically grounded.

Since the 1950s, leaders in education, science, politics, and business have stressed the need for “scientific literacy” among the U.S. general public. Today, concern over scientific literacy is growing due to the increasing demand for graduates entering careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).  In the coming decades, science occupations are predicted to grow faster than the average rate for all fields, and a significant amount of science and math training will be required for 9 of the 10 fastest growing occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The U.S. is in the midst of an effort to intensify middle school mathematics curricula by enrolling more eighth-graders in Algebra. California is at the forefront of this effort, and in 2008 the state moved to make Algebra the accountability benchmark test for 8th-grade mathematics. As a result, between 2004 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth-graders enrolled in Algebra or more advanced math classes nearly doubled, to approximately 65 percent. This effort was predicated on the notion that students learn more in academically challenging educational environments and supported by findings showing that exposing a student to more rigorous curricula and instruction increased achievement.

Since Head Start’s creation in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty, its mission has been to improve the school readiness of low-income children. To encourage this goal, the Head Start program uses a “whole child” model, which aims to promote children’s transition to school by enhancing their development through the provision of educational, health, and nutritional services to children and families. Head Start also engages parents in their children’s learning and helps parents with their own educational, literacy, and employment goals with the belief that these too are important in promoting children’s preparedness for school.