A Stronger Education System for California’s Students

‌Set a Few Clear Goals for Students—And Align the System to Achieve Them

Clear priorities are critical for ensuring that California remains focused on improving outcomes for all students, particularly those who have historically been least well served by its schools. The state currently lacks clear priorities for education. The California School Dashboard (Dashboard) has dozens of indicators and subgroup ratings competing for attention, and the state’s highest priorities can be hard to discern. The result can be a system that pulls leaders towards reacting to the latest red flag rather than sustaining attention on a small number of consequential student outcomes.

A focus on compliance compounds the problem. California district administrators spend roughly 20 hours a week—nearly two fifths of their work time—on state and federal compliance activities, including financial reporting, special education, the Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), student-support programs, and human resources requirements. Some of that work is necessary, but when reporting requirements proliferate, they consume time and attention that local leaders could otherwise devote to improving schools and student outcomes.

The state should be clearer about the outcomes it expects and organize its policies, funding, accountability, and support around them. Currently, there is an overwhelming number of measures and indicators in California. On the other end of the spectrum, while statewide assessments provide important information, no single test should become synonymous with the outcome itself. Further, being clearer about prioritized outcomes also does not mean prescribing a single local strategy. The state should provide a clear destination, multiple ways to understand progress, better evidence about how to improve, and sustained help over enough time to get there. Greater clarity would also help parents and caregivers answer a basic question: Is my child—and the school they attend—on track?

What could this look like?

• A small number of statewide student goals: Establish a clear state education strategy spanning early childhood through readiness for college, career, and life, and use those goals to discipline new policy and spending. Accountability should use multiple measures of student progress while eliminating burdensome reporting.
• Accountability that makes the priorities visible: Streamline planning and reporting over time and revise the Dashboard so the state’s highest priority outcomes stand out rather than competing with dozens of signals.
• Policies and funding that reinforce the same goals over time: New initiatives should connect to the state’s priorities and include the sustained support districts need to implement them well.

Other states demonstrate that a sustained focus around a small number of priorities is possible. Louisiana built a state strategy around a small number of priorities and created a single annual “Super App” that consolidates local funding and planning around them. Mississippi established a “north star” of student outcomes and paired coherent policies with implementation support and a decade-long horizon.

Start here: Initiate a process led by state and district leaders to set these goals. In the interim, give district leaders immediate relief from burdensome reporting. Use waivers, streamlined guidance, extensions, and other available tools to reduce requirements that consume local leaders’ time without helping them plan. That would free time for schools and students while signaling that the state is serious about making the system work better.

Make Sure Every District Can Get the Help It Needs to Improve Teaching

In California’s local-control system, districts carry enormous responsibility for the quality of teaching across their schools. But no one entity is responsible for ensuring that every district can get the sustained, high-quality help needed to do that work well. Support is scattered across state agencies, County Offices of Education (COEs), nonprofits, consultants, publishers, and other providers.

The gap is especially visible in teacher learning. Decades of research show that teachers improve through professional learning tied closely to classroom practice, sustained over time, and reinforced through opportunities to practice, receive coaching and feedback, reflect, and collaborate. Yet those opportunities are far from consistently available. For example, there is wide variation in both the availability and quality of math-specific professional learning. One in five districts in a representative sample offered no professional learning in TK–8 mathematics in 2024–25; even among those that did, professional learning was often limited or episodic rather than the sustained, high-quality support that teachers and administrators need. Districts frequently lacked both the time and the instructional expertise to provide that support.

California’s 58 COEs already have crucial required roles in fiscal oversight and LCAP review, and those responsibilities should continue. Some COEs also provide valuable support for teaching and learning, but those services are not required, consistently available, or high quality across the state. District leaders often must pay for the deeper support they need from COEs, vendors, nonprofits, publishers, and consultants—if they can afford it. The result is a system in which access to necessary instructional support depends too much on geography, size, local capacity, and resources.

California needs to make a single entity responsible for ensuring that every district—large or small, urban or rural—can count on high-quality support for teaching and learning. That entity need not provide every service itself; its job should be to ensure that districts can reliably access strong support and that the support meets clear standards for quality.

Funding must follow. California’s districts and the organizations that support them cannot sustain a core responsibility if it is financed primarily through short-term grants. Recent budgets have directed substantial education funding to programs aimed at serving a long list of audiences, and much of that funding is temporary. The state’s funding streams need to be focused and sustained to ensure districts have what they need to continuously improve teaching and learning.

What could this look like?

• A single point of responsibility: Designate one statewide entity responsible for ensuring that every district can access high-quality help with improving teaching and learning—and hold it accountable for doing so.
• A strong regional delivery system: Build on the best existing expertise in COEs and other organizations rather than assuming every COE must provide every service. The responsible entity should ensure that district leaders have access to effective professional learning for teachers, support for principals as instructional leaders, guidance on choosing and using quality curricula and support to implement them, coaching, and assistance bringing proven approaches into classrooms.
• Stable funding for work schools need year after year: Provide ongoing funding that allows regional organizations and districts to build and retain expertise rather than repeatedly staffing up and winding down.

Curriculum adoption in other states illustrates what stronger state and regional support can look like. California provides districts with lengthy lists of state-approved curricular materials but little guidance to distinguish among them, leaving local leaders to do substantial work to determine which options are best suited to their needs—a burden that is especially acute for small and remote districts. Other states, including Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and Massachusetts, provide clearer information about the quality and strengths of different materials and identify a shorter set of recommended options. California can preserve local choice while giving districts much better information to guide those choices—and more support to implement high-quality materials well.

Start here: Give districts clearer guidance about the strongest state-approved curricula and practical help with using them well. A shorter, more clearly differentiated list—paired with implementation support—would reduce local burden and help strong materials translate into better classroom instruction.

Make Sure New Teachers Are Ready to Teach

California needs enough teachers for every school and community—and those teachers need to be well prepared. Today, the state struggles on both fronts. Shortages persist in special education, mathematics, science, and bilingual education, and schools serving students with the greatest needs are more likely to rely on interns, emergency permits, waivers, or teachers working outside their credential area.

At the same time, becoming a teacher is expensive. Researchers estimate that, in addition to undergraduate tuition, it costs would-be teachers roughly $30,000 to become certified to teach in California, compounded by hundreds of hours of required, unpaid student teaching. Those financial barriers make it more difficult to attract and retain a diverse, talented workforce.

California’s dominant teacher-preparation model also compresses nearly all preservice professional training into a single postbaccalaureate year. It is unusual in how heavily it relies on a 1-year postbaccalaureate model to prepare its new teachers: Nationally, roughly 55 percent of teacher candidates earn their credentials through undergraduate programs and about 44 percent through postbaccalaureate programs; in California, only 9 percent of teachers in preparation were enrolled in undergraduate programs in 2024–25. The consequences of such compressed preparation are not hard to imagine. For example, district leaders consistently pointed to gaps in teachers’ preparation: Elementary teachers often lack sufficient math content knowledge while middle school math teachers may know the content but lack the pedagogical skills to teach it effectively. It is unrealistic to expect preparation programs to build both deep subject knowledge and strong teaching skills when nearly all professional preparation is compressed into a single year.

What could this look like?

• More integrated 4-year pathways: Expand programs in which candidates earn a bachelor’s degree and preliminary teaching credential together, weaving subject knowledge, teaching methods, and substantial classroom experience throughout the undergraduate years.
• Preparation for the classrooms teachers will actually enter: Ensure that candidates learn how students develop understanding in the subjects they teach, how to select and use strong instructional materials, and how to meet the needs of California’s diverse classrooms, including its growing multilingual learner population.
• A more affordable path into teaching: Pair improved preparation with continued efforts to reduce tuition costs and compensate candidates for required student teaching, such as the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, so that quality improvements do not make the profession harder to enter.

Start here: Continue investing in programs that reduce the cost of becoming a teacher, including tuition assistance and paid student teaching, while building towards a stronger 4-year preparation model.