California K-12 Education Reform

California K-12 Education Reform
Following the recommendations of this 2006 Hewlett-funded report, California enacted reforms to improve the quality, recruitment, and retention of teachers.

The Foundation supports California’s K-12 public school students by driving change in state regulations, policies, and funding. Although California students still lag the nation in all major ethnic and socioeconomic groups, 2006 marked significant progress in all our focus areas:

  • Promoting school finance reform. With Foundation support, researchers, policymakers, and constituency groups built momentum and bipartisan political will for reforming California’s outdated, inequitable system.
  • Adopting good government measures. Despite limited public and media interest in good government reforms, grantees made progress in promoting transparency and building better state data systems to track student achievement over time.
  • Improving teacher quality. Grantees advanced a significant package of policy reforms related to teacher quality.
  • Better serving the neediest students. Our technical assistance in two key areas—the design and implementation of a new $2.9 billion state program to improve California’s lowest-performing schools and a $20 million state program to better serve English learners—allowed policymakers and reformers to target help toward the neediest students.
California K-12 Education Reform Grants Authorized in 2006
 
2006 Highlights

A groundbreaking $2.6 million school finance research project—run by Stanford University and funded with the Gates, Irvine, and Stuart foundations—was announced with the help of the bipartisan group of policymakers who requested this research. In early 2007, the project’s results sparked discussion among policymakers and opinion leaders about how to make the dollars we spend on education more effective and how much it costs to educate our students so that they reach the goals the state of California has set for them.

The state Department of Education redesigned its public reporting this year after our grantee at UCLA released a report critiquing School Accountability Report Cards—parents’ main source of information about school performance. The new, more user-friendly format will be taken to the state Board of Education this fall for approval and rollout in all California schools.

With Foundation support, The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning highlighted the need for improving California’s teacher recruitment, training, and retention policies. CFTL also convened an expert group to develop recommendations. A bill containing many of these recommendations, signed into law in September 2006, streamlined the qualifying process for out-of-state teachers entering California and improved training for new teachers.

English learners remain poorly served by California’s public schools. In response, the 2006 state budget included $20 million for districtwide pilot programs to demonstrate best practices for improving their achievement. We funded WestEd, a regional education lab, to work with the state Department of Education to help design and evaluate this initiative.

2007 Goals
 
  • Advance high-quality research on the need to reform California’s school finance system
  • Mobilize the public and policymakers to champion school finance reform
  • Strengthen government accountability and transparency in data collection and public reporting
  • Ensure effective implementation of new teacher recruitment and training policies
  • Monitor new state programs for lowest-performing schools and English learners
  • Focus attention and resources on high-need students

For more information, please visit the Foundation Web site.