At a time when students of families living in poverty have experienced the worst of the economic trauma caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, community schools have reemerged as a promising intervention for addressing lack of access to quality education and economic prosperity. Policymakers are making investments in scaling up community schools;…

AB 471 requires that the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing report to the Governor and the Legislature each year on the number of teachers who received credentials, certificates, permits and waivers. This report provides data collected by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Commission) and addresses several questions…

Determining teacher supply in California is essential for policymakers as they analyze how current statutes and policies impact teacher recruitment, teaching incentives, and teacher preparation. This report provides data collected by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Commission) and addresses several questions regarding the supply of…

For over 5 years, The Education Trust-West's #Data4ThePeople campaign has been a statewide effort to ensure California builds a data system that is designed with achieving equity and the needs of students, parents, and families at the center. Now with school and college closures caused by COVID-19 posing a real challenge to data accessibility and…

Whether and how to hold schools accountable for their performance has been a topic of debate in education circles for decades, and the use of standardized achievement test scores for accountability has been particularly contentious. One proposed strategy for reducing reliance on test scores is to incorporate non-test measures into accountability…

AB 471 requires that the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing report to the Governor and the Legislature each year on the number of teachers who received credentials, certificates, permits and waivers. This report provides data collected by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Commission) and addresses several questions…

This report summarizes the deliberations and recommendations of the California Advisory Task Force on Alternative Schools (Task Force). The Task Force is a public service project of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University and is convened in collaboration with the California Department of Education (CDE). A…

Under California's System of Support, differentiated assistance (DA) provides supports to eligible districts to boost student group performance levels. This brief describes the districts that were eligible for DA in 2019 based on the performance levels of their students with disabilities (SWD). It also analyzes how SWD performance on State…

The Forum Guide to Reporting Civil Rights Data presents a variety of effective methods through which local education agencies (LEAs) report civil rights data to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. In addition, the guide provides examples of how state education agencies can voluntarily help their LEAs with Civil Rights Data…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

Brad C. Phillips and Jordan E. Horowitz offer a research-based model and actionable approach for using data strategically at community colleges to increase completion rates as well as other metrics linked to student success. They draw from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to show how leaders and administrators can…

With over 37 million residents, California is the most populous state in the country. California's primary and secondary schools enroll over 6.2 million students,1 and there are 3.4 million undergraduates attending 683 postsecondary institutions in California. Yet, because of the lack of a strong data infrastructure, we are unable to answer basic…

This policy brief is part of a larger research report, "Making ESSA's Equity Promise Real: State Strategies to Close the Opportunity Gap," that describes how states are using opportunities in ESSA [Every Student Succeeds Act] to better support historically underserved students through the thoughtful selection of specific equity measures…

Organizational leaders from nearly every sector have been using continuous improvement models and improvement science for years to improve products, services, and processes. Though continuous improvement processes are not new in education, they are relatively new in the state policy arena. In a continuous improvement system, educators use data,…

For years, student test scores drove much of the conversation about school quality and student learning. But new state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) show that policymakers are using a broader set of measures to assess school quality. In addition to math and reading performance, many states will also look at core subjects such…