School districts throughout the country have faced increasing challenges with recruiting and retaining beginning STEM teachers. In 2017, turnover rates for mathematics and science teachers were 90% greater in the top quartile of schools serving students of color than in the bottom quartile. A RAND Corporation 2021 survey found nearly one in four…

California is in the midst of a severe special education teacher shortage that threatens the state's ability to improve outcomes for students with disabilities, who often have the greatest needs but receive the least expert teachers. To help policymakers address the shortage, the Learning Policy Institute conducted an analysis of the special…

This is a policy brief for "California's Special Education Teacher Shortage." California is in the midst of a severe special education teacher shortage that threatens the state's ability to improve outcomes for students with disabilities, who often have the greatest needs but receive the least expert teachers. To help policymakers…

Large-scale efforts to address the need for data sharing and communication have surfaced in recent years. While these efforts have expanded data sharing and data use opportunities for educational institutions at all levels, the comprehensive educational and workforce data across California that are necessary to effectively inform efforts aimed at…

Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state-local dichotomy. Using interview data (n = 45) from six case-study states, we analyzed local leaders', state-internal actors', and state-external…

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) measures participant labor market outcomes to drive program performance. This article uses statistical analysis to examine the relationship between participant characteristics and key outcome measures in one large California local WIA program. This study also measures the impact of different training…

The past year highlighted and heightened California's key challenges. Millions of Californians lost jobs and income during the COVID-19 crisis; low-income families, communities of color, and women were hit hardest. As schools and universities shifted rapidly to remote learning, educators and parents scrambled to provide all students with…

This fifth annual update on America's high school dropout crisis shows that, for the first time in history, the nation has crossed the 80 percent high school graduation rate threshold and remains on pace, for the second year in a row, to meet the goal of a 90 percent high school graduation rate by the Class of 2020. This report highlights key…

On June 30, 2010, California awarded $3 million to support teacher recruitment and training through the California Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention (CalGRIP) initiative, which assists young adults at risk of joining gangs in finding employment or pursuing an education. California chose to fund six Career Pathways Partnership projects as…

The Workforce Investment Act uses measures of labor market outcomes to drive program performance. This paper examines the relationship of participant characteristics with key program outcome measures and evaluates the impact of different training interventions of program outcomes while controlling for participant characteristics. The paper…

This paper discusses the importance of institutionalizing practices that promote equitable outcomes for all students within the vast California Community College (CCC) system. The CCC system, which annually provides educational opportunities for almost three million students, exists at the heart of the state economy and future labor pool. Because…

California State University, Long Beach, in collaboration with Long Beach Unified School District's Head Start and Child Development Centers, and the community childcare agency Young Horizons implemented an intervention and evaluation program to improve children's school readiness. The focus of Readiness and Early Activities for Children from the…

Although the decade of the 1990s witnessed a decline in adult crime and violence rates in California and the United States in general, juvenile crime and violence remained a significant problem. In California, juvenile assault arrests remained at 12.5 per one hundred thousand between 1994 and 1999; adult arrest rates for the same crime declined…

This article reports findings from an assessment of the effectiveness of privately administered "structured on-site training" (SOST) programs funded by the California Employment Training Panel. It reports on the characteristics of SOST programs that increased trainees' competitiveness in the internal and external labor markets. In…