Technical Reports
(In)Effective Responses to Shrinking Enrollment: The Pressures of Demographic Change on California’s Schools
This report examines how enrollment decline is reshaping California districts. It considers what kinds of planning, funding, and community engagement can help districts respond thoughtfully rather than reactively.
Adolescence and the Reimagined High School: Scientific Perspectives on Development, Learning, and Civic Reasoning
This report draws on developmental science, neuroscience, and field studies of California secondary teachers, along with organizational research, to identify how high school design influences possibilities for adolescent development, including the development of transcendent thinking. It describes how schools designed around relationships, meaningful inquiry, civic reasoning, identity development, and purpose can support more powerful learning for adolescents.
AI and Education across California Schools: Calls for More Professional Development and AI Literacy
This report documents how AI is already entering California schools. It highlights the need for clear policies, professional learning, and AI literacy so that adoption is guided by educational purpose rather than left to chance.
Assessing Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs) Using Generative AI
This report uses generative AI to analyze thousands of LCAP goals and actions across California. It raises important questions about how local planning tools could become more measurable, strategic, and useful for improvement.
Beyond the Whole Class: Systematizing Engaging, Individualized Support at Scale
This report examines high-impact tutoring and individualized support. It asks how California can organize staffing, time, and instruction to meet students where they are more consistently.
California's School Facilities in a Changing Climate: Funding, Equity, and Resilience
This report examines school facilities funding, climate resilience, and equity. It highlights how buildings, outdoor spaces, and local fiscal capacity shape students’ learning environments.
Early Childhood Education - Section 1: The Changing Landscape of ECE in California
This report examines how universal prekindergarten expansion is reshaping early childhood education in California. It considers what expanded access means for families, providers, capacity, and the broader mixed-delivery system.
Early Childhood Education - Section 2: Staff Preparation & Support
This report examines preparation and professional support for early childhood educators. It identifies opportunities to strengthen quality and consistency across early learning settings.
Early Childhood Education - Section 3: The ECE Workforce
This report analyzes the early childhood workforce. It highlights how compensation, credentials, retention, and career pathways shape the quality and stability of early learning programs.
Early Childhood Education - Section 4: Quality Assessment & Monitoring
This report examines how California monitors early childhood program quality. It asks how the state could build a better system to assess and support improvement in the quality of children’s learning experiences across settings.
Early Childhood Education - Section 5: P-3 Instructional Continuity
This report examines alignment from preschool through third grade. It identifies ways to create a more coherent early learning pathway across standards, curriculum, assessment, and teacher preparation.
Early Childhood Education - Section 6: Data & Data Systems
This report reviews California’s early childhood data systems. It considers how better-integrated data could help the state understand access, quality, workforce conditions, and child outcomes; and make more informed decisions about its investments.
Education Data Needs, Availability, and Access in California
This report reviews California’s progress in building statewide education data systems. It identifies opportunities to make data more connected, accessible, and useful for families, educators, policymakers, and researchers working to improve student outcomes.
Mandatory Regionalization and Its Limits: How California Districts Experience and Navigate Special Education Governance
This report provides evidence on how California’s SELPAs serve important administrative, compliance, and service-coordination roles that are only partially visible in current reporting. It identifies substantial variation in SELPA spending and supports, pointing to policy changes that could strengthen transparency, accountability, and equitable access to regional special education services.
Public Accountability in California: Evaluating the SARCs and the California School Dashboard
This report evaluates California’s public accountability tools, including the Dashboard and School Accountability Report Cards. It considers how these tools could become clearer, more usable, and more actionable for families, educators, and policymakers.
Re-Envisioning California’s County Offices of Education
This report examines the evolving role of county offices of education in California’s education system. It considers how county offices can serve as both support providers and accountability partners for districts.
Structuring Charter School Accountability: How State Policy Shapes Authorizer Practice in California
This report examines how California’s charter authorizing system works in practice. It considers how state policy can support clearer expectations, more consistent oversight, and stronger accountability.
The Fiscal Consequences of School Closures in California: Evidence from a Statewide Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Design
This report examines whether school closures improve district finances. It offers evidence to inform more careful decision-making as districts respond to enrollment decline and community change.
The Learning Experiences that Matter and AI’s Role
This report asks how AI might support the learning experiences students most need, including targeted direct instruction, and caring and supportive relationships. Rather than treating AI as a standalone tool, it considers how technology could become part of the infrastructure that helps schools create richer learning at scale.
The Special Education Assessment Conundrum
This report examines special education assessment practices and the role they play in students’ educational experiences. It asks how eligibility processes could better inform instruction and ongoing support.
Who Benefits from Public PreK Expansions & Increased K-5 Spending? Dynamic Complementarity in California’s Education Policies
This report shows how California's investments in CSPP, TK, and elementary school spending delivered substantial, equity-enhancing gains in student achievement, and their effects reinforce one another across the preschool and early elementary grades. The results suggest that sequenced public investments in educational opportunity can produce developmental multiplier effects that exceed the sum of their independent effects.
Who Governs California’s Schools? A Cross‑State Map of Supervision, Administration, and Implementation in CA, FL, NY, and TX
This report maps California’s school governance system in comparison with other large states. It shows how authority, supervision, and implementation responsibilities are distributed across a complex set of actors.