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 Principals: Trends in Supply, Preparation, Distribution, Retention, and Turnover
This report examines principal supply, preparation, distribution, retention, and turnover across California. It highlights how leadership stability and support shape schools’ capacity to sustain improvement.
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.
California’s System of Special Education Staffing
This report analyzes California’s special education workforce needs across teachers, related service providers, and paraeducators. It highlights strategies for improving recruitment, preparation, role design, and retention.
Curriculum Adoption and Implementation in California
This report examines how California districts and teachers select and use instructional materials. It highlights opportunities to strengthen guidance, quality, and implementation support so curriculum choices better serve instruction.
Local Control in a Time of Change: The Work of California School Board Members
This report examines the characteristics and work of California school board members in a period of fiscal, demographic, and political change, including their practices, the challenges they face, the supports they have and want, and their future intentions. It shows the complexity and variation in what it means to serve and navigate the responsibilities of local governance.
Paraeducators in California: Current Trends and Recommendations for Policy
This report examines California’s growing paraeducator workforce, which is increasingly central to student support. It identifies ways to strengthen training, role clarity, compensation, professional support, and career pathways.
Teacher Certification Policies: Balancing Quality and Access in the Teaching Profession
This report examines California’s teacher certification system and the pathways educators navigate to enter the profession. It identifies ways to make those pathways clearer, more coherent, and better aligned with both quality and access.
Teacher Preparation for English Learners and Bilingual Education in California Schools
This report examines California’s preparation system for teachers of English learners and bilingual classrooms. It highlights regional access, teacher qualifications, and the preparation needed to support multilingual instruction.
The California State Role in Supporting District Capacity for TK-8 Math Improvement
This report examines district capacity to improve instruction in TK–8 mathematics and how current education governance and policies are insufficient to meet district needs. The findings have implications for reorganizing the system of support to create meaningful accountability for district improvement and changing policy approaches to improve focus and coherence.
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 Hidden, Guiding Hand of Compliance in California Public Schools
This report documents the administrative time California educators devote to compliance. It considers how the state could preserve accountability while reducing unnecessary burden on local leaders.
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.
Trends in California's Teacher Workforce: Understanding Supply, Demand, and Shortages
This report examines California’s teacher supply, demand, and shortages, with attention to where shortages are most acute. It highlights how preparation, retention, and distribution matter for students’ access to fully credentialed teachers and what factors matter for recruiting and retaining a well-prepared, diverse, stable workforce.
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.
Who Stays, Who Leaves: Five-year Retention Patterns by Teacher Entry Pathways
This report follows teachers across their first five years in the profession. It shows how entry pathways, preparation, and school context shape early-career retention and the stability of the teacher workforce.