Research Briefs
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22
Goals for Students and Schools in California: Broad Aspirations, Uneven Translation into Practice
California has developed expansive goals for students. State and local frameworks invoke academic achievement, equity, college and career readiness, civic engagement, and student well-being. Families and communities add their own vision: education as a pathway to opportunity, a space for curiosity and identity, and a place where children feel safe and known.
California’s Teacher Workforce: Progress and Persistent Structural Challenges
A diverse, high-quality teacher workforce is foundational to the state’s capacity to equitably serve all students. As the student population grows increasingly linguistically, ethnically, and racially diverse, the teacher workforce must be prepared to meet the needs of all student learners. Preparing a robust teacher workforce requires strong systems of professional preparation, credentialing, and development, backed by coherent policy infrastructure.
Special Education in California: Growth, Capacity, and Equity
Students with disabilities have a legal right to a free and appropriate public education under federal law. In California, fulfilling that promise requires a large and complex system that serves more than 865,000 students with disabilities, over 10 percent of all students with disabilities in the country, and spans multiple layers of governance, staffing, funding, assessment, and service delivery.
Improving Instruction in California: Capacity, Coherence, and State Support
California has improved instruction and student outcomes in recent years, but not at a pace sufficient to meet students’ needs (Reardon, 2026). The evidence shows that districts and educators are already operating near capacity under the current system, leaving them struggling to respond proactively to major shifts like the rise of generative AI and current students’ future needs.
California’s Balance Between State and Local Control
California’s education policy system combines substantial local responsibility with significant state control over many of the conditions under which schooling operates. Districts are expected to interpret state priorities, manage compliance, engage communities, and translate broad goals into day-to-day practice. At the same time, the state regulates instructional time, course requirements, curriculum frameworks, textbook adoption, categorical funding rules, and accountability processes in ways that shape what local systems can do.
From Expansion to Excellence: Addressing Systemic Challenges to Better Serve California’s Youngest Learners
California has significantly transformed its Early Care and Education (ECE) landscape since 2019 through the implementation of Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK). The state has phased in Universal Transitional Kindergarten (TK), expanding access to a school-based early learning experience for four-year-olds. This expansion is supported by the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P), which provides before-school, after-school, and intersession care to children from low-income families.
Curriculum Policy for California Schools
Curriculum policy shapes what students learn, how teachers teach, and which academic opportunities remain open or closed as students move through school. Its effects are not always visible at the point decisions are made. During the Common Core transition, for example, California districts reduced access to eighth-grade algebra, with enrollment falling from roughly 60 percent of students to under 20 percent.
California Schools in Transition: Enrollment Decline, Climate Pressure, and System Capacity
California’s K–12 system is being reshaped by sustained demographic contraction, population redistribution, rising climate disruption, and changing demands on district capacity to serve students with diverse needs, including immigrant-origin students. Districts are expected to balance budgets, maintain safe and functional learning environments, and support diverse learners, even as enrollment patterns shift and reshape the costs of staffing, facilities, and specialized programming.
Education Data in California: Infrastructure, Access, and Use
A strong data infrastructure can help district and school leaders understand student progress in school and after graduation, enable researchers to identify equity gaps and evaluate which programs and strategies help close them, provide policymakers with evidence about implementation and who benefits from policy, and support schools, students, and families in navigating complex systems and making informed decisions.
Student Outcomes in California: Progress, Uneven Recovery, and Persistent Gaps
How are California’s students doing? The question is straightforward, but the answers are complex. California serves a large and diverse student population, and student progress looks different across outcomes, age groups, and communities. As a starting point for understanding how the state’s students are doing, this brief highlights key findings from four Getting Down to Facts III technical reports that address student outcomes in math and reading achievement, chronic absenteeism, high school course-taking, and childhood emotional distress.
Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities in California School Finance
California’s K-12 school finance system has undergone substantial changes over the past two decades. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), adopted in 2013, shifted significant spending authority to districts, collapsing dozens of categorical programs into supplemental and concentration grants directed toward students from low-income families, English learners, and foster youth.
Supporting California’s Multilingual Learners: Progress, Persistent Gaps, and a Path Forward
California is home to one of the largest populations of multilingual learners of English (MLEs) in the nation. Roughly one in three students in the state’s K–12 system has ever been classified as an English learner, and more than two million children speak a language other than English at home.
Governing for Improvement: Transparency, Alignment, and Accountability in California Education
For more than a decade, California has pursued an education governance strategy built on local control, multiple measures of performance, and an array of state, regional, and local institutions charged with supporting improvement. California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) governance model rests on a set of linked assumptions: local actors are best positioned to identify needs and set priorities, public accountability and planning tools can support transparency and improvement.
Artificial Intelligence, Learning, and the Future of California Schools
AI is already part of daily life in California schools. Teachers are using it to draft lesson plans, adapt materials, and manage administrative tasks. Students are using it to brainstorm, summarize, solve problems, and draft writing. School and district leaders are exploring how these tools might support instruction, communication, data use, and operations.
High School as a Launch Point: Opportunity, Development, and Redesign in California
High schools shape young people’s pathways into college, careers, civic life, and adulthood. The experiences students have during these years, academically, socially, and civically, influence the opportunities available to them after graduation and the ways they come to understand themselves, their communities, and their possible futures.
Meeting Students Where They Are: The Challenge of Differentiation in California Schools
Differentiation means adjusting instruction based on what students currently know and need. It involves consistently and responsively adapting what is taught, how it is taught, and how learning is assessed, while holding high expectations for every learner. Differentiation is now especially important as post-pandemic learning patterns have widened the range of academic needs within many classrooms, leaving teachers responsible for supporting students working at very different levels.
Student Well-Being in California’s Current Context: Policy, Conditions, and Supports
Student well-being includes basic needs such as safety, social and emotional health, and meaningful opportunities to learn. It is shaped within an ecosystem of relationships and conditions that extend across families, schools, and communities. This brief draws on several Getting Down to Facts III technical reports that examine student well-being in California, including research on absenteeism, stress, marginalized student groups, and the community and developmental contexts that shape students’ experiences.
Family and Community Engagement in California: Requirements, Capacity, and Relationships
California’s education system creates many formal opportunities for families and communities to engage with schools and districts. School site councils, composed of educators, families, students, and other stakeholders, are a hallmark component of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), enacted in 2013.
English Language Arts and Literacy in California: Progress, Capacity, and Implementation
Reading shapes both educational trajectories and everyday life, influencing outcomes such as high school success, college completion, income, and the ability to navigate daily tasks. California has lagged behind the national average in reading for more than two decades.
Mathematics in California: Gaps, Capacity, and Implementation
California’s math and literacy trajectories have diverged over the past decade in two important ways. Achievement gaps have widened in math while narrowing in reading, and math has received less consistent state and district attention than literacy. The income-based gap in math grew by roughly 40 percent between 2009 and 2024, while the comparable reading gap narrowed by about 5 percent.
Charter Schools in California: Autonomy, Accountability, and Variation
Charter schools are a significant part of California’s public education system. Since California authorized charter schools in 1992, the sector has grown substantially. By 2024-25, nearly 1,300 charter schools served approximately 727,000 students, about 12 percent of public school enrollment in the state.
Leadership Stability in California: Capacity, Continuity, and System Coherence
School and district leadership play a central role in how California’s education system functions in practice. Principals shape instructional priorities, teacher development, and school climate, while superintendents and school boards set direction, allocate resources, and translate policy into local action.
