Jacob Alonso, James Bridgeforth, Althea Bustos Ito, Miguel Casar, Mariana De Franca Steil, Jeimee Estrada, H. Alix Gallagher, Danielle M. Gomez, Pam Grossman, Shira Haderlein, Maya Kaul, Adam Kho, Kurt Klaus, Susanna Loeb, Julie Marsh, Patrick McClellan, Laura Mulfinger, Amanda Pickett, Morgan S. Polikoff, Tye Ripma, Vandeka Rodgers, Beth Schueler, Shelby L. Smith, Lisa Towne, Jose Eos Trinidad, Akunna Uka, Eleanor Jingzhi Yu, Ron Zimmer
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, and regional and state institutions can provide the oversight and capacity-building needed to make local control effective. This model reflects an ambitious vision in which districts and schools have autonomy to respond to local needs, while the state and regional institutions provide the transparency, support, and capacity to support local control’s success.
The evidence across the Getting Down to Facts III governance studies suggests that although California’s education governance system has high aspirations for improvement and coordination across institutions, it is too fragmented in authority, accountability, and support to make local control work as a coherent, equitable, and reliable strategy for improvement. Authority and implementation responsibilities are spread across agencies and other intermediary bodies. At the same time, the state’s core accountability and planning tools often do not function as clear or actionable drivers of improvement, and the quality and capacity of regional support structures vary substantially across the state. The core governance challenge is a weak fit between California’s local control strategy and the infrastructure needed to make local control work: clear roles, usable accountability tools, coherent regional support, and enough capacity to translate statewide goals into consistent local practice.
This research brief synthesizes evidence from Getting Down to Facts III studies of California’s public accountability system, county offices of education, school boards, and the broader architecture of state governance, with supporting evidence from related analyses of Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs), special education governance, teacher credentialing, and the state’s role in supporting district instructional improvement. Across these studies, a common pattern emerges: California has built a system with many ambitions and many actors, but with uneven coherence in how responsibility, information, and support are organized. The result is a governance system that asks a great deal of local schools and districts without consistently providing the clarity, alignment, or capacity needed to help them succeed.
Key Findings
1.California’s education governance system is highly distributed, with authority and implementation responsibilities spread across multiple state, regional, and local institutions. This includes multiple state agencies, county offices of education, Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs), local school boards, and separate governance structures for areas such as teacher credentialing, resulting in a system that is institutionally dense and structurally complex.
2. California’s main accountability and planning tools do not consistently function as clear, coherent drivers of improvement. LCFF’s theory of action depends on public accountability and local planning tools including the Dashboard, School Accountability Report Cards (SARCs), and LCAPs to help districts, schools, and communities identify needs, set priorities, and improve outcomes. Yet these tools do not consistently function that way in practice.
3. Regional intermediary institutions are essential to how the system operates, but their capacity and quality are uneven across the state. COEs and SELPAs provide critical oversight, coordination, and services, especially for smaller and rural districts, yet their expertise, responsiveness, service quality, and capacity vary considerably across regions.
4. Across multiple parts of the system, accountability is more reactive than capacity-building. State and regional structures are more effective at signaling when districts or schools are struggling than at providing the coherent, ongoing support needed for long-term improvement.
5. Local control depends on infrastructure that is not consistently in place. School boards, districts, and regional entities all retain major roles in improvement, but the evidence points to diffuse priorities, fragmented supports, uneven capacity, and practical difficulty translating statewide aspirations into consistent local improvement.
