California is at an inflection point in education. Over the past two decades, the state has built stronger foundations through more equitable school funding, stronger standards and assessments, expanded early childhood education, improved data systems, and investments in community schools, early literacy, and the educator workforce. Yet California now faces a different question: whether those stronger foundations can support a public education system prepared for a very different future. Work is changing quickly, student engagement and well-being remain fragile after the pandemic, and federal commitments to civil rights, student welfare, and accountability have become less certain. California’s role has become more consequential as states carry greater responsibility for protecting educational opportunity and advancing equity. California’s central challenge is whether it can connect its ambitions, policies, supports, and institutions into a system that delivers strong learning opportunities consistently for students across the state.
This paper synthesizes findings from Getting Down to Facts III, a body of work comprising 55 technical reports and 22 research briefs. It draws those findings together to describe California’s current reform moment, identify the most important challenges facing the state’s education system, and clarify the priorities these findings suggest for policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders. The reports build on earlier Getting Down to Facts projects in 2007 and 2018, which helped diagnose major structural problems and informed important reforms, including the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and, later, investments in early childhood education and educator preparation.
What the Research Shows
Progress remains uneven, and the unevenness has a consistent explanation. Three system-level challenges recur across the findings.
| Accountability and alignment |
| California has many accountability tools and data systems, but they are not well connected to one another or to clear guidance and support for practitioners. Governance structures are fragmented and policies have proliferated over time, often creating disconnected, contradictory, and burdensome guidance to schools. The system produces information without consistently turning that information into action. |
| Balance between state guidance and local control |
| Districts carry substantial responsibility while facing high ambiguity about effective practice and heavy administrative burden. In areas such as math instruction, tutoring, and curriculum, local district leaders must make consequential decisions with limited clear guidance, even where the research base about what works is strong. |
| Capacity |
| California's ambitions depend on a workforce and support systems for school districts that are not yet strong or consistent enough across the state. Teacher shortages, uneven preparation, fragmented support for district staff, and leadership instability make it difficult to deliver high-quality, coherent learning experiences at scale. |
California has an opportunity to build a stronger system for learning, improvement, and innovation. The state is not yet organized to learn systematically from its own experience and extend effective practice across diverse settings.
What the Findings Imply
| 1 | Maintain and build on the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) while strengthening fiscal stability. Preserve the equity logic of LCFF while addressing constraints from volatile revenues, pension pressures, and other obligations, and facilities inequities. |
| 2 | Consolidate and align governance and accountability systems. California's current structures are too fragmented. Stronger alignment across planning, oversight, support, and intervention would reduce duplication and improve coherence. |
| 3 | Build stronger state capacity. California needs greater capacity to support workforce development, provide clearer instructional guidance for districts, and learn systematically from implementation across the state. |
| 4 | Reduce administrative burden. Overlapping plans, repeated reporting, and procedural duplication consume time and weaken local capacity for instructional improvement and strategic planning. |
| 5 | Support disciplined innovation. California should invest in developing, studying, and extending promising models in areas such as high school redesign, tutoring, educator pathways, and the thoughtful use of technology and artificial intelligence. |
The Bottom Line
California has strong foundations, ambitious goals, and visible examples of what richer and more coherent educational experiences can look like. The central challenge is whether state policymakers, county support providers, district and school leaders, educators, and education partners can connect policies, supports, and institutions into a system that delivers those opportunities consistently for students. The next phase of reform depends on building coherence through clearer priorities, stronger reciprocal accountability, and a better system for learning from experience, improving practice, and extending the state’s strongest examples to the students who need them most.
