California requires each school district to belong to a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) for special education planning and governance. The California Department of Education (CDE) and the State Board of Education (SBE) are interested in the impact on the surrounding small and midsized districts when large districts become single-district…

This document contains the technical appendices for the report "Targeted K-12 Funding and Student Outcomes: Evaluating the Local Control Funding Formula." Appendices include: (1) Data Sources and Sample Construction; (2) Estimating Effects on Student Outcomes; (3) Estimating Targeting Using School Site Spending Data; and (4) Supplemental…

Latinx Californians represent the largest ethnic group in the state, with a demographic that is disproportionately young. The state must significantly increase the educational opportunity and success of Latinx Californians, ensuring that more of them are prepared for college, attend college, and graduate with the skills necessary to thrive…

This dissertation examines the role that external factors play in students' educational attainment and success. The first two chapters examine the role of school quality. Chapter 1 examines how the timing of school quality impacts human capital formation, and Chapter 2 examines whether schools provide equal quality to all students within the…

As students return to full in-person learning in 2021-22, California public schools face considerable challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Record-high funding distributed through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) will provide some of the resources that will be key to an equitable recovery. In order to examine how school districts…

How are California's students doing? And are all groups of students receiving the same opportunities for educational success? How do patterns of educational outcomes in California compare to those in other states, and how have they changed in the last decade? In this study, the authors seek to provide a portrait of the state of educational…

City Year is a learning organization committed to the rigorous evaluation of its "Whole School Whole Child" model, which trains and deploys teams of AmeriCorps members to low-performing, urban schools to empower more students to reach their full potential. A third-party study by Policy Studies Associates (PSA) examined the impact of…

Between 1990 and 2012, the percentage of 13-year-olds (most of whom are 8th graders) taking algebra more than doubled, from 15% to 34% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Yet recent education policy changes suggest that this movement to encourage algebra-taking in 8th grade has begun to reverse course. Existing research suggests that…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) makes sweeping changes to the way school performance is measured. Using the innovative measurement system developed by the CORE Districts in California, the authors explore how schools can be identified for support and improvement using a multiple measures framework. They show that 1) Different academic…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to develop an accountability system that includes multiple measures of student academic performance and at least one additional indicator of "School Quality or Student Success" (SQSS). To support policymaking at both the state and federal level, the authors of "Identity Crisis:…

As the largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country, Latinos' educational success is a national priority. In the Los Angeles Unified School district, the country's largest, high school graduating rates for Latinos hover at near 40%. Examining this institutional and societal tragedy through the school-to-prison pipeline has…

This report provides a new resource for understanding the state of urban public schools in the U.S. Geared specifically toward city leaders who want to evaluate how well traditional district and charter schools are serving all their city's children and how their schools compare to those in other cities, the report measures outcomes for all public…

Making robust and reliable information about schools accessible is one of the most powerful ways to foster engagement and promote informed decisions that will shape our communities. Though education data is frequently collected and aggregated at the state level, data is rarely synthesized across cities. This report provides comparable information…

Every educator's quest is to help students learn in the environment that will allow them to obtain and retain the information presented to them. In the new age of technology, more students are able to choose the environment in which they learn. This study is a quantitative comparative study of the academic performance between online and…