For decades, policymakers in the U.S. have leveraged accountability policy as a governing tool to lift school performance and close the achievement gap. Accountability become so widespread that it arguably became a "policy paradigm" with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002. Yet after just 13 years of…

Teaching physical education involves more than overseeing what happens on the field, court or in the swimming pool. Physical educators also need to control the locker room, where students hazing other students may be common practice at certain schools. This case is a good example of what happens when teachers and coaches fail to supervise athletes…

The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California Community Colleges (CCC) has disappeared more than one million students in the past 15 years, a 35% decrease in its student body since 2008 despite California's population increase. This dramatic shrinking of the CCC system was not an accident. It was manufactured by a vast…

California is home to the fifth-largest population of Black people in the United States, approximately 2.8 million individuals. However, when Black Californians seek access to the state's colleges and universities, they face undue bureaucratic and financial barriers. This Equity Alert explores a legislative proposal to create a California…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how Title I K-12 general education teachers describe their attitudes toward inclusive education with students with disabilities and what factors they perceive as contributing to those attitudes in California. The theoretical foundation for this study was Ajzen's theory of planned…

The non-traditional gender occupational divide weakens state economies by decreasing economic productivity and reducing diversity in decision-making. By creating gender parity in which "women participate in the labor force at the same rate as men, work the same number of hours as men, and are employed at the same levels as men across…

The purpose of this study was to retroactively explore how Latinx undocumented students currently enrolled at a single University of California (UC) campus navigated policies concerning accessibility and affordability as they worked toward their goal of pursuing bachelor's degrees. Using a critical race theory (CRT) and Latino/a critical race…

California school districts are now mandated by Assembly Bill 101 to implement Ethnic Studies courses for high school students as a graduation requirement. School administrators are responsible for guiding implementation and providing resources toward these efforts. Without support from these key decision-makers, the implementation of Ethnic…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

California legislation (AB705, signed 2017) mandated accelerated community college writing education and implementation to begin just before the COVID-19 pandemic. This study captures faculty experiences with mandated pandemic-era acceleration via analysis of 131 open-ended faculty survey responses representing 60 of the 116 California community…

Next generation accountability systems can empower states, districts, communities, and schools with timely, relevant information and provide the capacity to analyze and continuously improve instruction and learning. After 21 years of the current accountability framework in federal and state policy in the United States, there is growing recognition…

For California's community colleges, fall 2019 marked the deadline for implementing the state's historic developmental education legislation, Assembly Bill 705 (Irwin 2017). AB 705 drove transformative changes in community college math and English programs as colleges implemented research-based placement policies designed to maximize students'…

The undocumented student experience has been a topic of interest for educational institutions since the passing of AB 540 in 2001 and has become an increasingly prevalent phenomenon amid emergent legislation, ever-changing political climates, and the rise of Dream Centers and undocumented student liaisons across higher education systems. However,…

Over the last decade, many local education agencies (LEAs) across California imposed significant restrictions on community-based orientation and mobility (O&M) instruction. Administrators from these LEAs prohibited O&M Specialists from transporting students off-campus for instruction, with one large Southern California district going so…

Efforts to strengthen the pipeline to college degree completion have focused on improving college access and providing academic, social, and financial supports to students post-enrollment. This paper explores one facet of postsecondary education that has served as a barrier to both college access and success--developmental education--which has…