The higher education policy implementation landscape has substantially shaped postsecondary education opportunities for undocumented youth, who are already negatively affected by discriminatory public policies, and institutional agents, who are often unprepared to address their needs. Guided by Bressers's contextual interaction theory that…

The value of a college degree continues to rise. A bachelor's degree in particular provides unrivaled economic and health benefits not just for the individual earning the degree, but for the entire state. Therefore, it is not surprising to see growing demand for a college education coupled with growing eligibility for California's public…

As a result of patchwork policies, early childhood education (ECE) providers combine funding from multiple sources, known as blended funding. However, little is known about the consequences of blended funding for policy goals. We use national ECE provider data to identify the prevalence of blended funding models, and detailed state quality rating…

Exploring Summer Youth Employment Programs: Increasing Access Through Career Pathways builds the case and provides actionable recommendations for state-led support in the intentional alignment of summer youth employment programs (SYEP) with career pathways and the work-based learning continuum, including through Career Technical Education (CTE).…

Equity practices have expanded throughout the California community college (CCC) system. Every CCC develops an equity plan, where each institution chooses a disproportionately impacted population and focuses on improving access, basic skills completion, degrees and certificates awarded, and transfer rates. Each college is required to develop…

Undermatching, or students attending less selective colleges than they are academically qualified to attend, is seen as a contributing factor to the lagging college completion rate of low-income and first-generation college students. Addressing the mismatch has been mainly limited to the individual level. Through analysis of interview and…

Eminent historian and educator Larry Cuban provides a thorough examination of, and challenge to, past and present definitions of what constitutes educational success in the US. Cuban argues that in the history of American education, standards of achievement and inadequacy--as well as the reform efforts issuing from them--have been neither stable…

When then-Governor Jerry Brown signed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) into law in 2013, California's leaders were hopeful that this legislation would set high expectations for flexibility, transparency, and equity within school districts. A key component of the legislation was to allow districts more flexibility to make spending decisions…

Contrary to educational policy and research assumptions about an immanent 'twenty-first century' future, this article uses the concept of 'sociotechnical imaginaries' to trace how nonprofit actors in California invented and materialized distinctive visions of educational progress. Drawing on interview and ethnographic fieldnote data, I illustrate…

California needs better data on the state's education systems to uncover and remedy systemic, long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequities. To create more just institutions, students, families, policymakers, educators, and advocates need access to quality, disaggregated data that allows them to answer questions about how well the state's…

Cynthia Coburn, in her 2016 article in the "American Journal of Education"--''What's Policy Got to Do With It?''--states that the field of policy implementation suffers from the propensity to learn the same lessons over and over again. This repetition of mistakes, I argue, stems from a failure to account for predictable patterns in how…

During the global pandemic of the 2020-21 school year, school districts rapidly transitioned from the traditional in-person structure of school to distance learning. This research study sought to understand how superintendents envisioned virtual learning as an option within their school district portfolio, exploring the barriers faced in its…

There are at least 39 million Americans who have attended college but needed to stop out before earning a degree. The "Degree Reclamation Playbook" supports practitioners seeking to reengage this population, capture the momentum of existing credits, and bring students across the degree finish line. Drawing on more than a decade of work,…

Higher education research supports that diverse faculty reflecting the students' ethnic and gender diversity is best practice to facilitate students of color academic success. Yet regrettably the underrepresentation of faculty of color in higher education is a historic and ongoing problem. Further, may scholars point to college senior leaders as…

Following the murder of George Floyd and the wide-spread recognition of systemic discriminatory abuse of power by police, organizations across the country were jolted into reviewing their own policies and practices for evidence of prejudice and racial injustice. Teacher education programs were no exception. As teacher education grapples with this…