Funding for California schools has improved rapidly in recent years but remains insufficient to meet educational goals and address the needs of students, particularly given California's high cost of living. Now, school districts face flat or declining revenues and rapidly growing student academic and social-emotional needs due to COVID-19.…

Project Tomorrow and BrainPOP have collaborated on the development of this new "Education Leadership Brief: Examining the Evolving Digital Responsibilities of School Principals" to examine specifically the evolving digital responsibilities of the school principal today resulting from the sudden shift to digital learning. This examination…

This study used a qualitative research design to identify the influences leading to the underrepresentation of women in the principalship as this contributes to a shortage of principals to lead schools. Women teachers from a California school district were interviewed to discover how they made choices about pursuing the principalship. Clark and…

Access to higher education in the U.S. is seen as an opportunity for social mobility. California's Master Plan for Education created a three tier system to provide educational opportunities for its citizens. By design, transfer pathways were implemented to allow students to begin their higher education journey at open access community colleges and…

Over the years, Sanger Unified School District (SUSD) has been engaged in rigorous efforts to improve student outcomes through instructional and organizational innovations--for example, Universal Design for Learning and Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). While these efforts have facilitated important gains in student outcomes, schools…

In this paper, the authors present qualitative data -- vignettes -- that describe how the professional learning systems and structures have changed for some of California's educators in recent years: organization of teachers within schools as professional learning hubs, management by school principals of the instructional mission, navigation by…

Black youth are less likely to enroll in college than youth of other races. The disparity in college access, and subsequently, in degree attainment, is due to many systemic and structural factors. Information gaps about how to research, prepare for, and finance a college degree also lead to racial disparities in college access. Technology,…

California early childhood administrators are faced with increased accountability to ensure preschool children are prepared to enter school ready to succeed. This comes in the wake of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and Obama's 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning initiative to improve the quality of preschool programs for its youngest learners…

The teacher-student relationship is a vital component to the social, emotional, and academic growth of students. Nationwide the one constant in teachers' classrooms are the observations by administrators. Administrators play a supporting role for students and teachers in our modern educational system. The present case study examined four middle…

The term "newcomers" is commonly used to describe students who have recently arrived in U.S. schools. Depending on usage, newcomers may mean students in their first 6 months in U.S. schools, in their first 4 years, or anywhere in between. A majority arrive speaking little to no English, most are from socioeconomically disadvantaged…

It has been six years since California adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). District leaders have been busy building capacity and developing infrastructure to support effective CCSS implementation, while teachers have been working hard to implement standards-aligned instruction that supports academic success for all students. In a state…

Background/Context: Researchers have amassed considerable evidence on the use of student performance data (e.g., benchmark and standardized state tests) to inform educational improvement, but few have examined the use of nonacademic indicators (e.g., indicators of social and emotional well-being) available to educators, and whether the factors…

For school districts in California, just as one set of revolutionary new content standards is beginning to feel familiar, another deep change is brewing. Districts have now had more than five years to wrestle with how they implement the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSS-M) (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010). Many have made large-scale…

NGSS Early Implementers is a four-year initiative created to help eight California school districts and two charter management organizations, supported by WestEd's K-12 Alliance, implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This evaluation report describes how site and district administrators are making critical contributions to the…

This article focuses on the leadership practices that four public school principals in two Northern California large urban school districts used during the process of implementing the state-mandated reading curriculum. These four school principals' leadership approaches are described and analyzed through the lens of neoinstitutional theory to…