The COVID-19 pandemic, along with historical inequities, resulted in a widening of the achievement gap between underserved populations and more advantaged students. In response to this issue, California took action by allocating additional funds to public school districts for out-of-school-time services through the Expanded Learning Opportunities…

As improving low-performing schools has become a critical strategy to achieve educational equity in China, local educational departments have implemented various school collaboration programs. Drawing on international literature and empirical data from in-depth interviews and policy documents in two Chinese urban districts, this multiple-case…

Public Impact's "Opportunity Culture" (OC) initiative provides a suite of models aimed at extending the reach of highly effective teachers and has partnered with school districts to implement these interventions in schools. Using administrative data from three partner school districts that collectively include 44 OC schools, we estimate…

Districts around the country are increasingly experimenting with the design and launch of autonomous district schools as a way to increase innovative, high-quality school options; bring decision-making closer to students; retain talented leaders; and prevent students and families from leaving the district for charter schools. In this report, the…

High-quality dual language immersion (DLI) programs can be a key lever to provide every student with a pathway to multilingualism. The Dual Language Immersion Playbooks (DLI Playbooks) provide a roadmap for the creation, design and adoption of policies, processes, programs, and practices that state educational agencies (SEAs), local educational…

Chronic absenteeism is often referred to as a problem hidden in plain sight (Chang & Romero, 2008). In recent years, more communities around the United States have been intentional on improving student attendance and limiting the impact of chronic absenteeism. Using qualitative interviews, we sought to understand how one community was…

Though scholars agree that professional development (PD) is a key mechanism for implementing education policies that call for teacher change, and that PD generally needs to be content-focused, active, collaborative, coherent, and sustained, the application of this framework has yielded mixed results. In this qualitative study, we employed…

There is growing interest in the ability of improvement science--the systematic study of improvement strategies to identify promising practices for addressing issues in complex systems (Improvement Science Research Network, 2016)--to spur innovation and address complex problems. In education this methodology is often implemented through…

This capstone examines how a newly formed senior-level team worked together to complete a complex task, while driving towards a larger goal of becoming a learning organization. For the 2014-2015 academic year, central office leaders in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) worked to develop a new approach to the execution of their…

This brief is part of a series that shares findings from a research collaboration between the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University and Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) focused on understanding implementation of the community school model in the district. This brief highlights findings related to…

This article explores the application of Whitaker, King, and Vogel's (2004) best practices for the implementation of partnerships regarding school leadership preparation programs in 3 school district-university collaboratives located in urban settings with large minority student populations. The 3 partnerships studied include the Nashville…

This report, based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of school districts in Common Core-adopting states, examines school districts' efforts to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The report addresses district leaders' views on the rigor of the CCSS and their impact on learning and instruction, progress on and…

In 2010, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) launched an initiative to transform all district schools into full service community schools. The community school design provides integrated supports to students and fosters a school climate conducive to academic, social, and emotional learning. Interventions span in-school and out-of-school time,…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the perceptions of collaboration between public and Catholic school administrators using the involvement in the federal Title II professional development program as the subject area. Volunteer participants were interviewed using a researcher-developed and pilot study tested-interview guide. Four…

This paper considers the growing trend of collaboration among school districts, addressing the national trend in general and examining the perspective of and the trends in Mississippi in particular. The trend in Mississippi is a natural outgrowth of the reform movement in the state and will probably continue on both a formal and an informal basis…