Improving Education in California
Created by youth at the East Side Arts Alliance, Justice Matters’ banner embodies their mission to bring about racially just schools by developing and promoting education policy rooted in community vision. Photo courtesy of Justice Matters.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state will face a shortage of college-educated workers by 2020 and will have twice as many high school dropouts than state businesses will be able to employ. Though we hope to improve opportunities for all students to succeed at the highest levels, we focus our investments on students who face the greatest barriers to success: those attending California’s K–12 public schools and community colleges. In particular, our grants are designed to improve the education of low-income students, Latino and African American students, and English language learners.
To help students who face the greatest obstacles, our investments focus on two areas:
Strengthening California K–12 schools. The Foundation supports improvements in state regulations, policies, and funding that will make the K–12 public school system more effective for all its students.
Strengthening California community colleges. The Foundation makes grants to help students succeed at community colleges by supporting research and advocacy to improve statewide policy and by helping colleges improve their teaching and their ability to track student performance.
Improving Education in California Grants authorized in 2007.
2007 Highlights
In 2007, our grantmaking played an important part in improving the prospects for a reformed K–12 finance system with the release of "Getting Down to Facts," groundbreaking studies on school finance and administration in California. "Getting Down to Facts" consisted of twenty-two studies by more than thirty researchers from the nation’s leading universities and research institutions. The studies were requested by a bipartisan group of state leaders, including Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Committee on Educational Excellence, and former Education Secretary Alan Bersin. Supported by four foundations (the Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation), the study showed that to have an impact on student achievement, new funding must be coupled with major structural reform of the education finance system.
Our grantees advanced our shared goals for strengthening community colleges on several fronts in 2007. In particular, a series of reports by Sacramento State University’s Institute for Higher Education Leadership placed a spotlight on students’ low rates of success, drawing unprecedented notice from community college leaders, state policymakers, and journalists. Among many issues, the reports highlighted the need to improve the way that colleges assess students’ readiness for college to ensure that they are guided into programs in which they can succeed. The Board of Governors asked the colleges to develop a system for assessing every student’s readiness, and key legislative committees, in conjunction with California State University, backed a new program to test high school students before their senior year on their readiness for college work.
In addition, improving the success rates for underprepared students, a primary focus of the Foundation’s grantmaking, has become a top priority for the community college system, as reflected in a new $33 million developmental education initiative. Practitioners at the eleven colleges that participated in Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), our project with the Carnegie Foundation, have become central to many aspects of this effort. They are leading the research on effective practices, participating as mentors for other colleges, and designing a conference on student success rates in which eighty-seven of the 109 colleges in the community college system participated. In a survey, more than 85 percent of SPECC faculty members said they had adopted new teaching strategies and 70 percent reported that their students’ learning had improved.
2008 Goals
- Use the information from “Getting Down to Facts” and other research to develop policy recommendations and create a bipartisan coalition to advocate for reform
- Apply what we’ve learned from grantee projects, such as Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges, to other colleges
- Educate policymakers and community college leaders about the role of state policy in improving student success
- Integrate K–12 and community college grantmaking in the Education Program
For more information, please visit the Foundation Web site.
