To realize this ultimate vision for our state, we are not starting from scratch. In recent years California has moved forward with the essential work of transforming our public education system. The work is difficult and requires much more progress.

Guiding Principles

Guiding principles of this work to date at the state level have been a focus on:

• Quality (Providing excellent teaching and support centered on a rigorous, relevant curriculum, so all students learn the skills needed to succeed in life: critical thinking, problem solving, and the capacity to engage in ongoing learning);
• Equity (Addressing historic inequities among different groups of students, including by aligning resources and approaches to meet the different needs of students and to close opportunity and achievement gaps);
• Transparency (Providing clear and useful information about students, schools and districts to measure progress and drive improvement efforts);
• Local Engagement (Creating systems, processes and structures that enable meaningful and inclusive participation in planning and decision making to advance a shared vision of student and school success.)

System-wide Changes

More specifically, major system-wide changes that have been put in place by the state include:

• Organizing teaching around the California standards, curriculum and assessments, which promote meaningful, rigorous learning aimed at 21^st century skills. The state has set high expectations for all students and has established annual computer-adaptive assessments that provide educators and families with information about how well students are meeting the standards.
• Distributing state funding based on students’ needs. Through the landmark Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), signed into law in 2013, school districts receive additional resources from the state to meet the higher needs of their students who are living in poverty, learning English, or who are homeless or in foster care.
• Establishing statewide priorities based on a holistic vision of student and school success. These priority areas are reflected in the LCFF and the California School Dashboard; they serve as a foundation for guiding local planning, funding decisions, and continuous improvement efforts.
• Increasing opportunities for local decision-making and community engagement. A guiding philosophy behind the LCFF is that local educators, leaders, families and communities know best how to address the needs of their students. To that end, LCFF requires school districts and charter schools to engage their communities (including parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators, other school staff, and local bargaining units) in developing and annually updating a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP). Importantly, the LCFF also provides local school districts and charter schools with greater flexibility to spend funding they receive from the state to address local needs. The state’s previous system of “categorical funding” restricted the use of a significant percentage of state funding to state-prescribed purposes and required intensive compliance reporting.
• Providing clear, understandable information about the performance of schools and districts on a variety of indicators – and for different groups of students. With the official launch of the California School Dashboard in fall 2017, the state took a leap forward in providing a more holistic picture of school and district performance. The Dashboard will be updated with current data each fall. New design and accessibility upgrades will also be added in December 2018. The Dashboard is intended to be the central tool for students, parents, families, educators and others to see how schools are serving their students based on multiple measures, including test scores, graduation rates, college and career readiness, suspension rates, school climate, and more.
• Building a Statewide System of Support to provide technical assistance and support to school districts. Beginning in 2018, California is rolling out this new system that relies in part on information from the School Dashboard to identify school districts in need of support. County offices of education and a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, along with other professional allied organizations will provide assistance and support, working closely with local districts to improve their schools by helping them to assess their challenges and build their capacity to address them.

A Practice of “Continuous Improvement”

All of these policy components together constitute a fundamentally new approach to change that California has embarked on called “continuous improvement.” Continuous improvement requires key shifts from traditional reform approaches. As a new Getting Down to Facts II research brief, “Continuous Improvement: Building System Capacity To Learn” explains:

For decades, education reform has been dominated by a series of disjointed efforts that don’t necessarily connect with or support each other. Over time, when it became clear that one approach wasn’t going to work, another easy fix took its place. Each new initiative was introduced with great hype, but often without the support to figure out how to get ideas to work in practice for diverse students in diverse contexts. Results, if they were evaluated at all, came at the end of the school year when that group of students was gone. Unlike most other education reforms, continuous improvement is a complex, systemwide strategy. It requires key shifts from traditional reform approaches. The premise is that the individual people in an organization aren’t the cause of current problems, rather that the system is designed in a way that produces the problems. Continuous improvement creates a culture of collaboration and experimentation. It provides a structure for teachers and staff to identify problems, design interventions specific to those problems, learn from trying them out in context, and evaluate their effectiveness while there’s still time to make any necessary changes.

The practice of continuous improvement relies on engaging everyone in the system—teachers, administrators, staff, parents and families—in disciplined problem solving to discover, implement, and spread evidenced-based changes that work locally to improve outcomes for students. This requires a sustained focus on building the capacity of everyone in the system—locally, regionally and at the state level—to fulfill their roles. Ultimately, continuous improvement depends on everyone in the system taking collective responsibility for the success of all students.