For Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Susanna Loeb, the work of bringing an incoming governor up to speed on the state’s education system begins with a listening tour.
“There are a billion different things you could look at in education,” Loeb told School’s In co-hosts GSE Senior Lecturer Denise Pope and GSE Dean Dan Schwartz. “We started by talking to a whole range of policymakers, advocacy groups, families to get a sense of where the interest was. From there, I put together a research agenda to answer some of those questions.”
Loeb is the lead researcher of Getting Down to Facts, a series of comprehensive reviews of California’s preK-12 system designed to inform policymakers about education challenges and provide data to support decision-making. The first report, in 2007, was prepared for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The second, in 2018, was for Governor Gavin Newsom. The third version, released May 7, is created for Newsom’s successor.
Loeb, the faculty director of the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University and founding director of the GSE’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, puts together a team of researchers to study the key issues that emerge from the wide-ranging discussions with stakeholders. For this year’s report, nearly 100 experts were brought in to examine topics including multilingual learners, special education, fiscal issues, early childhood education, and technology. The team prepared research briefs on 22 topics.
Loeb says the third version of the report shows that California has made great progress in areas such as school finance and investment in early education, in particular, with the adoption of the state’s local control funding formula and universal transitional kindergarten. Creating a system that can consistently improve instructional quality at scale has been harder.
Some states, for example, have been able to set out a goal for improving mathematics instruction statewide. “They are very targeted in the kind of math instruction that they envision, and then they put in professional development supports and curricular supports around that vision,” she says. “California just hasn’t done that.”
Three system-level challenges came up across the topic areas they studied, Loeb says, which the report dubs the “ABCs”: alignment and accountability, balance between state guidance and local control (and the burdens of compliance), and capacity building.
California has many tools and data systems to support and measure accountability, she says, but they are not well connected to one another or to clear guidance and support. Local school leaders make consequential decisions with limited guidance from the state while facing other burdens, spending some 20 hours a week on compliance activities. And a number of factors threaten the capacity of the educator workforce, with a supply of newly credentialed teachers that’s only about half of what it was two decades ago.
Getting Down to Facts III comes at a time of tremendous change in education, from the shifting role of the federal government to the impact of AI on school systems and classrooms. The report’s focus on “creating a system that can respond to change and improve instruction is particularly important at a time like this, when we have so much change going on,” says Loeb. “How do we get a system that will allow us to respond to these possibilities?”
After they work to disseminate their findings, Loeb says she and her team of researchers make themselves available to work on policies that would address specific shortcomings – meeting with decision makers, working with advocacy groups, even creating sample policies.
“I really hope that we get the California education system to be a model for the country and the world about the kinds of rich experiences that we can provide to students,” she says.