California K-12 schools have come a long way over the past 20 years, but according to an exhaustive overview of the state’s school system, further progress may require tinkering with a long-entrenched form of school governance: local control.
That’s among the conclusions of the much-anticipated Getting Down to Facts report released Thursday, a 1,000-page undertaking written by more than a hundred K-12 education researchers.
“We’re in a much better place than we were,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education and one of the report’s authors. “But we need a coherent governance system if we’re going to continue to progress.”
The Getting Down to Facts reports, published every 10 to 12 years, are large-scale reviews of California’s K-12 system – what’s working, what’s not, and how lawmakers should respond. For this report, researchers looked at everything from special education staffing to school closures to overhauling high schools. The report is based on extensive data analysis and interviews with hundreds of superintendents, principals, school board members and parents.
The report’s timing is important because the state’s K-12 school system is at a transition point, said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Stanford who is among the lead authors of the report.
The political landscape is changing in California, with voters electing a new governor and state superintendent of public instruction this November. Artificial intelligence is expected to drastically change the way students learn in the coming years. And the state is finally emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended learning for nearly all of California’s 5.8 million public school students.