The bachelor's degree remains a fundamental path to economic opportunity in the United States. Critical for policymakers, then, is ensuring equitable access to such benefits--a task often constrained by long-standing structural barriers. One of the most obvious structural impediments for bachelor's degree-aspirants in California (CA) is the…

The move to online instruction and service delivery has created both a critical need and a unique opportunity to investigate the innovative uses of technologies and practices. In the fall of 2020, NASPA launched the Virtual Innovation Awards: Excellence in Delivering Virtual Student Services. Over 100 submissions were vetted by an advising…

Those of us who serve the discipline of parks, recreation, tourism and related professions have long struggled with visibility and viability on university campuses. This struggle is magnified by the absence of an adequate umbrella term and the variability in the names of our academic programs and the colleges in which we reside. For some, the…

Guidelines for teaching California's students have changed dramatically in recent years, as state leaders have adopted new academic standards, curriculum frameworks, and instructional materials lists in an attempt to better prepare students for college and career. However, adopting high-quality standards and curriculum materials does not guarantee…

Project Tomorrow and BrainPOP have collaborated on the development of this new "Education Leadership Brief: Examining the Evolving Digital Responsibilities of School Principals" to examine specifically the evolving digital responsibilities of the school principal today resulting from the sudden shift to digital learning. This examination…

In a teacher residency, candidates receive almost all of their training in their future job site: They spend at least a year in a pre-k through 12 classroom under the guidance of a highly effective mentor teacher. This on-the-job experience is complemented by coursework that is tightly linked to and builds upon their experiences in the classroom.…

This chapter describes how the authors are using data and professional learning to mobilize change in developmental English and mathematics curricula and pedagogy across multiple community colleges in California.

This ongoing ethnographic study examines how a counter-space, La Libertad, introduces Latin@ students to a liberating pedagogy of praxis which counters dehumanization they experience in their high school. The researcher spent 180+ hours over 14 months in the field collecting data through participant observation, field notes, and personal…

The Young Artists at Work Program at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) recently shifted its model from an afterschool arts program to a young artists' residency. This decision arose from a desire to reposition the youth program as a priority within the larger organization, coupled with a commitment to deepening the pedagogical values of…

Based on a qualitative study of an urban middle school, this article examines student perceptions of shifting tracking structures following the dismantling of a school's bilingual education program. The article demonstrates that students understood the school changes based on supposed language needs through an explicitly racialized lens, thereby…

The Community College Pathways initiative consists of two pathways, Statway® and Quantway®, that accelerate post-secondary students' progress through their developmental mathematics sequence and a college-level course for credit. Launched in 2011, the Pathways have been remarkably successful, helping thousands of students achieve success in…

All across California, educators are finding that creating strong and effective Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at every grade level or in every subject area is not easy. It may be tempting to conclude that PLCs are one more idea that did not work. But there is solid research to support the core concepts of PLCs: (1) a focus on learning;…

The concept of and approach to service-learning across higher education has changed dramatically over the last two and a half decades. Historically, one of the primary goals of service-learning was to prepare undergraduate students to become engaged citizens and to introduce them to the challenges experienced by individuals from marginalized or…

The goal of this research study has been to develop, implement, and evaluate a school reform design experiment at a continuation high school with low-income, low-performing underrepresented minority students. The complexity sciences served as a theoretical framework for this design experiment. Treating an innovative college preparatory program as…

John Muir Elementary School in San Francisco is like countless other schools in cities across the United States. The student body comprises mostly lower income, African American and Latino students who--despite being just as intelligent as their white and Asian counterparts--traditionally underachieve on many academic measures. Talented,…