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Public school districts across California struggle to upkeep and modernize their school facilities. For many districts, aging inventory, coupled with limited capital funding opportunities, has led to school facilities with ballooning deferred maintenance problems and classrooms that do not appropriately support modern instructional practices. These realities also work against California's priorities for high quality, equitable education, childhood health, racial justice, and climate resiliency. In this paper, we investigate adequacy and equity of investment in California's public school facilities. By using a standards-based framework to understand patterns of investment levels, we gauge the likely "good stewardship" of these physical school assets. We look at both "maintenance & operations" (M&O) spending and capital investment by local K-12 public school districts across the state for the years 2009-2019.

The Adaptive Learning in Statistics (ALiS) Project tested the implementation of an adaptive learning platform at nine colleges in Maryland. The platform served as a textbook replacement to introduce course concepts inside and outside of the classroom, and instructors used in-class time to reinforce statistics concepts as part of a flipped classroom approach. This report describes study results from the 2017/18 academic year. The Urban Institute evaluation compared course satisfaction and learning outcomes (course grade, pass rates, and statistics competency) of students who completed introductory statistics in class sections with the ALiS approach against the outcomes for students enrolled in "business as usual" introductory statistics sections. We find that the ALiS intervention was effective at four-year colleges relative to business as usual. Students at community colleges in ALiS sections did not show significant differences in any of the measures of performance relative to students in business-as-usual sections but were less satisfied with the course than their peers in other sections. When all students are aggregated in the analysis, the results showed very modest improvements in student grades and statistics competency, no difference in passing with a C or better, and a lower level of satisfaction. This study adds to the body of research on adaptive learning approaches by highlighting the important roles of pedagogy, course curriculum, and course structure in the experience of students completing college-level, technology-mediated coursework.

"The Condition of Education 2017" is a congressionally mandated annual report summarizing the latest data on education in the United States. This report is designed to help policymakers and the public monitor educational progress. This year's report includes 50 indicators on topics ranging from prekindergarten through postsecondary education, as well as labor force outcomes and international comparisons. "The Condition" includes an "At a Glance" section, which allows readers to quickly make comparisons within and across indicators, and a "Highlights" section, which captures a key finding or set of findings from each indicator. The report contains a "Reader's Guide," a "Glossary," and a "Guide to Data Sources" that provide additional information to help place the indicators in context. In addition, each indicator references the data tables that were used to produce the indicator, most of which are in the "Digest of Education Statistics." In addition to the regularly updated annual indicators, this year's report highlights innovative data collections and analyses from across the Center: (1) The first spotlight indicator examines the relationship between student risk factors at kindergarten entry (poverty and low parent educational attainment) and academic achievement in early elementary school; (2) The second spotlight indicator draws on administrative data from the Center's EDFacts data collection and finds that 2.5 percent of students in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools were reported as homeless in 2014-15; (3) The third spotlight indicator draws on longitudinal data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Study to examine the rates at which first-time college students persist toward completion of a degree or certificate; and (4) The fourth spotlight indicator examines how disability rates for U.S. adults vary by educational attainment, finding that 16 percent of 25- to 64-year-olds who had not completed high school had one or more disabilities in 2015, compared to 4 percent of those who had completed a bachelor's degree and 3 percent of those who had completed a master's or higher degree. In addition, two indicators provide insights from the Center's recent work on technology in education. The first previews key findings from the Center's upcoming report, "Student Access to Digital Learning Resources Outside of the Classroom." The second presents findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress's 8th-grade Technology and Engineering Literacy (TEL) assessment. [For the 2016 report: "The Condition of Education 2016. NCES 2016-144," see ED565888.]