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Under emerging policy structures in California, the responsibility for school improvement is increasingly placed upon local school districts, with County Offices of Education (COEs) playing a critical support role. In this system, districts are responsible for school improvement, with counties in charge of ensuring quality across districts and providing feedback and support where necessary. Underlying this major policy shift is the idea that local leaders are in the best position to drive real educational improvement and ensure quality across multiple schools and contexts. While a continuous improvement approach involves many changes to the way educational systems work, strategic data use is central to effective implementation. Although there is wide agreement that data are critical to the state's policy vision, many questions remain: What does it look like to use data for improvement in California's context? What data are needed, by whom, and for what purpose, at various levels of the education system? And what can we learn from innovative practice in our state? This paper provides a framework for how data use for improvement is different from data use for accountability and how data should be used by actors at different levels of the system and shares lessons from the CORE Data Collaborative about how data can be used for.

Early career teachers make up an increasingly large proportion of the public school teaching force. Often less effective and facing greater challenges than their more experienced counterparts, new teachers tend to leave the profession at high rates and, given that the modal length of teaching experience has now dropped to one year, finding ways to support the growth and development of new teachers has become of paramount importance. One critical way to provide this support is through effective feedback that improves instruction. In this 90-Day Cycle, the authors investigate the factors and processes that contribute to an effective feedback system, paying particular attention to how the system affects early career teachers and how such systems can coexist with extant and emerging teacher evaluation systems. Identified are a set of interconnected drivers at the district, school, and individual levels, that unpack the feedback process into a set of sub-processes that are shaped by individuals, systems, and the larger context in which those systems operate.

In recent years, "continuous improvement" has become a popular catchphrase in the field of education. However, while continuous improvement has become commonplace and well-documented in other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, little is known about how this work has manifested itself in education. This white paper attempts to map the landscape of this terrain by identifying and describing organizations engaged in continuous improvement, and by highlighting commonalities and differences among them. The findings classify three types of organizations engaged in continuous improvement: those focused on instructional improvement at the classroom level; those concentrating on system-wide improvement; and those addressing collective impact. Each type is described in turn and illustrated by an organizational case study. Through the analysis, six common themes that characterize all three types of organizations (e.g., leadership and strategy, communication and engagement, organizational infrastructure, methodology, data collection and analysis, and building capacity) are enumerated. This white paper makes four concluding observations. First, the three case studies provide evidence of organizations conducting continuous improvement work in the field of education, albeit at different levels and in different ways. Second, entry points to continuous improvement work are not mutually exclusive, but are nested and, hence, mutually informative and comparative. Third, continuous improvement is not synonymous with improving all organizational processes simultaneously; rather, research and learning cycles are iterative and gradual in nature. Fourth, despite being both iterative and gradual, it is imperative that improvement work is planned and undertaken in a rigorous, thoughtful, and transparent fashion. The following are appended: (1) Selected Continuous Improvement Methodologies; (2) Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence Framework; (3) Examples of Improvement Artifacts from the School District of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin; (4) Examples of Improvement Artifacts from Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland; and (5) Examples of Improvement Artifacts from Strive Partnership Cincinnati.

In an effort to understand teachers' and administrators' experiences with public school accountability, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), with the support of the Noyce Foundation, established the Educator Responses to Accountability Project (ERAP). During the 2002-2003 school year, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with educators in eight elementary schools across California. They spoke with teachers, principals, and district leaders, exploring such topics as their knowledge and understanding of recent accountability mandates, the impact of accountability on their classroom practices and their sense of professionalism, and their efforts to address inequities in student achievement within the context of accountability. This report discusses key themes that have emerged from their conversations with educators, drawing on the voices of public school teachers, principals, and district administrators to present a portrait of accountability policies at the school level. The authors heard critiques as well as expressions of appreciation for recent state efforts, and they heard suggestions on ways to improve or supplement existing policies. Four appendices are included: (1) PSAA [California's Public Schools Accountability Act] Overview & Evolution; (2) ERAP Schools (2002-2003); (3) Trend of API [Academic Performance Index] Scores; and (4) Interview Protocols. (Contains 2 figures and 19 endnotes.) [Additional funding for this project was provided by the California Policy Research Center.]

The article reports on the study, Responses From the Field: Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence and Policing, by researchers at the American Civil Liberties Union, City University of New York School of Law, and the University of Miami, with the assistance of the American Bar Association Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence. The study highlights the existence of widespread discrimination by law enforcement faced by survivors of domestic violence.

The article discusses the effects of the attitudes by the police who response to domestic violence and sexual assault cases in several communities. According to the study by the American Civil Liberties Union, City University of New York School of Law and the University of Miami, the discriminatory attitudes of the police and by other law enforcement officer affects the survivors psychologically. It cites the discriminatory actions by the police, which include inaction, hostility and bias.