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The diversity of California's teaching force continues to lag behind its student population. While students of Color make up 78% of the state's K-12 population, Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (TOCIT) comprise just 34% of the teaching workforce (California Department of Education, 2018), a statistic that has dominated the teacher shortage narrative. Although there is promise in the fact that teacher education program (TEP) enrollment is more diverse than the state's current educator workforce, it's still 27% less diverse than the state's K-12 students. As demand for greater representation increases, so have the initiatives to recruit and retain more racially diverse teachers. In the past few years, California has spent billions in an effort to diversify its teacher workforce, including Assembly Bill 520, which allocated $15 million to be distributed to school districts to develop and implement programs that diversify teaching staffs, and Assembly Bill 130, which appropriated $350 million over the next five years to create or expand Teacher Residency Programs, a pathway that has been shown to recruit and retain higher numbers of TOCIT (California Legislative Information, 2023). This study sets out to (1) explore how current policies, structures, practices, attitudes, and ideologies across the pipeline and profession impede the recruitment and retention of TOCIT, and (2) better understand the racialized experiences and perspectives of pre-service and in-service Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers. The following paper is based on a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collected from system leaders in teacher preparation, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and former teachers over the course of approximately one year: spring 2021 to summer 2022.

Among the many inequalities associated with racial segregation in schools, one notable disparity is the unequal access to experienced teachers. Schools with high proportions of Black or Latinx students have a disproportionate share of inexperienced teachers, both throughout the nation and in California specifically (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Clifton, 2023; Darling-Hammond, 2004; Goldhaber, Lavery, & Theobald, 2015; Knight, 2019; Learning Policy Institute, 2023; Shields et al., 1999). State-level policies and analyses in California have addressed the racial distribution of teacher experience, including the State's release of three annual reports in 2015, 2016, and 2017 titled, "California State Plan to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators." This study analyzes seven years of the most recent publicly available data from California's public schools, focusing on the relationship between student race and teacher experience. The authors categorized teacher experience in various ways: identifying teachers as "novices" based on 1, 2, or 3 years of teaching experience, and calculating the average and median years of experience at each school. Segregation was assessed from multiple angles by grouping schools based on their racial composition in six different ways, including categories such as "majority non-white" and "90% or more underrepresented minorities" that measure varying degrees of racial concentration. It also presents a regression model to investigate whether the relationship between teacher experience and racial composition holds when taking into account other variables, such as poverty status. The multiple ways of assessing the relationship all point to a discouraging conclusion: California continues to maintain a system of segregated schools that are separate and unequal in terms of teacher experience. The remainder of this report details and provides context for these findings. It concludes with a discussion of several possible ways to address the inequitable distribution of teacher experience in California.

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within the state have played prominent roles in our nation's history of school desegregation. North Carolina's public school enrollment is increasingly multiracial, and the expansion of school choice means that a growing share of students attends charters and private schools, both of which tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools. On the cusp of this important anniversary, the authors assess where North Carolina schools are now in terms of school desegregation, as segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.

This report analyzes changing racial composition in a comparable subset of schools to enable policy-relevant comparisons between charter and magnet schools. It reports the levels of segregation and diversity in these two systems, which is important because of strong evidence that diverse schools produce educational gains and substantial lifelong benefits in terms of college, employment, and other key life goals. Primary data was acquired from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data (CCD), and Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data. In the school districts where both forms of choice were tried, magnets have done better than charters at modestly integrating students. An obvious explanation for this is that a basic mission of magnets, especially initially, was to address racial isolation. Policymakers interested in gaining the benefits of integration through choice might look closely at magnet schools. The higher segregation in charter schools observed in this analysis, coupled with other studies with similar findings, suggests that reforming charter schools, if not advancing alternatives like magnet schools or something even more powerful, is needed to address segregation and its well-documented harms.

"Brown v. Board of Education" held that the educational systems of seventeen states that mandated segregated schools violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision helped set off the civil rights revolution. However, after so many years of backlash, schools of the South are dramatically less segregated than what existed before "Brown." "Brown" brought to a head the conflict between the professed belief in equal opportunity and the reality of clearly inferior schools for Black and Latino children. Many whites saw the desegregation changes that the courts and federal agencies ordered as a threat. From a civil rights perspective, the battle was for connecting young people of color to transformative educational opportunities. Opponents mobilized and they attacked the courts and the law. This report examines the changing patterns of segregation and diversity in U.S. public schools, updating earlier work with contemporary and historical data. At a time when U.S. social and political polarization are severe and race relations are dangerously strained, schools matter even more.

Efforts to strengthen the pipeline to college degree completion have focused on improving college access and providing academic, social, and financial supports to students post-enrollment. This paper explores one facet of postsecondary education that has served as a barrier to both college access and success--developmental education--which has proven to exacerbate racial inequities in academic progress in higher education and has effectively decreased college access for low-income students and students of color. After more than a decade of trying to tackle the developmental education problem indirectly through basic skills-related initiatives, task forces, and success initiatives, the California state legislature passed Assembly Bill 705 (AB705) in 2017, which directed colleges to replace standardized placement tests with multiple measures of high school performance to determine college readiness. In this paper, the authors describe the research that prompted developmental education reform approaches nationally and in California, describe the efforts in California that led to the passing of AB705, and summarize research on its implementation and outcomes. Building on analysis of the research, the paper concludes with five key practice and policy recommendations for California community college leaders as they move toward realizing a civil rights agenda for college access and success in the next 25 years: (1) Address faculty and practitioners' beliefs; (2) Move from structural to instructional reform; (3) Improve data accessibility, reporting, and accountability; (4) Expand equitable college access opportunities for students in high school; and (5) Address barriers facing English learners.

In the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, suburban school districts enroll 14.4 million students, far more than the 6 million students enrolled in the same metros' urban districts. In fact, students enrolled in the suburban school districts surrounding the 25 largest metropolitan areas represent roughly 30% of the nation's entire public school enrollment. Suburban growth has occurred alongside the creation of a segregated, metropolitan society through policy, law and practice. Discriminatory loan practices, federal highway construction, site selection for subsidized housing and exclusionary zoning are examples of how racial discrimination permeated to origins suburban society. State and federal governments are dominated politically by those representing suburban constituents too often eager to maintain an exclusionary status quo. As shifting populations change suburban school enrollment, education policy trends formerly confined to urban districts have spread to suburban ones. Many suburban school districts have experienced growth in the charter school sector, as well as a rash of school closures. Suburban schools and districts reflect broader societal problems, paradigms, and possibilities. This paper draws on federal enrollment data from the nation's largest 25 metros from 2011-2020 to descriptively analyze suburban school enrollment and segregation at the school district-level, seeking to understand different district contexts and their relationship to student segregation.

Many educators in California are unaware of just how harmful out of school suspensions can be. When suspended students are barred from attending school, more often than not, the rule broken was some form of minor misconduct. This update of "Lost Instruction Time in California Schools" demonstrates that despite the important efforts by the state of California to reduce suspensions, those efforts are seriously insufficient. The most recent statewide rates of lost instruction due to out of school suspensions show a widespread increase in the days lost per 100 students. The increase in these lost instruction rates, is not large for every group, but the 2023 data reverses a consistent downward 6-year trend. In 2023, nearly every racial and ethnic group, as well as students with disabilities, experienced an increase over their rate of lost instruction from the prior year. Using the recently released data for 2023, show that not only are the rates for homeless youth increasing for every demographic, but they increased far more for Black and Native American homeless youth than any other groups.

Children of undocumented immigrants exist in permanent limbo. They are fearful every day that their parents will be deported and wondering if they have any future in the country. Many of these students identify as Latinx. Instead of focusing on their education, these students struggle with this uncertainty and as a result are often absent from school or inattentive. Their teachers also struggle to motivate them and sometimes to protect them. The so-called broken immigration system hurts schools and creates victims across the spectrum of race and ethnicity in the United States, but it is especially acute for these students. This collaborative research brief updates and builds on a previous analysis of a 2017-2018 survey examining the harmful impacts of immigration enforcement on Latinx children of undocumented immigrants. It summarizes key findings from "Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity," but updates the analysis with more recent data. [Additional collaborators of the research brief are the Center for the Transformation of Schools, School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA and the Latino Policy & Politics Institute, Meyer and Renee Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA.]

The rapid gentrification occurring in major cities may have a significant impact on California and the distribution of wealth and opportunity for its families, similar to the vast suburbanization that occurred during the baby boom era. The White flight from central city neighborhoods has far-reaching consequences, particularly in regard to school segregation, which became an often-intractable problem. However, there is substantial and growing evidence of the enduring benefits for children who attend diverse schools. This study aims to explore whether the return of White and middle-class families to gentrified areas in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego has the potential to help desegregate the schools or if it merely rearranges the geography of segregation for students of color, reinforcing racial inequality. [Foreword by Gary Orfield.]

While the statewide trends and disparities suggest that the rate of lost instruction in California due to out-of-school suspension (OSS) is about where it was before the COVID-19 school closures, this is the first report to highlight how post-COVID suspensions in 2021-2022 have added to the pandemic's harmful impact of instructional loss, especially for students from "high-needs" groups, who were most harmed by the pandemic. This report analyzes California Department of Education (CDE) data sources to provide a detailed review of how suspensions directly contribute to disparities in learning opportunities for students in foster care or experiencing homelessness, as well as along the lines of race and disability in every California school district. It also describes evidence of extreme differences in how some districts responded to student misconduct in 2021--2022 and uses the data on student enrollment and the raw count of days lost due to OSS to establish a baseline measure for calculating comparable rates of lost instruction for every group in every district in California.

This report examines the impact of taking a math course in twelfth grade on L.A. Unified students' science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) college course taking and academic achievement. We also investigate whether particular types of math courses (for example, Calculus or Statistics) are especially beneficial for students' postsecondary success.

Research indicates racism is a persistent and pervasive presence in the United States. Wealth gaps between White, Asian, Black and Latinx families are wide and expanding (Parker, Horowitz, & Mahl, 2016). Since wealth for the middle class is often maintained in real estate, the long and continuing legacy of discrimination in housing markets has significantly disadvantaged communities of color (Rothstein, 2017). Research has demonstrated that racism continues to influence the housing market by way of discrimination in home appraisals and subprime lending practices (Korver-Glenn, 2018). Studies have also thoroughly demonstrated bias in hiring practices -- resumés with stereotypically Black or Latinx names earn significantly fewer interviews than resumés with stereotypically White names (Pager, Bonikowski, & Western, 2009). Leveling the racial playing field necessitates a reduction of racial prejudice and supporting policies like reparations and affirmative action, the latter policies having received scant support in public opinion polls and elections primarily due to White skepticism (Conroy & Bacon Jr., 2020). Schools have long existed as a means of maintaining democracy in the United States and, given the centrality of race relations to the success of democracy, this paper suggests that schools can be called upon to address racism as well. As such, this paper looks to our rapidly diversifying nation and asks: "What would it take to move closer to meaningfully addressing the legacy of racism in the United States, and what role might schools play in this process?"

This report catalogues the growth of the modern mixed-race population in the United States and highlights the many complications this population presents for the future of civil rights law and policy. What is most distinctive of today's mixed-race individuals is their assertion of a mixed-race identity which they claim embodies a different experience compared to those who report to be a single race such as "white" or "black." This emphasis on personal identity presents a new dimension that must be considered in the development of new civil rights policy. The authors argue that policymakers and other practitioners need to be more aware of the complexities involved with defining a mixed-race population because a limited understanding will result in policy that could unintentionally undercut the very values civil rights policy seeks to uphold. Policy recommendations for reconciling how the growth of a mixed-race population may challenge the existing framework of civil rights are provided. [For the executive summary, see ED630504.]

Colleges and universities have become increasingly concerned that requiring standardized test scores for admission is an impediment to campus diversity, and these objections have grown with the recent focus on societal inequities. In addition, the pandemic led to the cancellation of test administrations, which, in turn, caused many institutions to eliminate admissions test requirements. These developments present an opportunity to reconsider the role of college admissions testing. The report begins by recounting the history of college admissions in the US, the relationship of admissions tests to intelligence testing and military testing, and the motivations for developing standardized exams to replace the admissions methods used at the turn of the twentieth century. Next, it describes the college admissions tests used today, along with their role in the admissions process, their advantages and limitations, and the ongoing debates about their fairness. Finally it discusses the future of admissions and admissions testing and end with a discussion of the concept of meritocracy as it applies to college admissions.