Brown Bag — The California CORE Districts

Two important policy shifts characterize the current wave of education reform in the United States and in California specifically:  (1) a growing consensus that college, career, and civic readiness should be the educational goal for all high school graduates, and (2) a trend toward local control or flexibility in implementation to achieve that goal. Taken together, these trends present new challenges for school district leaders.  The equity and learning demands of universal college and career readiness imply that all young people in public schools must have access to deeper learning opportunities that will prepare them to master rigorous academic content, think critically, work collaboratively, and learn to apply classroom learning to real-world contexts. As well, districts are being called on to play a central role in developing the strategies, capacities, and professional accountability systems that are equal to these new learning goals.  Against this policy backdrop, this Brown Bag session will explore the California CORE district’s efforts to form a learning collaborative to collectively advance professional accountability. This talk will describe their work with the John Gardner Center at Stanford, Transforming Education in Boston, and others to design a school accountability system that ensures equitable access to deeper learning opportunities for all youth. The focus for discussion is on how the districts are working to move away from the bureaucratic norms of accountability that have characterized public education for the last three decades and instead are focusing on building the infrastructure and capacity for district-led, continuous organizational learning and improvement.

If you missed seeing this Brown Bag Seminar in person, you can see a video of the talk and the slide presentation here.

Jorge Ruiz de Velasco joined the Gardner Center as Associate Director in 2013. Dr. Velasco comes to Stanford from Berkeley Law, where he was Director of the Warren Institute's Program on Education Law and Policy. The focus of his work is on the study and promotion of change in public schools, the implications of education reform for disadvantaged students, education law and policy, and the effect of immigration on schools and communities. Prior to his appointment at the Warren Institute, he served as Director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford, and has served terms as a Program Officer for Educational Opportunity and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation, and as a Senior Program Officer at both the James Irvine and William & Flora Hewlett Foundations. Dr. Velasco is a graduate of Harvard College (1984) and the Boalt Hall School of Law (1987). Subsequently, he earned an MA in Education Administration and Policy Analysis (1994) and a PhD. in Political Science (1999), both from Stanford University.

Thanks to our sponsors for the 2016 SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar series:

• The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
• The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities
• The Stanford Graduate School of Education