Giving a Student Voice to California's Dropout Crisis

Shares what first-year high school students find motivating or discouraging; how they view family, peer, and school factors; and how demographic characteristics, attitudes toward school, and support networks affect the odds of their dropping out

Connecting the Dots: Data Use in Afterschool Systems

Afterschool programs are seen as a way to keep low-income children safe and to foster the skills needed to succeed in school and life. Many cities are creating afterschool systems to ensure that such programs are high-quality and widely available. One way to do so is to ensure afterschool systems develop and maintain a data system.This interim report presents early findings from a study of how afterschool systems build their capacity to understand and improve their practices through their data systems. It examines afterschool data systems in nine cities that are part of The Wallace Foundation's Next Generation Afterschool System-Building initiative, a multi-year effort to strengthen systems that support access to and participation in high-quality afterschool programs for low-income youth. The cities are Baltimore, Md., Denver, Colo., Fort Worth, Texas, Grand Rapids, Mich., Jacksonville, Fla.,Louisville, Ky., Nashville, Tenn., Philadelphia, Pa., and Saint Paul, Minn.To date, research on data use in afterschool systems has focused more on the implementation of technology than on what it takes to develop and sustain effective data use. This study found that the factors that either enabled or hampered the use of data in afterschool systems—such as norms and routines, partner relationships, leadership and coordination, and technical knowledge—had as much to do with the people and process components of the systems as with the technology.Strategies that appear to contribute to success include:    Starting small. A number of cities intentionally started with a limited set of goals for data collection and use, and/or a limited set of providers piloting a new data system, with plans to scale up gradually.    Ongoing training. Stakeholders learned that high staff turnover required ongoing introductory trainings to help new hires use management information systems and data. Providing coaching and developing manuals also helped to mitigate the effects of turnover and to further the development of more experienced and engaged staff.    Outside help. Systems varied in how they used the expertise of outside research partners. Some cities identified a research partner who participated in all phases of the development of their data systems. Others used the relationship primarily to help analyze and report data collected by providers. Still others did not engage external research partner, but identified internal staff to support the system. In any of these scenarios, dedicated staffers with skills in data analytics were key.

Comparative cellular analysis of motor cortex in human, marmoset and mouse

The primary motor cortex (M1) is essential for voluntary fine-motor control and is functionally conserved across mammals1. Here, using high-throughput transcriptomic and epigenomic profiling of more than 450,000 single nuclei in humans, marmoset monkeys and mice, we demonstrate a broadly conserved cellular makeup of this region, with similarities that mirror evolutionary distance and are consistent between the transcriptome and epigenome. The core conserved molecular identities of neuronal and non-neuronal cell types allow us to generate a cross-species consensus classification of cell types, and to infer conserved properties of cell types across species. Despite the overall conservation, however, many species-dependent specializations are apparent, including differences in cell-type proportions, gene expression, DNA methylation and chromatin state. Few cell-type marker genes are conserved across species, revealing a short list of candidate genes and regulatory mechanisms that are responsible for conserved features of homologous cell types, such as the GABAergic chandelier cells. This consensus transcriptomic classification allows us to use patch-seq (a combination of whole-cell patch-clamp recordings, RNA sequencing and morphological characterization) to identify corticospinal Betz cells from layer 5 in non-human primates and humans, and to characterize their highly specialized physiology and anatomy. These findings highlight the robust molecular underpinnings of cell-type diversity in M1 across mammals, and point to the genes and regulatory pathways responsible for the functional identity of cell types and their species-specific adaptations

Spain, Angeline K., Just Talk? Discourses and Deinstitutionalization in School District Policy Making, American Journal of Education, 124(November, 2017), 1-7.

Reports comparative case studies in two California school districts on the decision making processes used in determining policies aimed at cutting extra-curricular activities; discourse analysis of deliberation by school board members and others was employed to locate cause and effect relationships among meanings held by these various actors; this study illustrates how organizational routines structure and influence the interpretation of meanings

Keeping Cuts from Kids? Deregulation in a Time of Ongoing Budget Cutbacks

Deregulation advocates have long argued that local educational leaders can make better resource decisions than state and federal policymakers. But viewed from the central state, without regulatory requirements locals will spend too little on underserved students and specific educational reforms. Lacking direct authority over local districts, the California Legislature has frequently used mandates and sanctions, tied to targeted "categorical aid" grant programs, to encourage attentiveness to state reform aims. Categorical aid programs' rules, layered on over time, have produced a range of bureaucratic tasks which have become part of the taken-for-granted fabric of work in the central office, but remain loosely connected to instructional aspects of districts' work. At the same time, tacit cultural conceptions of schooling have come to overlap with some of the educational objectives funded through categorical resources, from providing supplementary dollars for particular kinds of students to reducing class size. Deregulation proponents argue that districts will cut administrative costs, reconsider local fiscal priorities, and deploy resources in ways that boost students' achievement. But little is known about how organizational routines, neoinstitutional conceptions of the district's work, and local political pressures shape how district organizations implement large-scale deregulation. What, then, is the relationship between the institutionalized practices used to manage categorical aid resources inside districts and deregulation?Conventional politics of education explanations suggest that decentralization expands locally powerful constituents' influence and control over how deregulated resources are used. But neoinstitutional theorists, on the other hand, suggest that pressures from the institutional and technical environment of schooling will shape how deregulation unfolds. Some categorical aid programs, supported by a web of work practices, norms, and cultural expectations, will remain firmly in place while others that are less deeply embedded will be redeployed to address salient institutional and technical pressures.This study uses a qualitative, comparative case study to investigate how districts responded to 2009 legislation deregulating about 40 state categorical aid programs, commonly referred to as Tier 3 categorical flexibility. At face value, this reform freed up six percent of annual revenues. But it was enacted in the context of mid-year budget cuts and ongoing fiscal austerity. I analyze Tier 3 categorical flexibility implementation in two California districts to investigate the processes used to make decisions about Tier 3 categorical resource reallocation. I examine how these processes connected to tacit conceptions of schooling. I also examine the role of power and constituencies in how discretionary resources came to be distributed. Data include: observations of district budgeting routines; interviews with central office administrators, board members, and stakeholders; and a review of budget materials. The two study districts reallocated some, but not all, Tier 3 categorical resources. I found that political and cultural pressures influenced how board members and district administrators engaged in resource decision making, and these pressures were constrained and enabled by the formal structure of district positions, relational trust, and the distribution of expertise in district management and operations. These processes did not mirror the rationalized responses of deregulation's theory of action. In particular, I found that districts' resource decision making was shaped by the fiduciary role of the elected school board, a role that has generally been overlooked in research on education policy implementation

Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners, K-12: 2004 Report

The English Language Acquisition Program (ELAP) was established in 1999 by the California legislature to provide funds to districts to be spent on English learner instruction

Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners, K-12: Findings from a Five-Year Evaluation: Final Report

How should English learners be taught? What can state and local education leaders do to better support these students' academic progress? Conclusions from a five-year evaluation have been released by a team of researchers from AIR and WestEd. The report, based on the study of 1.5 million California English learner and 3.5 million English-fluent and native-English speaking students, includes detailed findings and policy implications for education in California and nationwide

Comparative cellular analysis of motor cortex in human, marmoset and mouse.

The primary motor cortex (M1) is essential for voluntary fine-motor control and is functionally conserved across mammals1. Here, using high-throughput transcriptomic and epigenomic profiling of more than 450,000 single nuclei in humans, marmoset monkeys and mice, we demonstrate a broadly conserved cellular makeup of this region, with similarities that mirror evolutionary distance and are consistent between the transcriptome and epigenome. The core conserved molecular identities of neuronal and non-neuronal cell types allow us to generate a cross-species consensus classification of cell types, and to infer conserved properties of cell types across species. Despite the overall conservation, however, many species-dependent specializations are apparent, including differences in cell-type proportions, gene expression, DNA methylation and chromatin state. Few cell-type marker genes are conserved across species, revealing a short list of candidate genes and regulatory mechanisms that are responsible for conserved features of homologous cell types, such as the GABAergic chandelier cells. This consensus transcriptomic classification allows us to use patch-seq (a combination of whole-cell patch-clamp recordings, RNA sequencing and morphological characterization) to identify corticospinal Betz cells from layer 5 in non-human primates and humans, and to characterize their highly specialized physiology and anatomy. These findings highlight the robust molecular underpinnings of cell-type diversity in M1 across mammals, and point to the genes and regulatory pathways responsible for the functional identity of cell types and their species-specific adaptations