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…

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…

The bachelor's degree remains a fundamental path to economic opportunity in the United States. Critical for policymakers, then, is ensuring equitable access to such benefits--a task often constrained by long-standing structural barriers. One of the most obvious structural impediments for bachelor's degree-aspirants in California (CA) is the…

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…

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,…

We hope this report will help to renew attention to the problem of excessive discipline. In keeping with this aim, we compare the projected full-year suspension rate for 2019-2020 to rates from prior years. We provide these projected suspension rates for the overall student population in California, and for every racial/ethnic subgroup at the…

This report shows that the segregation of Black students has increased in almost every region of the nation, and that Black students in many of nation's largest school districts have little access to or interaction with White, Asian or middle-class students. The report documents substantial Black enrollment in suburban schools, but high levels of…

This policy brief synthesizes research on enrollment, graduation and career success for traditionally underrepresented students, the benefits of diverse learning environments including campus racial climate, and the need to increase diversity in UC professional and graduate schools to better serve the health and wellbeing of all Californians. This…

The brief first presents new facts on the extraordinary segregation of Black and Latino students in the state's public schools. Second, it shows that those groups are doubly segregated by race and poverty at the most educationally unsuccessful schools. These children are, on average, from families with far lower income and wealth and with parents…

In November of 1996, California voted and approved Proposition 209 (also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative) by a tally of 54.55% to 45.45%. It is unknown how many of those voters voted for the initiative because the name implied that it was pro-civil rights. Nonetheless, California became the first state to ban the practice of…

This research provides a unique seven-year trend analysis indicating that, while California has seen a decline in the use of suspensions in schools prior to the pandemic, the pace of the decline has slowed and large racial disparities in suspension rates remain. The research supports renewed advocacy efforts to eliminate schools' use of security…

This is the executive summary for the report, "Is California Doing Enough to Close the School Discipline Gap?" In California, a combination of statewide and local efforts has been implemented to reduce the use of punitive suspensions in public K-12 schools. Current state data trends reflect these efforts, showing that far fewer students…

Across the nation, nearly all teachers can expect to have EL students in their classrooms. The challenges of teaching ELs students are particularly acute in the nation's secondary schools. There is evidence to suggest that the lack of preparation to teach ELs is generally weak, but even more so for secondary teachers. We analyze data from a survey…

Over the last few years, even as the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of race-conscious policies in postsecondary admissions in "Fisher v. University of Texas" (2016), a new wave of attacks in the conservative agenda to dismantle affirmative action (as the policy is more commonly called) emerged. First, in 2014…

This report is the first to analyze California's school discipline data as measured by days of missed instruction due to suspension. The state reports the number of suspensions for each district, disaggregated by racial/ethnic groups, but it does not provide any information on how much instructional time was lost. The authors used information from…