As CA continues to wrestle with the challenges of providing sufficient funding for schools, understanding the relationships among school funding, effective school resources, and outcomes is essential. In this seminar Norton Grubb addresses four principal questions: (1) What kinds of school resources make a difference to outcomes? (2) Why is the relationship between spending per student and outcomes so weak? (3) Why are outcomes so inequitable? (4) And what should CA do now, in both school finance and other areas of school policy, to avoid further damage to the state’s education system?

In this seminar, Sean Reardon and Michal Kurlaender will present student-level data from four large California school districts was used to examine the impact of the California High School Exit Examination exam on student achievement and graduation rates. In particular, they focus of the effects of failing vs. passing the CAHSEE in 10th grade on the subsequent achievement and graduation rate of students with relatively low math and ELA skills.

Although policy makers have been talking about and drafting policies to address inequities in student higher education experiences and outcomes for decades, problems of racial-ethnic inequities have proven to be intractable under current accountability and assessment policies. Estela Bensimon and Alicia Dowd discuss research findings from college sites in California and Wisconsin that are using their multi-disciplined approach and tools to help policymakers, leaders, and practitioners make sense of accountability data from the perspective of equity for racial and ethnic minority students.

This seminar will feature a round-table discussion to assess No Child Left Behind from a variety of perspectives, asking what we have learned since 2001, and can the federal government rethink its historical mission of equalizing education opportunity and results.