Spotlight On: Research for Action

Region: California
Investment: $505,000 over three years

Governor’s Committee on
Education Excellence

The Purpose

Governor Schwarzenegger formed the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence in April of 2005 to “analyze current impediments to excellence, explore ideas and best practices relevant to California, and recommend changes and reforms” to the state’s K-12 educational system. Drawn from the public and private sectors, the 15-member, non-partisan committee was charged with focusing its recommendations on four interrelated topics: the distribution and adequacy of education funding; the functioning and effectiveness of governance structures; teacher recruitment and training; and the preparation and retention of school administrators.

The Process

For over two years, the Committee held meetings across the state and spoke with numerous stakeholders, policy makers, and researchers from California and throughout the nation to learn from their ideas and experience. The Committee benefited from an extensive array of research on education, prior studies of the California education system, and reports from other states and cities seeking to dramatically reform their school systems. In March of 2008, the Committee released its report entitled, “Students First: Renewing Hope for California’s Future.”

I asked 18 of California’s top minds in education to examine our system to see what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong and to make recommendations for the future. The Committee’s report serves as an outstanding blueprint on how to make big, bold improvements to our education system. The report shines a spotlight on a number of issues – from streamlining bureaucracy, to the need for more local control and having clear governance and real transparency, so there is accountability from top to bottom.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Report Recommendations

The Committee agreed on approaches to four interrelated priorities:

Strengthen teaching and leadership.
- Make teaching and education leadership true professions.
- Deregulate professional preparation.
- Close the gap in teacher and principal effectiveness among schools.
Ensure fair funding that rewards results.
- Invest more resources in students, particularly those at the lowest end of the achievement gap.
- Deregulate finance and link local control to outcome-based accountability.
- Create local incentives to reward teaching and leadership excellence.
Streamline governance and strengthen accountability.
- Refocus accountability on improving outcomes and meeting proficiency targets for all students and subgroups.
- Enhance assessments to measure growth of student achievement.
- Expand local control to increase efficiency.
- Have county offices provide support to address district needs.
- Create a school inspection system to identify problems and support improvement.
- Empower county superintendents to enforce district accountability and intervention.
- Enhance sanctions for school failures.
- Designate the Superintendent of Public Instruction as the independent guarantor of success, overseeing accountability (post-2010).
- Create an independent data commission.
- Have the Secretary of Education manage policy, program and funding of the data commission.
- Have the State Board of Education become advisory to the Governor and Secretary.
- Empower parents to help improve learning quality and give them real choices.
Use data wisely.
- Make performance, program and financial information transparent, and provide it to parents, educators, communities and the state.
- Create comprehensive data systems that link student, teacher, school, district and state data with the capacity to link to college, work and social services data.
- Create capacity to analyze data and programs and to support districts’ needs.
Plus, create a foundation for continuous improvement.
- Prepare our children for success from the earliest age.

Read the full report here.
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