California’s Unique Opportunity to Build a Comprehensive Data System

This year federal stimulus funding provides a unique opportunity to strengthen our statewide teacher data system to offer educators and policymakers essential information on California's educator workforce. A new policy brief from the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning outlines the need for, and benefits of, devoting a portion of the federal stimulus funds to expand and accelerate implementation of the California Longitudinal Teacher Integrated Data Education System (CALTIDES). The brief also examines why strengthening CALTIDES may be critical to meeting commitments made to the federal government when the Governor applied for stimulus funding necessary to stem thousands of teacher layoffs this year.

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Creating a Well-Prepared STEM Workforce:
How Do We Get From Here To There?
Release date: April 28, 2009

On February 2, 2009, a group of California science and mathematics teachers, policy makers, researchers, and representatives from business, industry, and higher education met to consider how California could do a better job of preparing today's students for the future STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - workforce. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) and the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (CFTL), as well as the California Teacher Advisory Council (Cal TAC).

http://www.ccst.us/publications/2009/2009CalTAC.php

Progress At Risk: California’s Budget and the Implications for Teaching Quality
The budget crises will have far reaching impacts on education in California. This CenterView addresses the critical issues of equity and teaching quality and asks key questions that are beginning to emerge. It is absolutely essential for educators and policymakers to carefully monitor the impact of the budget cuts on California’s longstanding educational goals.
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Strengthening California’s System for Preparing and Supporting Principals: Lessons from Exemplary Programs

Current data shows that school leadership is a key factor in the recruitment and retention of teachers, and effective school leaders can be instrumental in creating a culture of learning within schools and supporting improvements in student learning and achievement.

This new research brief from the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning describes the major challenges facing the education leadership workforce, reviews existing data about California principals, provides an overview of the state’s current principal efforts and draws upon what is known about promising programs in other states that can inform improvement of California’s education leadership system.

Despite increasing demands for performance, principals in California generally have not received the support, preparation, mentoring or professional development needed, according to the brief.  Based on a 2007 study conducted by Linda Darling-Hammond and Stelios Orphanos, the report is augmented with analysis on California school administrators prepared for the Center by SRI International.

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Now available on the Center’s Web site are the teacher workforce data files used in California’s Teaching Force 2008: Key Issues and Trends. It is the Center’s intent to make publicly available the data sets (and accompanying data dictionaries) used in our annual reports. These files were merged and cleaned by the research team at SRI International and are offered for the purposes of conducting analyses on the state’s teacher workforce. To download these files, please click here.

California's Teaching Force 2008

California’s Teaching Force 2008: Key Issues and Trends is the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning’s tenth annual report on the status of the teaching profession in California. It finds that a grim budget outlook, complex challenges to the supply and assignment of public school teachers, and the lack of an effective teacher data system pose significant hurdles to California’s ability to meet increasing demands for students’ high academic performance.

This report updates data on the teacher workforce and raises serious questions about the current capacity of the state’s teaching force to help students meet the academic goals the state has set for them. For instance, schools in the bottom achievement quartile have more than four times as many underprepared teachers as those in the top achievement quartile. And in high schools across the state, a quarter to a third of teachers in core subjects are teaching out-of-field, are underprepared or are in their first two years of teaching.

The new report also reveals that one-third of middle school algebra teachers are underprepared or teaching out-of-field, and underprepared mathematics teachers are more likely to teach in the state’s lowest performing schools.

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Summary report and fact sheets

Full research report

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