Report of the Working Group on Student Learning

• Guarantee that all students PreK-16 have ready access to teachers and administrators and regularly work with counselors who combine subject matter knowledge, understanding of student learning, and high expectations for all students with knowledge of the requirements their students will encounter at the next level of schooling.
• Ensure that the state’s K-12 teachers meet the state’s newly adopted teaching standards, and are prepared to assist students to meet the state content standards and college preparation requirements.
• Fund the preparation and ongoing professional development of K-12 teachers in second languages in order for them to enable students to meet the oral fluency and literacy goals advanced in Recommendation 1 (above).
• Create specific competencies regarding college preparation, student financial aid, and success in college that all teachers as well as counselors are required to meet.
• Guarantee funding and time for teachers, working in collaboration, to develop standards-based lessons and assessments at school sites and across-sites.

• Establish ongoing long-term professional development programs as an integral part of educators’ work that enable them to develop their knowledge and teaching skills.

• Establish partnerships between the universities, colleges, districts and teacher unions to support teachers’, counselors’, and administrators’ development.

Recommendation 5:
Guarantee high-quality learning conditions and opportunities for every student.

California's requirement of compulsory education for all children in the state must be viewed as a compact or contract between the State and the student/parents, complete with obligations, duties, responsibilities, and rights. Most important, every K-12 student in California has a fundamental constitutional right to an adequate, state provided education. Therefore, the State must provide all students with the resources, instruction, and support necessary for achieving the competencies that the standards and college admissions requirements demand.

While all students have a right to the same educational basics, they may require significantly different opportunities and resources to accomplish those basics. Ensuring equality of opportunity requires schools to respond appropriately to differences among learners. Groups for whom access, continuing participation, and success are the most problematic include students who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, low-income students, and English language learners. These students and others have the right to the resources and conditions that foster their achievement of the competencies expected in standards-based school programs and college admissions requirements, even if they require additional resources, opportunities, and support.

As noted throughout this report, the Master Plan must embody the State’s guarantee that all students have the resources, instruction, and support necessary for achieving the competencies that standards and college admissions requirements demand. Therefore, an accounting of whether or not the education system provides all of the following must be an integral part of the state’s comprehensive accountability system. This information will enable parents and students, school officials, and policymakers to assess the education system’s adequacy and target areas of greatest need for resources, development, and reform. As we describe in more detail in Recommendation 7, the state must create and report an “Opportunities for Learning Index” (OPI) that parallels the Academic Performance Index (API). This index will report students’ access to opportunities, and, like the API, will permit statewide school comparisons, comparisons with high-and average-performing schools, and comparisons to prototypical schools that serve as desirable models of the goals every school is expected to achieve.

Recommendation 5.1: The legislature must enact legislation that ensures, at a minimum, that local schools provide every K-12 student:

• A clear statement of the academic standards that both define what students are expected to know and do and what the system in turn will do for them at every level;
• Certified teachers, credentialed in the subjects they teach; certified administrators, counselors and other staff who combine subject matter knowledge, high expectations and knowledge of requirements and expectations for success for their students at the next level, as specified in Appendix C and in Recommendation 9;
• Accurate information about successful preparation for college eligibility; postsecondary options; and post-high school success;
• A course of study that provides equitable access to the curriculum specified in Recommendation 3—one that integrates rigorous academic content with robust, viable career pathways;
• Appropriate, high-quality learning materials and resources, including textbooks and technologies that engage students with the knowledge they are expected to learn and detailed in the standards, as specified in Appendix D;
• Suitable learning environments, including classrooms, facilities, and buildings as specified in Appendix E;
• Fair and authentic diagnostic assessment at each grade level. The three-fold purpose of the assessment system must be to 1) support student learning, 2) inform the provision of supplementary educational services, and 3) provide essential data for the accountability frameworks. The nature of this assessment is more fully described in Recommendation 6.

Recommendation 5.2: The State legislature must provide necessary resources to enable low-income, English Language Learning (ELL), immigrant, and disabled students to participate fully in K-12 and postsecondary schooling, even if those exceed the resources provided to other students or other schools.

• Fund and staff effective supplemental learning supports that enable students to succeed in the common, standards-based curriculum;
• Fund and staff the additional time that is needed to achieve academic success. This may include an extended instructional day or academic year, intense summer institutes, an additional year of high school, etc.;
• Support and monitor the development of appropriate academic assessment policies and practices for students whose first language is not English;
• Require that schools provide students and parents with the full range of linguistically and culturally appropriate information regarding successful participation in higher education, including academic, financial, and residency requirements. This includes providing families with timely, ongoing assistance in acquiring public and private financial support for higher education.

Recommendation 5.3: As with K-12 schooling, community colleges and universities must insure that conditions are in place for all students to succeed. These conditions include, as a minimum:

• A clear statement of the academic standards that must be met for degree attainment, transfer from a community college to a four-year institution, or certificate of completion;
• Qualified faculty who combine subject matter knowledge, high expectations and knowledge of requirements and expectations for success for their students;
• A course of study that provides rigorous academic content and enables robust, viable career options;
• Suitable learning environments;
• Fair and authentic diagnostic assessment;
• Effective learning support for low-income, and immigrant students, English language learners and students with disabilities who need these supports.

Recommendation 6:
Provide flexible time and instruction that support learning and insure successful transitions between schooling levels.

Although the K-12 curriculum and basic conditions for learning should be common for all students, the time and support required for all students to master the curriculum should be flexible. The current system for delivering education provides small, hourly funding for before- and/or after- school tutoring, but basically assumes that students at each grade will achieve a prescribed set of standards within a set amount of instructional time. This is contrary to reality. Students learn in a variety of ways, and success for all students requires new ways to structure time and deliver instruction.

Resources currently devoted to compensatory, remedial, and retention strategies should be shifted into flexible systems of time and learning supports.^[7] The need that many students have for differential attention is normal, and a healthy education system addresses these needs routinely. However, this flexibility must not delay students’ achievement or interfere with timely or successful transitions to the next schooling level. Intensive academic support, accompanied by additional resource investment will be needed to provide all students with the learning opportunities they require to master the curriculum at grade and/or age levels comparable to those of most of their peers. Most importantly, supplemental programs, PreK-University, must focus on having all students “keep up” rather than having to “catch up.” We recognize that the interventions we recommend below will be costly. We also accept the fact that there will need to be a plan to phase in the necessary support and intervention systems. We want to reiterate that it is the state legislature's responsibility to develop a rational, sequenced educational investment plan with appropriate benchmarks. Without a plan and without appropriate benchmarks there will be no way of knowing how successfully we are progressing toward reaching the goals let alone how well we are implementing the plan that is developed and adopted. We would remind the legislature that the most expensive intervention is retention.

Support should be available for meeting student learning needs at every grade level. However, we describe below some of the critical PreK-16 transitions where additional support must be focused.

Pre-K to grades 1-3. It is a truism that children begin their lives with endless possibilities. They enter school enthusiastic, motivated and expecting to succeed. However, many students, especially in low-income neighborhoods, enter a disjointed education system that is ill equipped to meet their needs. From their earliest years they encounter poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms, and non-credentialed or inexperienced teachers.

Students who struggle in the first grade quickly become unmotivated and do not participate in the very activities that they need most. These children begin a pattern of continued academic frustration that continues throughout their education. After the 3^rd grade, academic achievement levels appear to remain remarkably stable throughout the school years. If students are not at grade level in reading and math by the third grade the trend continues throughout their education.

There are successful instructional programs that train teachers to work with a wide range of learner needs and these programs should be implemented throughout the early elementary years so all students can become successful learners. These programs should include diagnostic assessment tools that enable teachers, students, and parents to monitor learning over time in different skill areas and contexts, in order to address learners’ needs before they become barriers to student success.

However, simply putting a “program” in place can mean little—even with well-trained teachers—if the overall school resources are so strained that they require students to be “rushed through” the program; that is, “covering” the material becomes more important than learning it. Successful programs work best when they are “institutionalized” or “standardized” as part of ongoing instruction.

From the 3^rd to the 4^th grade and throughout the upper elementary years. Educators have created a benchmark that students should read at grade level by the time they reach 4^th grade. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, however, reports that less than one-third of the nation’s 4^th graders are proficient in reading. When students fall behind in the first three grades, schools often hold them back. In some inner city schools, as many as one-fourth of the primary children repeat a grade. Research on grade retention consistently finds that student attitudes often worsen and skills do not improve. In addition, struggling students are often assigned to the least prepared and most inexperienced teachers. The legislature should develop, enact, and fund a plan for early intervention for struggling students to ensure that they read at grade level by the fourth grade. For students who are struggling with literacy by the end of 3^rd grade, schools should:

• Conduct a careful evaluation of the instruction they have received;
• Evaluate whether there are particular unmet learning needs that require interventions by specialists or special materials or programs;
• Adapt teaching and learning strategies for students with language learning needs or learning disabilities and enable them to be taught by specialists using strategies and materials suited to their needs, with additional time for learning as appropriate;
• Provide additional time for student learning through a variety of strategies, using credentialed teachers to extend the opportunities for learning through before and after school sessions, Saturday school, summer sessions, and tutoring and mentoring.

The SLWG endorses the concept that strategies to support student learning are preferred alternatives to social promotion and grade retention. Furthermore, we endorse the concept that teachers, counselors, and administrators trained in effective research-based intervention strategies and in using their own reflections on best practices to support each student are the most cost-effective resource for student learning.

Into and through middle school to high school. Middle school organization and curriculum varies from school district to school district, ranging from departmentalized course offerings to integrated core curricula. Whatever structure is selected by a district, it must support students to learn the content standards, and it must avoid separating students into different curricular paths with different expectations for learning. The SLWG recommends that all middle schools should strive to help students take charge of their own learning and become independent learners and thinkers, and develop the confidence that they will graduate high school qualified for college admission. This confidence must be realistically based on students’ clear understanding of the necessary academic preparation, financial requirements and supports, career exploration, and other elements necessary to ensure their success in high school no matter what post-high school option they choose. Moreover, middle schools need the resources and staffing to ensure that all students can have their academic needs met and enter high school well-prepared for the academic curriculum described in Recommendation 1.

High school graduation and beyond. It is common to see students as having two options upon graduating high school: graduates will either go to work or go to college. Although it is true that most students eventually “wind up” in one of these places, it would be untrue to say that many have a genuine choice. In the K-12 education system, the choice of immediately joining the workforce or attending college is usually made far before high school graduation, typically via course assignment decisions made with incomplete information. Students who “choose” the option of entering the workplace right after high school most often do not have the option of going to a four-year college. Students who are college-prepared rarely give serious thought to opting for the workplace. As we stated earlier, students will only have options if they are qualified to select among many alternatives available to them.

The communication and computational competencies that industry wants in workers and that colleges want in their entering students are remarkably similar. Most jobs in the 21st-century workforce will require some postsecondary education. It is reasonable, then, that California should set its sights on having its high school students graduating with the necessary competencies to begin college work.

To discourage students from closing down postsecondary options, the California education system must change the common perception that less is expected of students bound for the workplace or community college than for those who intend to go to a four-year university. California high schools and colleges are components of one education system.

An unmistakable and often destructive hierarchy exists among the three postsecondary segments, with the community colleges at the bottom. This hierarchy obscures and detracts from the strengths, purposes, dignity, and accomplishments of each of the components separately and of the entire system as a whole. Certainly, a central challenge to the higher education system in California is to clarify the multiple purposes of the community colleges and position the community colleges as a co-equal and critical component of the state’s higher education system rather than its lowest rung.

To strengthen the community colleges’ viable and systemic role in the state’s education system, we must look first to the community colleges themselves and be certain that they have in place the necessary resources and supports for high-quality student learning. At the same time, K-12 curriculum and counseling practices must be aligned to preparing all students to attend college. Students who have the desire and aspiration to attend college need to be provided with all the options available to them early (at least by middle school), so that they do not have the perception that the community colleges are a choice only by default.

To create an educational system where instructional time and support are flexible and targeted at ensuring successful school transitions for every student, the Student Learning Working Group recommends the following:

Recommendation 6.1: Adequate learning support in K-12 should be defined as those resources and interventions that meet the academic needs of all students and ensure that all meet the state content standards and college preparatory requirements.

The State must re-examine and redirect current structures, practices, and resources currently aimed at identifying and assisting students at risk for grade retention or failure to graduate. It also must provide considerable new resources. Important, here, is that adequate support in K-12 should be defined as those resources and interventions that are necessary to enable schools to meet the academic needs of all our learners and ensure that all students meet the state content standards and college preparatory requirements.

Recommendation 6.2: To target learning support adequately, establish as standard practice the use of classroom-based diagnostic assessments that specifically link to interventions aimed at enabling students to meet the standards and college entrance and placement requirements.

Learning support cannot be provided meaningfully in a system that uses norm-referenced tests to determine who needs support and the type of support needed, since such measures provide little substantive information about students’ academic strengths and gaps. Neither can support be provided meaningfully if the system delays that support until just before or after a student fails a “high stakes” assessment that carries negative consequences for the student.

Decisions about which students need support and what support are most appropriately derived from ongoing classroom-based diagnostic assessments.^[8] Such assessments allow educators to pinpoint the specific assistance students require, and they point to interventions that respond to particular learning needs. Interventions must not be of the type traditionally used in remedial programs—e.g., stand-alone programs focused on basic skills. Rather, they should consist of additional time and instructional support in curriculum matched to the standards and college preparatory courses.

Recommendation 6.3: Provide additional learning supports at grades 3, 8, and in the last two years of high school to support students who take longer to meet standards or may be ready to accelerate.

Although it is important to meet the needs of students throughout their K-12 career, it is acknowledged that currently there is a need for additional targeted interventions at key transition point for many traditionally underserved students. As with other learning supports, these must be developed with the intention of addressing student learning and development rather than remediating failure. They must enable students to meet the standards and college entrance and placement requirements. Examples include English language learners who need extended learning opportunities; community college courses for seniors who need additional courses to meet university entrance and placement; and double-dose algebra courses in grade 8 for those who need it.

Recommendation 6.4: Provide continuing information and counseling and planning, regarding college requirements and student financial aid to all teachers, students and families, and provide families college-going “accountability” reports that make clear their child’s progress toward college and careers.

UC has developed an ongoing student information system (Individual Academic Planner) that provides a useful model for this type of guidance and reporting to families. Of course, this recommendation must be accompanied by a serious reduction in current counselor and teacher workloads, since accomplishing this goal is not possible in schools that have 1 counselor for 500 or more students and teachers with student loads of 170-190. Importantly, however, the challenge of assisting K-12 students navigate the academic pathway toward college will be eased considerably by the implementation of other recommendations in this report. For example, linking high school course requirements with common college expectations will largely obviate the current problem of graduating seniors who have satisfied their high school requirements, but are not prepared for college-level work or qualified to apply to a CSU or UC.
Recommendation 6.5: Develop mechanisms that grant college credit to high school students based on demonstrated learning.

Options for high school students to gain college credit include: honors courses, Advanced Placement and equivalent alternative courses, college courses offered on high school campuses, part-time enrollment at a local college, “2 plus 2” occupational programs, special college summer school programs and an array of computer-based, distance education courses. Concurrent enrollments and opportunities for high school students to earn college credit are common alternatives for schools serving middle and high-income students. However, because these opportunities are at least as appropriate and necessary, though less widely available, for low-income students, the State must make certain that the opportunities to obtain college credit while in high school are equitably available to all students. Importantly, such options should never be allowed to further disadvantage students who have demonstrably fewer opportunities to take advantage of them. Exceptions to the standard curriculum/course admissions requirements can also be mitigated by greater admissions flexibility on the part of the CSU and UC.

Recommendation 6.6: Use authentic assessments that measure students’ high school accomplishments, including student work samples and portfolio entries, in relevant academic subjects for college admission and placement.

Although this should reduce the overall testing burden on students, the State should also guarantee that students have the opportunity and financial support to prepare for and to take any necessary additional exams for college admission, including the PSAT, SAT, ACT, and AP tests, including the payment of fees.

Recommendation 6.7: Mandate the development of transparent and sustainable articulation and transfer processes that provide students with clear curriculum guidance about the transition between high schools and college and between two- and four-year colleges and universities.

A host of policies could ease considerably the often opaque and complex transition process of students between high school and college and between two- and four-year colleges. For example, the State and the UC Board of Regents should require and support the implementation of dual admissions programs to UC and CSU that link high school preparation, community college coursework, and university admissions; expand transfer and career counseling on the community college campuses; (provide financial incentives to colleges to implement programs for community college students to) accelerate progress toward the BA such as concurrent community college–university enrollment, wherein the university offers select upper division coursework at community college campuses. Implementing other transfer policies should be focused on reducing the current barriers and providing necessary learning supports (financial, academic, housing, etc.) to enable more community college transfer students’ to achieve success in UC and CSU as full-time students.

Recommendation 6.8. Support the implementation of “dual admissions” programs that support the transfer of community college students to CSU and UC
The Student Learning Working Group recommends that the State support the joint University of California and California Community College Dual Admission Plan. This plan will assure University admission to additional thousands of California’s under-served students. Already approved by the University’s Board of Regents and supported by California Community Colleges, the Dual Admissions Program can provide a new path to the University, over and above the means that currently exist. Participants in this program would be identified from within the top 12.5% of each high school who are not UC eligible for freshman admission. These students would apply for admission to the UC campus(es) of their choice, receive a dual admission offer guaranteeing acceptance, contingent upon their satisfactory completion at a community college of UC course requirements and achievement of a prescribed level of academic performance. This program combines the community college’s advantages of geographic accessibility and financial economy for students, while extending their opportunity to complete a UC baccalaureate degree. If this recommendation is implemented it would have the effect of expanding the enrollment pool well beyond the pool of students who currently qualify for freshman admission to UC.

Similarly, the State should provide increased resources for an enhanced transfer admission guarantee program between the California State University and California Community Colleges. Like the UC, program, CSU’s program is designed to accord community college students a sense of commitment and clarity toward the goal of achieving the baccalaureate that is accorded to freshmen enrolling at the California State University. The current program is designed to provide support services (counseling, information, tutoring, financial aid) to California Community College students whose goal is the completion of the baccalaureate degree at a California State University campus. Program participants are expected to sign an agreement that indicates the specific campus, term, and major of the baccalaureate program to which they aspire. In turn, the California State University campus is obliged to describe precisely the requirements needed for successful transition from the California Community Colleges to the CSU campus, term, and major of choice and to reserve a space for that student in the term and major indicated and to provide the support services described in collaboration with the California Community Colleges.

Recommendation 6.9: Assign responsibility and provide targeted resources at the postsecondary level to enable increasing numbers of college students to keep up with their academic coursework and attain certificates and degrees.
New models of teaching and learning have been implemented with increasing success in community colleges and universities in California. The most effective models integrate core disciplinary instruction with supplemental and co-curricular support for students which is provided as part of the structured academic program. The distinctive feature of such programs is that the incorporation of supplemental instruction and the reinforcement of learning activities do not require that individual students navigate complex bureaucracies to access supplemental resources, but rather receive them as part of the overall plan of instruction. This model presently has many successful forms which include, but are not limited to, learning communities, first year experience programs, teaching assistants as learning coaches in academic classrooms, and the linking of academic with discipline-specific study skill courses. We recommend that these approaches be supported, not only at Community Colleges, but also at the CSU and UC.