At the June 18 California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) board meeting, the organization’s three centers all shared their accomplishments for 2025–26 and intentions for 2026–27. This included receiving feedback from the board, which largely reinforced ongoing efforts.
The Center for Transformative Systems made progress in areas related to offering responsive and impactful resources and services to those in the field; expanding opportunities to engage; and promoting collaboration within the Statewide System of Support (SSOS) via avenues like the Community Engagement Initiative and Connecting California. The SSOS Toolkit was also released.
For 2026–27, the center will work to expand a proactive systems approach for students with disabilities among other goals.
The Innovation, Instruction and Impact Center shared advancements related to its learning networks (such as the African American Student Success and Universal Design for Learning Implementation networks), success of its Data Academy and analysis of systematically collected data.
In 2026–27, plans include reorganizing staffing and infrastructure to better support the center’s data for impact goals, enhancing networks and the Data Academy for alignment with direct technical assistance (DTA) needs, and expanding and sustaining data literacy resources and learning opportunities.
The Teaching, Learning, and Leading Center this year served dozens of local educational agencies in DTA (22 exited and 20 entered) and 2,040 participants in Learning Acceleration System Grant professional learning (with 87 percent of educators making changes to instruction practices in comparison to 76 percent the year prior) and facilitated statewide math and literacy networks.
In the coming year, the center will stay the course with growing and refining direct support models for LEAs and integrate the math and literacy networks within the SSOS.
CCEE’s annual report for 2025–26, which has a full breakdown of the year’s developments, was recently published and can be found on the agency’s website.
In his report, Executive Director Matt Navo explained that the CCEE’s objectives for 2026–27 would be the same as they were in 2025–26. Some include strengthening collaboration across SSOS partners to foster interdependency and provide better access to resources and services for LEAs in their work to improve student achievement; facilitating the application of evidence-based continuous improvement processes within LEAs; identifying, vetting and disseminating emerging best practices, strategies and information to address LEAs’ priority areas; and supporting those in need of targeted assistance to achieve Local Control and Accountability Plan goals.
“We have objectives because they force us to go beyond just statutory responsibilities and they force us to go beyond the goal, so they ask more of our team in respect to what we’re actually defined to accomplish,” Navo said.
His presentation covered anticipated next steps as the new year begins, including actions to strengthen integration across the SSOS, alignment and data use across the SSOS, and DTA and alignment with the SSOS.
Also at the meeting, Cynthia Glover Woods was elected to continue serving as board chair and Ed Manansala as board vice chair in 2026–27.
A recording of the meeting will be available on the CCEE’s website. The board is scheduled to convene next on Aug. 13.
