Research
The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) released its latest snapshot of the state of California’s TK-12 education system in August. The brief examines current enrollment trends, student achievement, funding and other factors in an effort to help guide local and state policymakers in better supporting and educating California’s youth.
With roughly half a million LGBTQ+ students served by the state’s public schools, the Equality California Institute’s 2026 Safe & Supportive Schools Report Card offers a glimpse at school climate, policy, curriculum adoption and other measures as well as recommendations for improving conditions for this population.
In the past six months, 29 percent of military-connected teenagers and young adults who participated in a recent survey reported thoughts of self-harm and 16 percent harmed themselves at least once, according to The Military Teen Experience in 2026: A Data-Driven Understanding of Our Military-Connected Teens and How We Can Help. Seventeen percent reported some level of suicidal ideation.
A June report from Brookings Institute reviews how school funding has changed through the decades using school district level data from1976 to 2021. Researchers aimed to answer two key questions: Do high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts spend less than their lower-poverty or predominantly white counterparts? […]
Children who own cellphones tend to have lower reading comprehension scores regardless of what age they were when they first got one or whether or not they take it to school, according to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
A new report from the Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports at UCLA finds that current efforts to address barriers to learning and teaching, while valuable, won’t provide lasting progress until policymakers adopt student and learning support systems that are unified, comprehensive and equitable.
The Learning Policy Institute explores trends in California’s teacher workforce supply in a new brief, “California’s Teacher Shortages: Trends in Supply, Demand, and Turnover.” Using data from the California Department of Education (CDE) and the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), researchers determined that turnover […]
A July brief from EdResearch for Action synthesizes current research on strategic staffing — a framework for redesigning teaching roles, time and compensation to better improve teacher retention, instructional quality and student outcomes.
In 2024–25, two-thirds of English language arts teachers at the secondary level (67 percent) intended to have students read between one to four full fiction or nonfiction books, according to the RAND Corporation’s May report Reading Full Books in Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms: Findings from the Spring 2025 American Instructional Resources Survey.
Segregation in education settings is on the rise, cautions a resource that ranks states on racial and economic segregation in public schools and offers strategies to address the issue.
