Dear Friends,

Here are four views of California from the national media, just in the past month:

“Far from presiding over a Greek-style crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown is proclaiming a comeback.”
Paul Krugman column, The New York Times, March 31

“You can laugh at the sunbaked barbarians, even wish them ill. But you should not fail to see in their fledgling renaissance another chapter in the American experiment, no less daring than the Golden Gate Bridge or the castle that Hearst erected at continent’s edge.”
Timothy Egan column, The New York Times, March 28

“The more powerful message is where people are going when they leave states like California and New York, two states ranked among the “least free” in a recent study by the Mercatus Institute. They are going to red states where, according to Mercatus, there is greater individual freedom, less government regulation and lower taxes. Earth to Jerry Brown: California, you have a problem.”
David Davenport column, Forbes.com, April 11

“But, in the end, Brown has done little but slap a temporary, inadequate patch on a dysfunctional system of financing and service provision that needs a fundamental rethink if California is to build a better future.”
Matt Miller column, The Washington Post, April 4

As a grantmaker, I get the opportunity to hear about how organizations are tackling some of the most pressing issues facing youth in our state. One of the events that I look forward to most is the annual Grantmakers for Education conference, because it gives me the chance to learn how other funders are thinking about systemic education reform, and highlights some promising practices taking place across the nation. This year’s conference brought together nearly 500 education grantmakers in New York City for keynote speeches, site visits and panel discussions. This format may sound similar to other conferences you have attended, but what do 500 education grantmakers actually talk about when they come together?

The hot issues at the conference are probably not surprising to anyone who follows education reform. College and career readiness, the Common Core State Standards, STEM, better use of data, collaboration, district-level reform and digital learning were all topics that had a lot of buzz. I was especially interested in a session on “College and Career Readiness: What Do We Mean?” that was moderated by former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. The session featured an engaging trio of panelists including Nader Twal from Long Beach Unified School District, JD Hoye from the National Academy Foundation (NAF) and NAF alumnus Michael Durant. Frameworks developed by both NAF and ConnectEd were presented to describe what it means to be ready for both college and career.

What I found to be most encouraging, though, is that all the big issues being discussed at the conference — including college and career readiness — tied incredibly well to what we’re doing collectively as a Linked Learning field. For example, sessions on the Common Core were packed, and seeing that level of interest continued to reinforce that Linked Learning is ideally positioned to be a central way districts deliver the Common Core standards.

Irvine’s Board of Directors approved more than $20 million in grants at its quarterly meeting last week. Of the 36 grants approved, 22 in the Arts, nine in California Democracy two in Youth, and one in Special Initiatives. In addition, two Special Opportunities grants were approved. Here are a few grants that we’re particularly excited about:

Exploring Engagement Fund — The grants include the first round under our Exploring Engagement Fund which demonstrates Irvine’s new Arts program strategy in action. The goal of the new strategy is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians — the kind that embraces and advances the diverse ways that we experience the arts and that strengthens our ability to thrive together in a dynamic and complex social environment. Grants total more than $2 million to 20 arts organizations who are piloting new ideas to engage Californians in the arts.

Families in Schools — A $5.15 million grant was made to continue our Families in Education Initiative, which seeks to engage parents in educational decision making and advance new educational policies and practices in the San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire. The initiative supports 11 community organizations in those regions and is administered by Los Angeles-based Families in Schools, which provides advice and technical assistance and strategizes with Irvine about how to maximize the initiative’s impact. This grant is part of the California Democracy program, which seeks to advance effective public policy decision making that is reflective of and responsive to all Californians.

ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career — Our Youth program promotes Linked Learning as a new approach to high school education that combines strong academics with real-world experience in a wide range of fields. This $5.725 million grant includes continued funding and substantial support to ConnectEd to serve as the intermediary organization managing the California Linked Learning District Initiative and to provide technical assistance to all nine districts for one additional year. This grant is part of the program’s Linked Learning Practice priority. Grants made as part of Irvine’s Youth program seek to increase the number of low income youth in California who complete high school on time and attain a postsecondary credential by the age of 25.

To the national debate about whether students should pursue career and technical education or college preparation, a California program wants to add an emphatic declaration: Yes.

The refusal to choose between one instructional emphasis or the other symbolizes the work being done to build career pathways in nine school districts as part of Linked Learning, an initiative cited as a national model of career and technical education.

One of the places the project is unfolding is in a cluster of high schools in the Porterville Unified School District, which serves a predominantly Latino, low-income community here among the San Joaquin Valley’s olive and orange groves.

At one school, a half-dozen students huddle around big desktop computers. The complex formulas they’re calculating and programming into the computer will tell a robot how to restack blocks of blue and red cubes. When they give the robot the command, the job comes off perfectly. Barely old enough to drive, these students are learning to negotiate the real-world engineering that shapes manufacturing.

A few hallways away, teenagers master the high-tech tools of the performing arts world. Aspiring musicians sit at rows of electric pianos, listening through headsets to the music they create as it is automatically notated on computer screens. At another school, students juggle computers and soundboards to produce a morning broadcast.

When they’re not in classrooms, students from these schools are out in the community, working in local engineering companies, staging musicals with preschoolers, or helping design sound for a street concert.

The point, leaders of the work say, is to create a more relevant, engaging school experience for young people by blending the rigorous core academics they need for college with the career and technical education that prepares them for good jobs, and to do it in an applied, hands-on way that includes real-life work experience.

When Cynthia Gutierrez arrived four years ago at Skyline High School in Oakland, she was neither an academic superstar nor someone who struggled with school. Like most kids, she says, she was "somewhere in the middle." Bored with her classes, she'd left behind a trail of C's and D's, and with some bad luck, she might have even lost interest in school altogether. "I didn't know what I was doing," she says.

Instead, Gutierrez had a stroke of good fortune. During her freshman year, a teacher told her about Skyline's education academy, a small school within the school centered around careers in education. When she heard the program included regular field trips, she signed up. Gutierrez and 25 of her classmates spent the next three years taking classes together on education-related topics like child development and how people learn, combining a rigorous college-prep curriculum with student-teaching trips to local elementary schools. In the close-knit environment of the academy, Gutierrez found new motivation, and she discovered a love of teaching.

"Before, I couldn't really connect with my teachers all that well," she says. "But in the academy, it was different." Gutierrez's grades improved, even with a more demanding course load that qualified her for admission to the state university system. Her teachers say she blossomed into a leader. And in June, she earned something that far too many of California's young people do not: a high school diploma.

Students like Gutierrez are far from the exception in California's public schools, but they aren't nearly as much of the rule as California needs. Over the past 10 years, while graduation rates at high schools across the country have been climbing, many of California's high schools have gotten worse. One out of 3 students in our state still doesn't graduate from high school, severely limiting career options - and sending negative consequences rippling across the state's economy. Barely a third of those who do, meanwhile, are considered "college ready." For students of color and those from low-income households, these numbers are even worse, but for years, education experts have been struggling to find a way to close this widening achievement gap.

Dear Friends,

California high schools have faced extraordinary challenges this year. State budget cuts and the economic downturn have forced many schools to resort to drastic measures, including teacher layoffs and shorter school years, to balance their budgets. And in a state where students already lag their peers elsewhere in the country in academic achievement, there is concern that these measures will only put them further behind.

Yet there are reasons to be optimistic about California's educational future, including the work of some of our grantees as described in this quarter's letter. The efforts of our partners demonstrate that despite the considerable, short-term fiscal challenges we face, the state's top educational policymakers have not lost sight of longer-term goals that ultimately will have more far-reaching impact on California's young people and our economy.

Last month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell released a report outlining a bold vision for transforming California's high schools through an approach called Linked Learning. This approach, originally known as Multiple Pathways, seeks to engage more students and prepare them for college and career by combining the best of college-prep academics, demanding technical education and hands-on work experience.