Existing law requires the State Board of Education to adopt evaluation rubrics to, among other things, assist a school district, county office of education, or charter school in evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require improvement. Existing law requires, as part of the evaluation rubrics, the state board to adopt state and local indicators to measure school district and individual schoolsite performance in regard to specified state priorities. Existing law requires the State Department of Education, in collaboration with, and subject to the approval of, the executive director of the state board, to develop and maintain the California School Dashboard, a Web-based system for publicly reporting performance data on the state and local indicators.
Contingent upon an appropriation by the Legislature in the annual Budget Act or another statute for these purposes, this bill would require the department to administer a grant program to provide additional targeted assistance to 10 low-performing school districts with identified opportunity gaps among their pupils, including, but not limited to, opportunity gaps for pupils of color and pupils from low-income backgrounds, to help those school districts close their opportunity gaps. The bill would require those school districts to be competitively selected based on 2018–19 fiscal year data on the California School Dashboard. For the 2021–22, 2022–23, and 2023–24 fiscal years, the bill would require the department to allocate $1,250,000 to each of the 10 selected school districts to be used to hire and fund one distinguished educator with experience in improving pupil performance and outcomes and to implement a customized action plan to be created by the distinguished educator, as provided.