The California Collaborative on District reform convened on March 26 and 27 in Menlo Park for a two-day meeting, Looking Forward: Preparing Our Students for a New Workforce. The meeting expanded on a recent focus on college and career readiness to explore labor market trends, the skills that future careers will demand, and avenues for preparing students to meet those demands.

As school districts across the country seek opportunities to work strategically with other districts to increase efficiencies and learn from each other’s experiences, the Fresno-Long Beach Learning Partnership serves as a useful example of such collaboration.

Two December events, a presentation at the California Educational Research Association (CERA) conference and a webinar hosted by SchoolsMovingUp, highlighted the Collaborative’s work regarding school turnaround.

Collaborative member Richard Carranza was selected as the next superintendent of San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) by a unanimous vote of the San Francisco Board of Education.  He will begin his tenure when Superintendent Carlos Garcia retires in July 2012.  Carranza has served as SFUSD’s Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Innovation, and Social Justice since 2009.

The Understanding Language initiative has launched a new website and online community at ell.stanford.edu. The initiative, co-chaired by California Collaborative member Kenji Hakuta, aims to investigate, raise awareness about, and address the role of language in learning for all students, particularly English learners.  Hakuta explains, “The main message is that language matters — it has always mattered, but it matters especially so with the new standards.  The implication is that content and language specialists need to collaborate to effectively educate ELLs, and we need to develop the necessary tools and systems to make this happen.