PIE Network Guest

The mission of California Business for Education Excellence is to raise student academic achievement and close achievement gaps in California public schools. CBEE accomplishes this by using actionable data to identify and organize the highest performing public schools and providing them a voice so that all schools can replicate their best practices and academic achievement.

High achievement can be found across all ethnic and socioeconomic lines in every corner of the state. By connecting low performing schools with high performing schools with similar student populations in an organized way, we dispel the myths often used as excuses for the lack of performance. Focusing on higher performing school systems and schools changes the debate away from fixing failure in our public schools towards replicating and scaling success.

Go to CBEE.org.

• Promoting high expectations for achievement and rigorous standards for all public schools students by identifying and recognizing higher performing schools with high poverty levels and with significant minority subgroups to focus the education policy and debates away from fixing failure and towards spreading success by helping school leaders learn directly from their peers who are reaching higher levels of academic achievement.
• Providing actionable data to the state’s educational leaders so that they have the information necessary to make reforms proven to raise student academic achievement and close achievement gaps.
• Mobilizing the business community to advocate for the need to increase academic achievement and college readiness for improved economic productivity and prosperity and by providing powerful roles for business leaders to influence education policy and legislative outcomes through the media, appointments to high profile boards and commissions, and direct contact with policymakers around a coordinated, focused message
   

• Developed the Center to Close the Achievement Gap that facilitates CSU colleges of education and other teacher preparation partners in identifying higher performing district and schools across the state then taking faculty and deans directly to those districts and schools to investigate best practices in order to use that information to adjust their teacher and administrator preparation programs. In addition sought and received Chancellor support for the purposeful placement student teachers in higher performing schools identified by the CBEE Honor Roll.
• Published an annual report on college readiness that backward maps matched student records for students who are college ready and not college ready on the CSU Early Assessment Program all the way back to the third grade on the California Standards Test. This report highlights where students need to be in terms of proficiency every year to be college ready, and has provided needed insights as to the gaps and disconnects in our PreK-12 education pipeline to get more students college ready, particularly minority and low-income students.
   

Kirk Clark
Executive Director

Media Contact:: Kirk Clark
(916) 498-8980

Context:

The most effective aspect of your state’s current education policy framework is that California’s academic content standards are among the most rigorous in the nation.

Challenges include that California’s education governance is the model for how not to achieve alignment of purpose with respect to raising student academic achievement and closing achievement gaps.