On April 29, 1992, the faculty of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA were stunned and angry as they watched their city’s tenuous social contract go up in smoke just hours after the jury delivered its not guilty verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Their anger turned to action over the next three years to create a new center—Center X—to directly address issues of race, poverty, and inequality in schools. In this paper, Jeannie Oakes chronicles the founding of Center X and details the strategies it created to transform the fields of teacher education, induction, and professional development—a broad-based collaborative effort to make the rhetoric about social justice and multiculturalism real.

This report synthesizes the findings of a set of expert reports analyzing the plaintiffs’ claims in Williams v. State of California, and it presents the implications of those reports for changes in state policy and practice. It examines California students’ access to three basic requirements for educational quality and opportunity: qualified teachers; adequate textbooks and other relevant instructional materials; and clean, safe, and educationally appropriate facilities. It reviews the role of these resources and conditions in providing or limiting access to students’ opportunities for achievement, and, more specifically, it places the availability of these basic requirements in the context of California’s current standards-based education policies. This report considers both the overall availability of these essential conditions to California students and patterns in their distribution among schools serving different student groups. This synthesis also supplements the material in the expert reports with information from documents produced by the California Department of Education (CDE) and other State agencies, information generated by California schools and districts, and reports of independent organizations. Finally, it assesses the past performance of state education policies and officials in providing California’s students with the educational essentials they require, and suggests policy alternatives that would bring considerable improvement.

About 6% of California’s students attend schools that operate on a multi-track calendar known as Concept 6. On this calendar, three tracks rotate throughout the school year, with two tracks in session at any given time and a third on vacation. This results in the school year being broken up into separate blocks by two two-month long vacations, which occur at different times for different tracks. This calendar provides for the maximum enrollment given a school’s existing space. However, students who attend schools operating on the Concept 6 calendar suffer several clear disadvantages. These schools remain large, even with the implementation of this calendar. Students at Concept 6 schools also lose instructional time, since they have fewer days of school compared to other students, fewer nights for teachers to assign homework, and delays due to the need to review material at the beginning of each block of instruction. Furthermore, because of uneven distribution of curriculum across the different tracks, students have limited access to courses (including Advanced Placement courses) and specialized programs; the ill-timed breaks mean students have less access to extra-curricular activities. Students in Concept 6 schools have poorer academic performance than their peers in other schools. Likewise, busing seeks to address the negative effects of overcrowding, but creates inequities of its own. Students who are bused to school due to overcrowding suffer several disadvantages, including reduced parental involvement, an incentive to skip kindergarten (to avoid having to ride the bus), limited access to after-school programs, and poorer academic performance. Overall, students who attend schools on the Concept 6 calendar, as well as students who are bused to relieve overcrowding, receive a significantly lower quality education than that provided to the overwhelming majority of students in California.

Oakes and Saunders address four questions: 1) Are textbooks and curriculum materials essential to students’ education in California? 2) Do all students have access to these resources? 3) Has the State failed to correct (or even contributed to) gaps or inequalities in access to instructional materials? 4) Are there policies the State could follow that would lead to better access? Drawing both on empirical research and the analysis of current state policy, Oakes and Saunders show that, although textbooks and instructional materials are fundamentally important to students’ education, many California students do not have access to them. At many schools, instructional materials inadequacies converge with problems in staffing and facilities. Schools serving low-income students, English language learners, and/or non-white student majorities are most plagued by inadequacies in instructional materials. Furthermore, by not mandating that students be provided with instructional materials, and by not investigating their availability through existing oversight mechanisms, the State has contributed to shortages and disparities in access. An analysis of other states’ policies, however, shows that the State could take measures that would insure students access to sufficient and appropriate textbooks and instructional materials.