California Education Partners

California Education Partners works with nonprofit partners to raise student achievement in the Golden State. This proposed grant would support a project to oversee the work of the California Office to Reform Education, a coalition of ten urban districts that aims to strengthen local application of Common Core standards by developing tools, providing training, and building district leaders’ capacity for managing systemic change. The goal is to increase academic achievement through deeper learning.

CORE, overseen by California Education Partners, is a partnership of the Clovis, Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Sanger, and San Francisco Unified school districts—a diverse collaborative that serves nearly 1 million students. This partnership creates new strategies and tools to help students, and the districts, meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. CORE is focused on implementing the Common Core State Standards, especially strengthening the engagement, rigor, depth, and alignment of curriculum toward college and career readiness. Its Standards, Assessment, and Instruction team will work to increase arts’ influence on English Language Arts and Mathematics instruction and assessment in their districts and to increase the alignment of arts instruction with new Common Core standards.

With California’s adoption of the Common Core National Standards and a committed group of superintendents who offer an established track record of improving student achievement, we recommend this grant to the California Office to Reform Education (CORE) to help implement the Common Core with an emphasis on Open Educational Resources (OER). CORE is led by seven district superintendents from Clovis, Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Sanger, and San Francisco unified school districts. This project will produce a new OER platform through which digital curricular materials and formative assessments aligned with the common core will be available for these districts and ultimately all of California.