Welcome to the California Student Success Project!

Mission Statement

CSSP will focus attention on the immediate policy window to actively engage policymakers, business leaders, educators, labor leaders and civic leaders in the need to design and implement a comprehensive change framework that is aligned to higher student and educator outcomes and has the resources needed to dramatically improve the future for California's children and the state.

New OP-ED Video

The California Student Success Project has just released a new VIDEO OP-ED featuring California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell. Superintendent O’Connell discusses closing the achievement gap, improving our education system and the need for a comprehensive statewide information system.

GCEE Report is Released

The Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence released their report on March 14, 2008. To view the report please click the link below:

Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence’s Report

The California Student Success Project Releases New Data/Information Systems Video

More Than A Number: Education Information Systems in California

“Data can be used as a hammer or a flashlight,” says Dr. Laura Schwalm, superintendent of the award-winning Garden Grove Unified School District in Southern California. Education data, in other words, can be used to identify and punish teachers and principals based on a single high stakes test, or data can be used to engage principals and teachers in a process of continuous improvement of instruction.

Too often, teachers and principals are provided data that they view as meaningless because the data come from a single, multiple-choice test that was administered the previous school year (when the students had different teachers) and that was developed to hold schools accountable for meeting general standards.

What teachers and principals need—according to those interviewed for this video—are data that come from tests given throughout the current school year, are given to them in a timely fashion and in an environment that values collaboration and problem solving, and allow them to adjust instructional strategies. It is only in this way, they argue, that significant gains in student achievement will be realized.

Garden Grove Unified School District and other districts across the state have developed systems and environments in which this continuous improvement process takes place. It needs to take place, however, on a much wider and systematic basis. For it is only in this way that data become “more than a number”—data become the “voices of children telling us what they need.”