Jodi Anderson Jr.
Rézme’s mobile platform disrupts the outdated 2D resume, cover letter, and background checking model by sourcing, screening, and matching justice-impacted job applicants with second-chance employers. Recommendations from verified sources in an applicant’s social and professional network coupled with personal 60-second audio and video modalities highlight research-based factors of employability while upending negative assumptions about an applicant’s lack of formal job history, training, education, and digital presence.
Yesenia Ayala
For two academic quarters as part of my fieldwork, I supported WestEd’s partnership with Sunnyside Unified School District. For the last seven years, Sunnyside Unified School District has created and continues to build the infrastructure and culture to successfully implement formative assessment. With the district guiding the learning, WestEd works as a partner to support SUSD by providing professional development opportunities and resources. Through thoughtful planning and creating an intentional plan, the first stage of the work consisted of learning about the formative assessment practice and the evidence-based approach to the work. In March 2022, I visited the site for five days, where I experienced the shift between research and practice. Among the materials, you will find our site visit interview protocols and questions for students and educators, a student agency starter resource guide proposal for the district, a sample lesson informed by the proposal, site presentation, reflection blog, and other supporting material.
Natalie Berkeley Bess and Cata Fuenzalida
This interactive case about two POLS students' experiences in their field project in Oakland Unified School District. Slides are meant primarily for teaching purposes and can be edited to teach the following objectives to a graduate level education course:
Students will be able to…
1. Understand how POLS students’ positionalities can impact their work in their field project
2. Explore the dynamics and complexities of district operations, school board politics, and school closures
3. Reflect on how their own positionalities may impact their upcoming experiences in their field projects
Chee Wing Chan
Education is one of the possible ways that we might seek to limit the impact of globalization by ensuring that the population is up to date with skills. This would ensure that the population continues to be economically productive. Many governments and international organizations have introduced systems, initiatives, and programs in their quest to produce a population who are lifelong learners that can face the challenges in a globalized world. Singapore is one such country that is also embarking on this journey. This qualitative study aims to share insights into 7 Singaporeans' journey on continuing education after they have started work.
Thu Cung
As part of a research assistantship, these works hold three different elements from which to better understand the issue of disproportionality in special education: history, theory, policy. The paper focusing on history shares insight into how certain policies and practices within special education and the broader construction of ability were and continue to be deployed as forms of marginalization. The analytic memo provides a working theoretical framework which connects technologies, multiple trajectories, and Critical Race Theory as a guiding frame for an ongoing research project. The policy brief highlights the current landscape of disproportionality in California and suggests recommendations aimed at creating a more holistic and proactive approach to the issue of disproportionate identification of children and youth for special education.
Elena Elliott
The Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) is proposing a P-3 Specialist Teaching Credential that ensures that teachers are adequately prepared to provide high-quality instruction to California’s youngest learners. The details of the P-3 Specialist preparation program requirements are still being developed, but California colleges and universities are already beginning to anticipate both the opportunities and the challenges of the new credential. This report summarizes findings from interviews of administrators and faculty in four California State Universities.
Shawn Filer
This report captures the learnings gained and resulting recommendations from a six-month engagement between the Ferguson-Florissant School District (FFSD) and a masters student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies program focusing on equitable budget construction through the process of Participatory Budgeting. The report contains the learning gained from over 200 pages of literature review on Participatory Budgeting, a policy brief recommending that $3,000,000 of federally issued educational stimulus funds be distributed through democratic discourse, two visuals that summarize FFSD’s budget process and current budget composition, a visual to identify where community stakeholders can get involved in FFSD’s current improvement process and recommendations on what the foundations of Participatory Budgeting should look like in FFSD when leadership is ready to implement such programming.
Gabriela Fiore Bonicio
The Ambitious Teaching Project final presentation and activity plan for a professional development concept mapping activity. Drawing from Shepard and Chi, Glaser, and Farr, I developed an intervention with teachers to understand how they make sense of formative assessment concepts. They would have to come up with an original model that conveys key assumptions and associations of formative assessment. An important aspect of this activity is that it assumes teachers as experts, which is particularly relevant for an external organization.
Molly Gibian
This project was conducted to evaluate early childhood educators’ perceptions of three types of assessment and to identify current assessment practices in an early childhood education organization that serves children in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. It focused on math assessment in pre-kindergarten classrooms by comparing an observation measure, a teacher-administered direct assessment, and a technology-delivered direct assessment.
Jenn Hofmann
As my 2021-22 POLS Field Project, I served as Stanford's Graduate Fellow with Whiteboard Advisors, an education consulting firm. The final field project is a portfolio of work, showing work ranging from Minority Serving Institution landscape analyses to issue briefs.
Rui Huang
In the US, there are approximately 1.8 billion dollars of student debt and an approximately 50 percent college completion rate. Higher education is becoming more unaffordable and possession of a degree in no way guarantees good employment. Besides these issues, competition in industrial markets requires continual upskilling for job security or career advancement. This brief offers insights into the different models of financing postsecondary education in different nation-states; its purpose is to apprise policymakers, employers, and the general public about a range of strategies available for financing postsecondary education and lifelong learning.
Cordy McJunkins
Given the growing literature on first-generation, low-income, and minority student outcomes in college, practitioners have looked to find ways to help improve the likelihood that these students go to and through college. Peninsula Bridge, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, has done this by creating programming for students from middle school all the way through college graduation. This report is a reflection of the six months I spent at this organization in which I reviewed their data and conducted informal interviews about the impact of their work. This brief provides insight into what Peninsula Bridge offers its students and recommendations to improve and expand the services they provide to children in high school and as they go off to college. The recommendations listed are not meant to be comprehensive but serve as a guide for areas of growth within the organization and for similar organizations that engage with marginalized populations.
Maria Camila Rivera Zabarain
This report documents how Rudsdale Newcomer High School supports newcomer students in Oakland. I performed a literature review about community schools and newcomer students in a joint study with the John Gardner Center. Moreover, with the Center's support, I developed informal interviews with the School staff and students and collected information about how this School provides an alternative educational experience to newcomer students. The following report contains the profile published as part of the John Gardner Center's profiles in the California Alternative Education Series. Additionally, this report includes the School's informational flyers for the community, which I helped develop.
Savannah Strong
This field project supported the work of PhD student, Kemi Oyewole, who conducted a research-practice-partnership with a group of Bay Area-based K-12 instructional leaders. The final deliverable comprised a design workshop and retreat during which participants were given space to reflect on group learnings from the 2021-22 academic year, recharge at the end of their 3rd year of pandemic teaching, engage in mutual learning with POLS students, activate their learnings through a workshop with d.school professors, and dream expansively about what the future of their network will look like. While the final deliverable for this project was the retreat itself, the following article constitutes the author's reflections surrounding the experience of organizing and hosting it.
Devon Winsor
My project supported the process of creating STEP's spring seminar curriculum on Race, Culture, Intersectionality, and Identity in California schools. It outlines considerations for teaching STEP students about race, culture, intersectionality and identity. Recurring themes are identified and observation, interview, and student written feedback data were gathered and triangulated to gauge student perception of 4 spring seminar classes.
Thibaut Delloue
Nationwide, students with disabilities represent 13.7% of all enrolled students — totaling almost 7 million students in the 2017-18 school year. Our country’s education system is not meeting the needs of these students, particularly when their disabilities are coupled with other factors like poverty and race. When marginalization intersects with disability, students often face low expectations and segregation and are denied access to higher education and other postsecondary options. Marshall Street currently supports a multi-year Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of school organizations from across the country. Their goal is to use the principles of Continuous Improvement to make dramatic gains for Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty. The following briefs document the efforts of three Charter Management Organizations during the 2020-2021 school year to begin the Continuous Improvement process.
Sergio Diaz Luna
After more than a year of strictly virtual or physically distant participation in school, students are in need of a restorative restart—an opportunity to feel safe, seen, supported, and engaged in learning. The objective should not be to put back into place the previous practices that led to inequities but rather to reimagine and rebuild a system that supports all students with a focus on equity. During the 2021–22 school year, education leaders, educators, and other stakeholders have the potential to reimagine and rebuild schools. They can not only reverse the effects of pandemic-induced lost learning opportunities but also lay the groundwork for systemic transformation by using evidence-based, whole child approaches to advance learning and engagement for all students.
This report builds upon the April 2021 brief Reimagine and Rebuild California Schools: Restarting School with Equity at the Center, which was endorsed by over 40 California-based family and student engagement organizations, associations representing educators and system leaders, research institutes, and civil rights and equity groups. The report summarizes the evidence undergirding the brief and presents concrete practices to guide implementation.
Sam Eiseman
For my POLS project, I partnered with Marshall Street's Continuous Improvement team to codify learnings from their Networked Improvement Community for Students With Disabilities. This brief focuses on coaching co-teachers, and includes best practices, things to consider, and a breakdown of different coaching models to choose between. In addition, the brief contains resources that districts and charter management organizations (CMOs) can use to support instructional coaches in this work. The guidance in this brief comes from the learnings of multiple CMOs as they executed PDSA cycles over the course of the 2020-21 school year.
Rob Heavner
This document contains two works that I created during my time a as team member at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. I spent twenty weeks working as a thought partner and team member on the Gardner Center’s research practice partnership with the East Palo Alto based organization, Live in Peace. Pages 3-16 of this document contain a literature review on the effects of Covid-19 on disadvantaged youth. One unpublished source from the Gardner center was removed to maintain privacy. On pages 17-19, is the focus group protocol that I created with input and collaboration from the Gardner Center team. The protocol will be used by the Gardner Center in June 2021. Since the project is ongoing, the Focus Group Protocol has been anonymized to maintain efficacy. The development of the protocol was guided by the literature review and the results from a survey that the Gardner Center team implemented during the early months of 2021. Both documents have been and will continue to be used to help the Gardner Center analyze the strengths of Live in Peace’s Students Who Achieve Greatness (SWAG) program.
Lange Luntao
In the Redwood City and Fair Oaks neighborhoods, Redwood City Together (RWCT) works to build a collective action agenda that promotes improvement in the areas of education, childcare, and family mental health and wellness. This case study focuses on 1) Redwood City Together’s approach to collective impact, 2) the recent history of the initiative and selected relevant accomplishments over the past year, and 3) current status and opportunities for growth in Redwood City Together’s relationship with Stanford University. Particularly in the context of the opening of the Stanford Redwood CIty campus, this case study asks: how might Stanford, as one among many community partners, continue to partner in an authentic and useful way with the work of RWCT?
Briana Mullen
We have potentially missed an important piece of the puzzle that is necessary when considering how to create the conditions for learning at the greatest number of schools possible; the people democratically elected to govern our schools. Whether or not the current governance system is highly effective or requires reform are questions that I will put aside for the moment.2 These governance bodies have an outsized effect on the conditions and context in which teachers work & students learn. Not engaging with this group of policymakers & school-community liaisons leave room for confusion and lack of clarity of what constitutes high-quality boardship3 in the system. This paper argues for the investment in professional learning for school boards by describing 5 key dimmenions of successful board members.
Will Paisley
Students from East Palo Alto Academy have fewer resources than students at surrounding South Bay Area high schools, which necessitates the foundation’s work. 95% of their students qualify for free and reduced lunch and 75% are English language learners. The foundation’s team focuses mainly on financially supporting students through scholarships but hopes to expand its impact through other programming. Development of a financial literacy and career readiness program is EPAAF’s next step to expanding its offerings. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a pause in the organization’s physical programming with students and this project serves to create a foundational plan for implementation in the coming academic year and beyond. Fostering a new generation of diverse and successful individuals with higher education degrees is of great importance to advancing issues of social and racial equity in American society. EPAAF’s work is community based for the underserved students of East Palo Alto who are predominantly people of color. Equipping these students with the tools necessary to succeed will only benefit society through servicing the needs of underserved populations. Overall, this POLS project is part of a thoughtful long-range planning process to sketch a multi-year sequence of events, which will foster scholars’ career readiness and financial literacy throughout their undergraduate experience.
Lily Rosenthal
A literature review and qualitative study were done to define learner-centered design. For the qualitative research, five teachers were interviewed to determine shared mindsets and best learner-centered practices. The deliverable is a guide for teachers to understand learner-centered design and utilize best practices in their classrooms.
Ali Bloomgarden
Many vote-by-mail ballots across the United States are not counted due to a problem with verifying a voter’s signature on their ballot, called a signature mismatch. Signature verification is the process of comparing the signature on a voter’s vote-by-mail ballot with that voter’s signature in their state’s voter registration system. If the signature on a voter’s ballot does not match one in the system, the ballot is either challenged or rejected. In 19 states, if a ballot is challenged for signature discrepancy, the state requires registrars to notify the voter of the mismatch and provide an option to fix the signature so the vote can, ultimately, be counted. In 31 states, if there is a signature mismatch, the state does not require that voters be notified and be given the option to remedy their signature, and the ballot is rejected and the vote is not counted. This webinar is made for all eligible and registered voters to learn about the importance of their signature on a vote-by-mail ballot. Given the national push to vote by mail in light of COVID-19, it is critical, now more than ever, that voters know the importance of their signature on their vote-by-mail ballot, so we can all vote with confidence
Kelly Branning
This report was compiled for The Primary School’s San Francisco Early Childhood Education team with the goal of understanding the implementation of the Early Childhood Mental Health Initiative at Wu Yee Children’s Services center in San Francisco. The report was informed by qualitative interviews with individuals across Wu Yee sites, including the Kirkwood location that is piloting a new mental health consultation model. Ultimately, the report finds that program implementation varied greatly from site to site, with the most success reported out of the Kirkwood pilot of the new model.
Marlee Burns and Haley Hemm
Prepared for the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching, this comprehensive booklet outlines the characteristics, competencies and core values of successful design thinking schools. A qualitative approach allowed us to gather meaningful information from four design thinking schools, including public and private and ranging from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Our recommendations are rooted and linked to evidence from each of the schools. This extensive document provides both depth and breadth for those considering starting a design thinking school or for those who would like to reflect on their current model. Design thinking provides a unique lens to the world of education and offers meaningful insights and applications for educators everywhere.
Jen Calder
The Hollyhock Leading Fellows (HLF) Capacity Building Framework for Teacher Leadership maps the core challenge, targeted capacities and outcomes of the HLF program. The framework charts the HLF program path from the core challenges it endeavors to meet, the capacity targets that fellows develop, and the outcomes they can expect to see. It is based on existing teacher leadership, educational equity and capacity building research as well as the HLF processes, practices and artifacts. It serves as a means to communicate clearly how fellows can benefit from their participation in the program, and to situate the HLF within the field of teacher leadership development.
Serena Cervantes
For my POLS project, I partnered with Professor Kathryn Moeller to create a literature review and glossary mapping out the overall structure of the venture capital world – the history behind venture capital, its funding structures, and the levers of power and influence in venture capital. Because of the lack of research in education on the topic of venture capital, this literature review and glossary serve as an exploration of how venture capital fits into the political economy of education so we can better understand the effects of corporate power on education.
Hannah Chia
Working with Entangled.Group was a true privilege and eye-opening experience. “3 Lessons Schools Can Learn From Startups” captures my reflections on this experience and the other two documents are samples of the work I completed.
Jimin Choi and Praveen Loganathan
How can mentorship programs help students thrive in college? In 2019, East Palo Alto Academy Foundation (EPAAF) launched a Mentorship program to support first-generation college students. This project evaluates the effectiveness of EPAAF’s mentorship program and identifies pathways to help students thrive in college. The attached presentation highlights the strategic review of EPAAF and the Mentorship program, recommendations to strengthen the program, and opportunities to better support first-gen college students.
Belen Gutierrez
My project was to support the implementation study of the 10,000 Degrees non-profit in San Francisco through the John Gardner Center. Throughout Winter and Spring quarters I updated literature on college success indicators for students that aligned with and validated the support and services that 10,000 Degrees provides to students. Much of the research also included the partnerships and support needed for students at a community college and included factors such as student social-emotional well-being and basic needs (e.g. housing and food security.) I was able to update indicators on the current College Success Grid, which was formed during the CRIS study and have been able to expand research to include new documents that have been published within the last 3-5 years. In hope my portion of the ongoing implementation study will hopefully provide validation of the services that 10,000 Degrees and support in their expansion efforts in the Bay Area and different parts of California.
Lauren Hogan and Maira Martinez
Prepared for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), this research brief reports effective strategies that enable continuous improvement capacities at the school and district levels. Through comprehensive analysis of case studies and interviews with school leaders, this brief highlights salient practices that are visible within four lenses of continuous improvement. The findings of this report can be shared with instructional leaders who are hoping to utilize improvement science within their organizations and can be replicated or adjusted given different school or district contexts.
Joshua Jordan
As a research intern with the Students with Amazing Goals (SWAG) Research Team at the John Gardner Center, I was privileged to complete three deliverables: a literature review exploring successful school-community partnerships, the development of a youth survey, and a review of the SWAG theory of change. This experience revealed the importance of relationship-building in school-community collaborations, especially research-practice partnerships.
Yoon-Chan Kim
During winter of 2020, the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society interviewed fifteen professionals from fifteen unique organizations in the donor support ecosystem to gain insight into the philanthropic practices of donors from those who work closely with them and to better understand the role these donor support professionals themselves play in shaping the trajectory of philanthropy. This report tries to articulate what was learned and sketch the conditions of a growing donor support ecosystem. It is preliminary not yet an official publication of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. The lab plans to deepen the investigation to expand our findings in the coming months.
Hillary Knudson
My POLS project was in support of WestEd’s fiscal policy analysis study on special education in California. This study was commissioned by Governor Newsom to understand the complexity of special education funding and determine opportunities for alignment and improved methodology. I served as a contributing author and researcher for the Phase I Report with a focus on state-to-state comparisons, fiscal monitoring, and charter school policy. My final deliverable included a slide deck detailing the scope of the project and my own role, as well as the published report (July 2020).
Carmen Krefft and Elizabeth Tish
In partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, we developed a repository of skills, behaviors, and dispositions that every staff member should exhibit. This matrix will better inform professional development, performance evaluation, and hiring processes as the organization strives to improve their staff coaching practices.
Alex Kuehn
Teachers in California’s continuation high schools work with student populations that are markedly different from those in comprehensive schools in the same district. Yet, little research exists on how principals and administrators recruit and hire teachers to work in these settings. This report presents initial findings from qualitative interviews with six continuation school principals and administrators on the topic of teacher recruitment and hiring in continuation schools. Principals and administrators use a continuation school’s reputation, contractual language, and targeted credentialing as strategies for recruiting teachers. Among other qualities, they prioritize teachers’ personality characteristics and their ability to implement engaging instruction when interviewing candidates. Finally, principals and administrators use interviews, openness about the nature of the teaching role, and school perception as mechanisms to hire teachers who will be able to be successful. These findings, while not generalizable, offer insight into opportunities for further research.
Chris Lacopo
Analysis of over 400 minutes of virtual coaching calls between coaches at Stanford’s Center to Support Excellence in Teaching and emerging teacher-leaders yielded insight into the essence of transformative mentoring of adults. A new teacher-leader, who is often awkwardly situated between administration and faculty, faces many challenges. The coach, whose work is founded on trust and sense of partnership, must be deeply engaged and should infuse mentoring sessions with support, constructive critique, and empathy.
Ana Machado
Since the beginning of the last century, co-operative models in Higher Education are partnership models that connect universities and hiring organizations, with the main objective of integrating learning and working. There are three stakeholders with convergent, but often divergent, interests in this relationship: students, Higher Education institutions, and employers. This paper conducted a literature review on the topic to create a framework for building new models of co-operative programs that balance the different perspectives of all the involved parties.
Clare McLaughlin and Meg Pantell
The East Bay Regional Park system (EBRP) is an expansive natural space in Oakland, a racially and economically diverse urban community in California. This study interviewed local park visitors to understand the perceived health and wellness benefits of Reinhardt Regional Park (a park location within the EBRP system) as well as visitors’ perception of the park’s engagement with the local community. Study participants (n=15) noted extensive physiological and psychological health and wellness benefits of the park, and also noted potential barriers to access, which hinder some community members from experiencing these benefits. EBRP’s position as the largest regional park system in the United States, its location within a diverse urban community, and its history and current vision for community engagement create a nexus of opportunity for EBRP to be leveraged as a powerful public resource for health and wellness.
Paola Mora Paredes and Camila Moreno-Jimenez
With the expansion of post-secondary education programs in prisons, there is a lack of a reliable infrastructure to evaluate them. This project is aimed “to develop a more robust research and data infrastructure for evaluating the quality and impacts of higher education in prison programs.” The report sets a historical context to explain the current politics regarding higher education in prison programs. This is followed by a landscape overview with Ithaka S+R’s Unbarring Access report, and current evaluation practices at various levels including single program, statewide, and meta-analysis. The report concludes by recommending some frameworks that programs can utilize to best support incarcerated students.
Niyo Moraza-Keeswood
This toolkit serves as an introduction to the Indigenous practice of Peacemaking. It provides foundational knowledge for individuals, communities, and organizations who are considering building alternative processes to address harm, violence, difference, decision making, and community building. This resource discusses various systems of Indigenous conflict resolution; explores application in diverse settings, and presents an introduction to peacemaking circle facilitation. This toolkit was made in collaboration with the Native American Cultural Center, Stanford University.
Miwa Okajima
Can design thinking experience increase the female students’ interests and motivation and provide the nudge they need to consider STEM professionals, innovators, and entrepreneurs?” SKY Labo, a non-profit education social venture explores this hypothesis by providing 3-day workshops to Japanese students since 2016. The results from the pre- and post-intervention surveys informed that the short intervention has a strong positive influence on the female students’ mindsets, self-images, and perceptions towards STEM, innovation, and entrepreneurship, while gender norms and negative attitudes towards failure remains to be persistent.
Eric Saito
This project was in partnership with StraighterLine, a subscription-based, low-cost online college credit provider. StraighterLine sought to improve the efficacy of its automated platform of nudge message emails, with the ultimate aim of improving course completion rates. This project provides a review and executive summary of the existing literature regarding nudge messaging and adult learning. The findings were then used to create a nudge message criteria/checklist. Finally, the checklist was used to evaluate all 44 messages in the StraighterLine Academy nudge message platform. Eight messages from that platform were targeted for an A-B test. These messages were edited and improved based on the checklist. The findings, summary, and sample emails were arranged in a slide deck presentation and presented to the StraighterLine C-suite.
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