The Education program’s goal for California is to improve educational proficiency rates for children of color, children from low-income families, and emerging bilinguals by 10 percentage points by 2030.

In order to make progress towards these goals, the Education program has identified cross-cutting strategies that span our overall Enabling Conditions (policy) and Effective Practice (practice) portfolios. These cross-cutting strategies are synthesized in this graphic, and have resulted in two collaborative efforts:

  • Families Lead California is designed in response to the compounding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession, and continuing racial injustice––all of which disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. These events point to the critical need to focus on building the influence and power of families to lead their children’s learning, and to influence systems and policy. Learn more about this initiative here.
  • Practitioners’ Voice California (PVCA) is focused on lifting provider voices in collaboration with other systems change funders in the state. Flexible, two-year grants have been awarded to practitioner-led efforts seeking to improve the compensation and working conditions of early educators working in diverse settings in California. PVCA was seeded by Heising-Simons Foundation and is housed at Tides Foundation. Learn more about this initiative here.

In addition, several of the program’s major initiatives invest in organizations working in California. You can learn more about the program’s major initiatives here. 

California Early Learning and Care Portfolio Framework

In 2021, Social Policy Research Associates supported the Education program and 15 grantee partners in co-designing an evaluation framework to serve as a theory of action for the program’s grantmaking focused on systems change in California. The design of the framework also included contributions from policymakers, parents, and practitioners from across the state. The framework is used to support learning and continuous improvement for the Foundation and its grantees, and to assess progress toward its shared goals. To learn more about this effort, click here.