PACE Gets New Direction and Funding

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) has had major developments in its goals and its funding. Recently the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced a $900,000 grant that will support PACE's research efforts for the next three years. PACE will also become a conduit for $6 million to expand childcare training programs. The funds are allocated by the California Children and Families Commission, chaired by Rob Reiner and fueled with Proposition 10 tobacco tax monies.

PACE is a research institute based at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, and Sacramento. Bruce Fuller, PACE co-director and UC Berkeley associate professor, described one of the organization's new emphases: "We need to focus on how policy affects kids in the earlier years. Unless we improve our preschool and childcare system, we won't improve our schools." Another recent area of interest is accountability, particularly the impact of the new wave of tests that the state government is mandating. "There's a whole set of accountability measures in California and we want to step back and take stock of how they fit together and how effective they are," said Michael Kirst, PACE co-director and a founding member of the organization.

Started in 1983, PACE reorganized six years ago when mainstay and co-founder James Guthrie took early retirement. Since then, the organization has bounced back stronger than ever. In the last five years, PACE's support has doubled, its research staff is taking on more issues spanning preschools to community colleges, and the organization is seeking additional office space to accommodate the overflow of new projects. The reason: PACE has built a reputation for providing sound, balanced analysis on the issues that are most current in education. "Controversial issues are often filled with polemics," Fuller said. "We've tried to find out what the evidence is."

In recent studies, for example, PACE took on a hot potato of the education world--school choice--to determine if charter schools, vouchers, and other options really boost student learning. The verdict: "There isn't enough empirical evidence to show that these programs do in fact raise student achievement," said Elizabeth Burr, PACE's research coordinator--a surprising finding given how much weight some policy makers are putting on these programs.

Tackling another lively issue, PACE led a three-state team to determine the effects of welfare reform on the children of women entering the workforce. The study, which involved visits to over 900 child care sites in California, Florida, and Connecticut, determined that, "many mothers moving off welfare are placing their youngsters in child care of highly questionable quality--care that may be injurious to children's basic development," according to Burr. The report, entitled "Remember the Children: Mothers Balance Work and Child Care under Welfare Reform," indicates that, "Most sampled children spent hours watching television, rarely read with their caregiver, and wandered aimlessly with little interaction or direction from the caregiver."

PACE's new focus on early childhood is also evident in the project the center is undertaking for the California Children and Families Commission. "We're aiming to expand the training and improve the retention of child care providers," said Burr, "with an emphasis on L.A. and the Central Valley, the regions of the state with the greatest shortage." The project is two-pronged. First, PACE will serve as an intermediary agent, contracting with community colleges and other institutions that train child care providers. PACE will allocate funds to them, as well as monitor the quality of their program and evaluating them. A parallel research activity will assess various efforts to provide incentives to child care providers to stay in the field: "If we're training new care providers, it's essential to have effective mechanisms to make sure they're not leaving the field at an equal rate," said Burr.

Fuller attributes much of PACE's success in its research efforts to the quality of Cal's student body: "We attract really good doctoral students to work on projects for us."

PACE is also hoping to make increased use of the faculty resources at UC Berkeley and Stanford. "We're forming faculty review panels to issue reports on certain key issues in education," said Fuller. The first panel will take on the question of accountability--including how all the student exams in California dovetail with one another, or whether they contradict or overlap one another.

The influx in funding for education has provided a bounty for research institutes like PACE, but it also creates dilemmas. "Our biggest challenge is how we grow without watering down the intellectual content of our work," Fuller commented. "We want to develop long-term research interests“how we build a stronger child care and preschool system, and whether centralized accountability in K-12 education will really improve kids' learning. We plan to follow these lines of inquiry over time."

Bruce Fuller, PACE co-director

Michael Kirst, PACE co-diretor

Elizabeth Burr, Research Coordinator