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Geography of Child Poverty in California

By Caroline Danielson, Sarah Bohn

One-quarter of young children across the state live in poverty. In inland regions, reducing child poverty requires efforts to improve job opportunities. In many coastal regions, increasing access to affordable housing will help.

interactive

Geography of Child Poverty in California

This interactive map highlights local variation in poverty among young children age 0–5 across California. It also shows demographic traits and family resources, as well as factors that can affect poverty, such as parents’ education and employment, cost of living, and the social safety net.

Report

Improving California Children’s Participation in Nutrition Programs

By Caroline Danielson, Sarah Bohn

Food and nutrition assistance programs help children gain access to adequate amounts of nutritious food—reducing child hunger and food insecurity as well as promoting healthy development. Yet in California, enrollment varies widely across counties and across the main nutrition programs that serve children: CalFresh, popularly known as food stamps; the WIC program, which serves infants and preschool-age children; and school meals, which include lunch and often other meals. Increasing children’s enrollment in CalFresh and achieving healthier outcomes for Californians are priorities for the state. The governor’s January 2016 budget set a goal of enrolling 400,000 more eligible children in CalFresh over two years.

This report assesses children’s eligibility for CalFresh and eligible children’s participation in the three main nutrition programs to explore opportunities for improving enrollment and the benefits of higher enrollment. Key findings include:

  • CalFresh has lower enrollment than free school meals and WIC. In 2015, 24 percent of all California children participated in CalFresh, while more than twice as many age-eligible children (51%) were enrolled in free school meals; 44 percent of infants and 34 percent of young children were enrolled in WIC.
  • There is substantial potential to expand the impact of nutrition programs. We estimate that if all CalFresh-eligible children were fully enrolled in both CalFresh and either free school meals or WIC, these programs would reach 1.6 million more children.
  • Infants and young children are better connected to nutrition programs. Among CalFresh-eligible children, we find that 12 percent of public school students participate in neither CalFresh nor free school meals—more than a quarter million school children (331,000). In contrast, only 4 percent of infants (21,000) and 9 percent of young children (87,000) are disconnected from both CalFresh and WIC.
  • Higher participation in nutrition programs would lower child poverty. Among public school students living in poverty, we project that full participation in nutrition programs would increase family resources by 15 percent. Among infants and young children living in poverty, we project that family resources would increase by 9 percent following full participation in nutrition programs.

To some extent, lower CalFresh enrollment reflects more restrictive eligibility requirements. However, there is good reason to believe that more children participating in free school meals and WIC could be connected to CalFresh. Currently, most policies designed to integrate nutrition programs run from CalFresh to school meals. Building robust, two-way connections could help counties and the state better achieve the goals of these programs so more children have access to adequate, nutritious food.

Report

High-Need Students and California’s New Assessments

By Laura Hill, Iwunze Ugo

The 2014–15 school year was the first in which the Smarter Balanced assessments (referred to here as the SBAC) were administered statewide. While educators and policymakers agree that multiple measures over multiple years are the best way to gauge student, school, and district performance, the first-year SBAC results provide an important baseline for assessing implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs).

These results may also have implications for the evolution of accountability measures at the district and state levels—especially in relation to high-need students. The California State Board of Education has not yet devised a replacement for the Academic Performance Index (API), which was suspended in the 2014–15 school year. Districts have developed goals and measures in their LCAPs but the rubrics that state and the county offices of education will use are not yet in place. In the meantime, a close look at the results of the first year of testing can help us track achievement gaps between student groups and identify districts and schools with the largest tasks ahead.

One of the major goals of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is to help districts address a long-standing achievement gap between high-need students—economically disadvantaged students and English Learners (ELs)—and other students. However, we find that the test score gap is larger for 4th-grade EL and economically disadvantaged students when measured with the SBAC than with the state’s prior assessment (the California Standards Test, or CST). Generally speaking, as the share of high-need students in a district or school increases, the proportion of students meeting the standards falls. However, when we compare results across demographically similar schools and districts, we find that some schools performed better than expected.

Results for English Learners are particularly useful for local and state policymakers as they implement new EL standards and consider how to revise reclassification standards. Notably, in a relatively large number of schools, no EL students scored at or above the standards for English language arts (ELA) and math. In the past, 30 percent of districts required ELs to meet the ELA standard on the CST to be reclassified.

Our main conclusion is that high-need students are far behind other student groups—indeed, they may be farther behind than we thought. Schools and districts can use this analysis to take stock of their implementation of the Common Core and their progress toward their LCAP goals for EL and economically disadvantaged students. And schools and districts with large gaps—especially those performing below expectations—can find examples of similar districts and schools that exceeded expectations.

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