Report of the Working Group on Governance

The Report
This report is the product of nearly a year’s work by the Governance Working Group. The Group, made up of members from different education and civic backgrounds and fields, has listened to presentations and read extensive background materials on the many governance issues that affect California’s public education system.

This report sets out the Group’s recommendations and rationale, provides background on governance, and supplies two appendices: Appendix A, which includes Group meeting information and the meeting summaries, and Appendix B, which includes the materials available to the Group throughout the process. No member agrees with every assertion in the report; most of the Group concluded that different perspectives could cause people to reach varying conclusions. Nonetheless, the recommendations contained herein are strongly supported by a majority in each instance.

This introduction is followed by the Group Findings section, which sets forth the governance recommendations and rationale. Although the Conclusion sums up the body of the report, the subsequent Governance Background section explains in greater detail some of the concepts discussed in the Group Findings.

Charge and Scope

When building a system, either in the form of a physical structure or an organization of people and resources, one temptation is to focus first on form, especially when the system is very large and complex. However, an organization’s form exists to support that organization’s substantive goals, and hence should be shaped only after those goals are determined.

The first element of the Governance Working Group’s operational charge, added by the group, was to determine the general desired outcomes of California’s public education system (see box, next page). This step involved confirming some current goals, modifying others, and adding more. The Group continued to modify this list of outcomes throughout its meetings. Priority outcomes that are overarching in nature include coordination of and accountability for California’s educational system throughout the education continuum. These outcomes support the principal goal of the Master Plan: to promote student achievement.

The second element of the charge was to recommend structural forms of governance that offer the greatest promise of yielding the desired outcomes. An overall pre-K through university governance scheme was addressed, as well as postsecondary education and K-12 structures at the state, intermediate, and local levels.

The final element of the charge was to assign clear roles and responsibilities within the structures at all levels, attempting to eliminate overlapping responsibilities. Upon consideration of this element of the Group’s charge, initial deliberations also yielded the following principles to guide the Group’s work:

With this foundation set by the end of meeting one, the Group began meeting two by laying out all of the issues in both K-12 and postsecondary education that were to be discussed throughout the meeting process. These issues guided the formation of the agendas for each of the remaining meetings.