We believe no school reform in Los Angeles and the many other crowded urban areas of California - from reducing class size, creating neighborhood schools, moving to school-based funding, preparing children for school by expanding preschool, and more - will succeed without sufficient school facilities. Through our work on facilities, we also have developed a focus on school finance reform.

K-12 School - No Seats, No Reform

Our eight-year focus on LA's school overcrowding crisis has been a nation-leading success, vastly increasing resources and momentum for constructing adequate facilities for the most crowded schools serving the poorest children in our region. We did this by overhauling the system for distributing state funds for school construction to make it more fair, increasing the investment in school facilities from $10 billion to $25 billion over the past 7 years, and in Los Angeles, by having our Co-Director Connie Rice chair the Bond Oversight Committee of the Los Angeles Unified School District to ensure the schools were built on time, on budget and free of corruption. more »

Early Childhood Education - Serve Children Who Can Benefit Most

We are deeply involved in efforts to provide safe, adequate learning environments for young children, aged 0-5. In partnership with others, we led Los Angeles Universal Preschool to prioritize tens of millions of dollars per year in funding for new preschool facilities in L.A. County's highest need "Hot Zones", neighborhoods that lagged far behind other communities in the infrastructure needed to serve children aged 0-5. Our statewide study of the shortfall in preschool spaces in low income neighborhoods California's Preschool Space Challenge (www.advanceproj.org/preschool/) led to immediate support from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nu?ez for including preschool facilities funding in the next statewide K-12 bond, and the creation of a Speaker's Task Force on Preschool Facilities to explore options for eliminating the preschool facilities gap and others ways to increase access to preschool.

K-12 Finance - A More Just, Effective System

California student achievement now ranks 48th among 50 states, ahead only of Louisiana and Mississippi, and drops to 50th when students of all racial and ethnic groups are compared to their counterparts elsewhere, according to a 2005 Rand Corporation study. Although money is not the sole reason for this poor performance, California spends far less than it should per pupil-it ranks in the bottom quarter of the nation considering costs of living and 10th out of the 15 largest states on a simple cash basis - and it also spends the funds it does have in a highly arcane, inefficient and unfair way. As a result, the K-12 funding system systematically shortchanges the poorest and most politically powerless students and families, while even more privileged areas experience an unpredictable roller-coaster of lean and even leaner years because of the increased instability of education funding sources since the passage of Proposition 13.

California cannot have a first class educational system again until its K-12 educational system works better than it currently does. Our aims are to (i) build a shared understanding of the barriers the current K-12 financing system poses to improving the responsiveness, flexibility and effectiveness of local districts and schools, and (ii) forge common ground among business leaders, nonprofit education advocates, teacher's representatives and other stakeholders that can support progress toward reform.