New school improvement agency makes four key hires
SOURCE: CALIFORNIA COLLABORATIVE FOR EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE WEBCAST.
Carl Cohn, executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, discusses the need for staffing at a recent meeting of the agency's board.
The state agency charged with overseeing school improvement under California’s new accountability system has chosen four top administrators, putting it in a position to move ahead next year with its work.
The Legislature established the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence two years ago in the law creating the Local Control Funding Formula and approved a $10 million budget for the new agency. But the agency, led by a five-person board of directors, has been running in neutral while the State Board of Education chooses the metrics for deciding when county offices of education and the agency will provide support for – and eventually intervene in – districts that fail to reach their academic goals. The state board must adopt the first set of these measurements, called rubrics, by next fall.
The agency’s executive director, Carl Cohn, a former state school board member and superintendent in Long Beach and San Diego, announced the new hires. They are:
- Aida Molina and Socorro Shiels as education directors. Molina is assistant superintendent of Academic Improvement and Accountability for the Bakersfield City School District and, since 2011, a member of the State Board of Education appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown. She is also a former commissioner of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Shiels is superintendent of the Santa Rosa City School District and was recently named a board member of FCMAT, the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistant Team, which assists school districts in financial trouble.
- Sujie Shin as the director of research and data assessment. Shin is co-director of the Research for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability Services program at the education research agency WestEd in San Francisco and has held assessment and research jobs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York.
- Joshua Daniels as director of outreach and communications. Daniels, a current member and past president of the Berkeley Unified school board, is staff attorney for the California School Boards Association and the Education Legal Alliance, which handles litigation for the school boards association.
In creating its name, the Legislature indicated that the new agency should take a less dictatorial and punitive approach to school improvement than the federal government prescribed during the past decade under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Consistent with that, Cohn said all four hires have what he and the board want – “a passion and commitment to equity and serving the underserved and a belief in the right drivers of reform,” including New school improvement agency makes four key hires | EdSource: