Month: March 2017

Video: Reaching Children in Poverty

Despite California’s strong economic growth, 750,000 children under age 5 live in poverty, and they live in nearly every region of the state. Their economic circumstances vary, a new PPIC report finds. The authors of the report, Geography of Child Poverty in California, conclude that approaches that take local differences into account could reach poor families more effectively. In conjunction with the release of the report, PPIC convened a panel of service providers from around the state in Sacramento to describe lessons they have learned.

Liza Bray, executive director of Partners for Children South LA, said her organization uses a “collective impact” model and works with 16 organizations to link families to services in parts of Watts and Compton. The goal is reducing the risk of involvement in the child welfare system. She said the effort began by surveying residents to assess their top concerns. Leading the list: addressing developmental delays in children, housing, child care, and access to social safety net programs such as CalFresh, or food stamps.

Sabrina Kelley, resident services manager of the Fresno Housing Authority, underscored the importance of partnerships and surveying families about their needs. Her organization provides housing subsidies to about 50,000 people, half of them children under 8, in the city and county of Fresno. Her organization learned residents’ needs by initiating neighborhood walking tours. “We just walked the life of the residents,” she said. A conversation with children playing in a vacant lot led to the creation of the Almy Street Playground—designed in a neighborhood workshop and funded after the children wrote letters to the city council and potential corporate partners. Crucial to the effort was a partnership with Habitat for Humanity and other organizations.

Speakers at the PPIC event said that local solutions need the support of state policymakers. Suzan Bateson, executive director of the Alameda County Community Food Bank, said distributing food—while essential—is not the best way to alleviate poverty. Families are better served by maintaining and funding programs like CalFresh, she said.

“We are absolutely not going to ‘food bank’ our way out of this.”

Learn more

Read the report Geography of Child Poverty in California
Learn about poverty throughout the state with the accompanying interactive map

Bridging Equity Gaps in Health Career Training

California’s community colleges are the largest providers of workforce training in the state, offering a wide variety of career technical education (CTE) programs. Career training in health is particularly promising for students, as the health industry offers many in-demand, well-paying jobs for Californians with less than a bachelor’s degree. Health programs have higher completion rates than other CTE programs and attract a large and diverse student population. But gaps in achievement across student groups are a persistent problem.

PPIC’s latest report on career technical education in health provides detailed insights into the nature of equity gaps in student achievement. African American students are nearly 12 percentage points less likely to complete a health credential than their white peers. Latino students are about 6 points less likely.

To better understand racial/ethnic achievement gaps—and identify potential solutions—we examined three possible explanations: socioeconomic factors, program choice, and course-taking patterns. Individual demographic factors like age, immigration status, and economic disadvantage do matter, but cannot explain away the achievement gap. A student’s choice of health program also matters—that is, African American and Latino students are less likely to be enrolled in the health CTE programs with the highest completion rates, such as registered nursing and dental hygiene. But even after for controlling for socioeconomic factors and program choice, the racial/ethnic achievement gap persists (7 percentage points for African American students and 3 percentage points for Latino students).

By far the most consequential factor driving the racial/ethnic achievement gap in health programs is course-taking patterns—in particular, course progression patterns that are linked to student success. African American and Latino students are less likely to enroll full-time or in consecutive terms—these two patterns are strongly related to college completion. In addition, they are less likely to complete 30 or more units before entering the health program, another factor linked to future success. Finally, compared to white students who are otherwise similar, African American and Latino students are less likely to receive financial aid. Simply put, we find that if students entered similar programs and made similar progress course by course, the racial achievement gap would disappear.

These results suggest that there are many steps community colleges can take to alleviate completion gaps. In fact, systemwide efforts to support full-time attendance to and to guide students on choosing a program of study are among the reforms implemented through the Student Success effort in recent years. Our results suggest that efforts to enable underrepresented students to devote more time to their courses of study and pick up momentum toward their educational goals will do the most to reduce completion gaps. More information about the programs with the best completion rates and earnings potential can empower students to decide which career pathways to pursue. By identifying and addressing the drivers of inequity in CTE—in health as well as other programs—colleges can help more students take the crucial first step of earning a credential and then move along well-paying career pathways.

Learn more

Read the report Career Technical Education in Health: An Overview of Student Success at California’s Community Colleges
Visit the PPIC Higher Education Center

Commentary: Cooperation Needed on San Joaquin Valley Water


This commentary was published in the Sacramento Bee on Thursday, March 2, 2017.

Recent rains have not washed away the growing threat of water scarcity in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s largest agricultural region. Over time it could bring disruptive changes not only to the region’s farmers but also to rural communities, the local economy, and the state as a whole. Resolving this problem will take creativity and cooperation.

Read the full commentary on sacbee.com.

Groundwater: Act Locally, Think Sustainably

The complex challenges that the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act aims to resolve don’t lend themselves to quick fixes. With the deadline for the first major step—forming “groundwater sustainability agencies” in affected basins—coming up in June, we asked Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, about progress to date.

PPIC: How are California communities doing in implementing the law so far?

Karen Ross: I’ve been very impressed with how implementation is progressing. Clearly, people realize it’s time to address groundwater sustainability, and they are working together at the local level because they prefer that to state action. This is a big undertaking because to address groundwater covers areas like land use and economic development for cities and counties. So the progress made on establishing the governance structure is just the first step. The next step is the hard part: putting together plans that will bring basins back into water balance. That will require very difficult decisions about how the resource is allocated and managed.

The state is supporting this process in a number of ways. Our colleagues at the Department of Water Resources (DWR) have a huge role to play in supporting the process by establishing guidance for governance structures and the criteria for what constitutes a sustainable groundwater plan. The state is backing that up with facilitation and financial support. For example, DWR awarded $6.7 million in grants last year to 21 counties for groundwater planning projects, and just last month the Department of Food and Agriculture and DWR announced a joint $6 million water efficiency grant program for agricultural water suppliers and farmers.

PPIC: What big challenges do you think will result?

KR: Some of the critically overdrafted basins will have challenges getting back into balance, and many of these areas are dependent on agriculture as the primary engine for their local economy. The state of the basins is directly impacted by the lack of surface water over time. Tough decisions will have to be made about demand management, potential fallowing, and how to balance the human impacts we saw during the drought, like drinking water supplies and jobs.

It won’t be easy to bring all parties to the table to address these issues―not to mention the specific trade-offs needed to bring the water supply back into balance. But we must ensure that all have a voice in determining the governance structure and taking part in the planning process. That is critical to success.

PPIC: What kinds of opportunities do you think will arise for communities implementing the law?

KR: I see a unique opportunity to unite communities in a deep and lasting way. This is a chance to help determine the future of their community. People must work together to maintain a thriving local economy, their quality of life, and environmental quality. What these communities face is daunting. While it is easy for me in my position to be optimistic about future progress in maintaining sustainability in a special part of California, we must all recognize that building resiliency for the long term will be hard work. But future generations will thank us—just as we owe previous generations a debt of gratitude for the vision, the leadership, and the investment they made in the infrastructure for agriculture and rural California that we enjoy today.

Learn more

Watch “Implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” a video featuring Secretary Ross and other panelists (October 21, 2016)
Read “Reforming California’s Groundwater Management,” (PPIC fact sheet, June 2015)
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center