Update: The final report will be sent to Gov. Newsom on Dec. 18.
One of the few notable areas where Gov. Gavin Newsom departed from his predecessor Gov. Jerry Brown on entering office was his support for establishing a longitudinal data system linking information from preschool into the workplace.
Despite the fact that most other states had created that system in some form, for years Brown resisted entreaties from researchers and advocates to allocate the funds to set one up.
But it was such a high priority for Newsom that, within days of taking office in 2019, he called for it in the second paragraph of his first budget as governor. He designated an initial $10 million for “critical work” to create what he called “the California Cradle-to-Career Data System” in order to “to better track student outcomes and increase the alignment of our educational system to the state’s workforce needs.”