Equity is at the core of leadership
Data & Evaluation
At CORE, data and evaluation are tools for learning, reflection, and action—not just accountability. Our evaluation work centers equity, elevates the voices of educators and communities, and supports continuous improvement across our initiatives. Through formative evaluation, participatory methods, and shared learning, we examine our reach, deepen our impact, and strengthen leadership practices that advance more just and inclusive school systems.
Our Evaluation, Accountability & Impact Team
Our Evaluation, Accountability, and Impact (EAI) team partners with colleagues, interest holders, and clients to design and implement culturally responsive, racially equitable evaluations that amplify stories of impact. Grounded in the lived experiences of the communities we serve, our diverse and highly qualified team uses human-centered approaches to share data in innovative, accessible, and actionable ways. Through this work, we support meaningful decision-making and strengthen evaluation capacity across initiatives and partners.
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Measuring What Matters
This evaluation report examines the leadership development supports provided to participants in the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy (21CSLA) Cohort 2 during their first and second years (2023–2025). The study was designed and conducted collaboratively by LAEP’s Evaluation, Accountability, and Impact (EAI) team and the Cultivating Organizational Resilience and Empowerment (CORE) team.
Guided by Empowerment and Utilization-Focused Evaluation approaches, this evaluation emphasized community ownership, data capacity building, and the use of findings to inform program design and implementation. The work provided both formative support, to strengthen programming in real time, and summative insights, to understand outcomes and impact across offerings.
What the Data Says About Our Reach & Impact
Methodology
Our mixed-methods, formative evaluation approach centers learning, equity, and use. By combining data tracking, surveys, interviews, and collaborative sense-making, LAEP CORE ensures evaluation findings are accessible, actionable, and responsive to the communities we serve.
Participatory Methods
Between summer 2023 and spring 2025, LAEP hosted four conferences that served as the grand majority of region’s LPL and CoP learning opportunities – Learn, Lead, Liberate in summer 2023, A Gathering of Giants in spring 2024, Equity Camp in Fall 2024, and Equity in Action in Spring 2025.
While all four of these conferences were designed to deepen participants’ understandings of equity, increase networks of support, activate leaders to action, and promote leadership practices that center healing, justice and transformation, this section of the report emphasizes the three most recent conferences, briefly referencing the first.
All of our conferences were intended to bring the 21CSLA Equity Statement to life: Leaders for opportunity, and inclusion for students and adults, especially those who are systemically marginalized and historically underserved, so that they can thrive.
Leader Case Study
A heart-focused leader and her team learn together to create equity for their students
Leader Profile
County: San Bernardino
Role: Equity and Access Coordinator
Number of Years in Role: 1 year
Number of Years in the Education Field: 27 years
Participation in 21CSLA Offerings: Equity Camp, Equity in Action, Affinity Groups
Journey Towards Educational Equity through Crisis and Awakening
Dr Gable (not her real name) began her career in education 27 years ago as a substitute teacher. Always reaching for the next plateau, Dr. Gable, now Coordinator of Equity and Access at a school district in San Bernardino, continued to expand her knowledge and sphere of influence as she became a teacher-on-assignment, then a curriculum specialist, then pursued an EdD program after experiencing a deep internal crisis during the 2020 summer of social justice awakening. She embraces her identities as an African American,
Christian, heterosexual woman who leads with compassion and empathy, and reflects on her experiences to push beyond race and gender biases that threaten to stop collaboration before a trusting work relationship develops.
Dr. Gable is strengthening her leadership by learning and practicing how to be more directive, delegating, and enabling emerging leaders to “take my position.” She is focusing on systems and structures to identify specific inequities for African American students in her schools and turning these into opportunities for their success. A primary aspect of this work for her is acknowledging that leaders in this work tend to come from marginalized communities themselves, and processes of re-creating systems and structures require a lot of discomfort for a lot of people. She described the complexity of managing her own discomfort while supporting others to do the same, “You have to be able to manage your own personal feelings as well as being able to create that system that’s going to work for people. How do you manage yourself while you’re doing that?” Mental health resources and hopeful perspectives are critical in these processes, she added, but in our current climate, “things that made people feel safe, that made people feel secure … are being deleted. You have to manage those feelings as well.
Her participation in 21CSLA – in particular the LAEP conferences – supported her and her team by expanding their thinking, encouraging them to build stronger strategies together, and offering “heart spaces” to process difficult learning. At Equity Camp in the fall, she appreciated the format of the conference with a variety of keynote speakers, panels, breakout sessions that allowed for closer interaction with panelists, and Touchpoint sessions for building connections with peers that extended beyond that weekend. “They had lots of activities,” like community building activities, opportunities for networking, Smores Night. Mike Tyson was fighting, people were connecting. She met new people, and Touchpoints allowed them to network. [With] repeated exposure to the same facilitator and group, “you grew strong relationship with those people because you circled back to them.” At the Equity in Action conference in the spring, Dr. Gable brought an even larger team of colleagues with her, and she felt a sense of connection with other districts, having engaged them in the fall. She and her team took an organized approach to their collective learning by attending sessions that aligned with their district’s equity initiatives, processing together, articulating phrasing, and planning how to share their learning back at their district. Dr. Gable appreciated the session with Dr. Mark Kabban, where she confronted a problem she had identified earlier in the year, “The messiness of the equity work is that you’re always trying to articulate something in a way where it’s not offensive to someone, especially when you are offended. If you happen to be the person that has been offended, you’re having to articulate thoughts or feelings, or are advocating for this group of students or teachers or parents.” She found the vulnerability and sharing of others in the room especially supportive.
Carrying into the Future Stronger Resolve, More Strategic Approaches, a Sense of Community, and a Commitment to Care
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, Dr. Gable reflected on how the 21CSLA conference had influenced her own leadership practices and prepared her to meet the needs of diverse students. She named her Affinity Space experience and the debrief with her team as one of the most impactful aspects of her conference participation. “The affinity space was phenomenal for me… You don’t understand how freeing it is to walk into a space where you don’t have to spend 20 or 30 minutes proving you’re a person or a human, that you get to just be and then continue.” She described her team debrief as essential to processing with her task force in the moment, identifying what to return to, and what their collective work would look like in 2025-26. She was moving into the new year with a stronger resolve, more strategic approaches, a sense of community, and a commitment to care for herself as much as for others. “Equity work sometimes can be very isolating. You know, you start pissing people off. You start making people uncomfortable, and people pull away, and then you still have to, you know, you still want to do the work. So how are you able to sustain your core values and goals in the process? … Every time I go [to a 21CSLA conference], I walk away with some more strategies that help to sustain me in the work, as well as connecting with people that are in the work too.”
Learn About the Impact of Our Specific Offerings
21CSLA Leadership Coaching Report
This report highlights key findings from LAEP’s individualized leadership coaching for equity, a core 21CSLA professional learning offering. Over a one-year period, leaders across Southern California engage in 25 hours of virtual or hybrid coaching designed to strengthen their capacity to improve access, opportunity, and inclusion for students and adults, particularly those who are historically underserved. The report shares insights on coaching implementation, impact, and lessons learned.
UTK Professional Learning Modules
This report highlights key findings from LAEP’s implementation of the UTK Professional Learning Modules, part of the statewide 21CSLA initiative. These modules support site leaders, teacher leaders, and central office staff in Southern California to implement Transitional Kindergarten with equity and quality at the center. The report shares insights on leadership development, program implementation, and the impact of UTK modules on inclusive teaching and learning practices.hy text to tell people what you offer, and the benefits they will receive. A great description gets readers in the mood, and makes them more likely to go ahead and book.
21CSLA Conferences
This report highlights key findings from LAEP’s 21CSLA conferences held between 2023 and 2025, which served as the primary Leadership Professional Learning (LPL) and Communities of Practice (CoP) learning spaces for regional leaders. Designed to deepen understanding of equity, strengthen networks of support, and activate leaders to action, these conferences centered healing, justice, and transformational leadership. The report shares insights on how convening leaders advanced equity-focused practices aligned with the 21CSLA Equity Statement.