News Update

Matt Navo appointed executive director of school improvement agency

California State School Board member Matt Navo will be the next executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a 6-year-old, small state agency charged with the big task of overseeing the state’s school improvement effort.

Matt Navo

The 5-member board of the collaborative last week selected Navo, who is currently the director of Systems Transformation for the Center for Prevention and Early Intervention at WestEd, a San Francisco-based education research and training nonprofit. He is the third head of the agency and will succeed Tom Armelino, a former superintendent of the Shasta County Office of Education, who is retiring after three years at the collaborative. The first executive director was Carl Cohn, a former Long Beach Unified superintendent and member of the State Board of Education.

Navo also is a former member of the State Board of Education and former superintendent of Sanger Unified, a 12,000-student district in the Central Valley that was praised over the past decade as a model of academic improvement.

With a staff of fewer than two dozen employees, the collaborative is charged with being a lead agency in the state’s system of supporting district improvement by working with county offices of education and the state to identify best practices and strategies and disseminate them through workshops, guides and materials. The Legislature also assigned it, under the law establishing the Local Control Funding Formula, to oversee improvement efforts in those districts identified under the California School Dashboard indicators as chronically underachieving.