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The Public Policy
Fool's Gold?
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state's Democratically-controlled legislature have become better-known for dysfunctional sparring matches and dueling tax increase packages than for any form of unanimous agreement. So the last month proved to be amazing as legislators agreed to pass a string of the Governator's school reform measures, including a measure that allows more parents to choose schools for their kids outside of the districts in which they reside, and, even more shocking, end a ban on the use of student test scores in evaluating teacher performance.
Certainly Schwarzenegger has earned his bona fides as a school reformer. After all, he has strongly backed a string of unsuccessful voter referendums since replacing the much-loathed Gray Davis six years ago. Among his lowlights: A plan to increase the time it takes for teachers to gain lifetime job protections through the granting of tenure was widely defeated thanks to a $15 million campaign against it by state and local affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers.
But why did legislators, beneficiaries of $346,300 in donations from the unions in 2008 alone (along with campaign help from their rank-and-file), turn their backs on their erstwhile allies? The opportunity to tap some of the $4.5 billion in so-called "Race to the Top" funds, provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has proven to be too tempting to ignore. Declared Schwarzenegger this week after signing the bill: "These bills represent an important first step in bringing California's students and schools closer to billions of much-needed federal funding."
California isn't the only state that has needed prodding from the federal government to reform its woeful public education system. But the state that used to set the pace for innovations good and otherwise has fallen behind its sister states -- including Florida, Texas, Indiana, and even the notoriously dysfunctional New York State -- in taking steps toward reform.
Befitting California's position as America's state and its role as primary soundstage for disasters real and celluloid, the academic and fiscal morass of its public education system is staggering. It is home to Los Angeles Unified -- the nation's second-largest traditional public school district -- where two out of every five high school freshmen drop out before senior year. Only New York City's public school system is home to a greater concentration of the nation's dropout factories.
But L.A. Unified is no isolated case. Twenty-six percent of the state's school districts are ranked as academically failing, according to the U.S. Department of Education. They teach 1.6 million children -- or one-fifth -- of the state's student population. As a result, some 100,000 California high school students drop out before graduation every year. Notes Robert Manwaring, a researcher at the Education Sector, a reform-minded think tank: "[California] have lots of low performing schools, and not much urgency about fixing them."
Becoming a teacher in California can be way too easy. A newly-minted teacher in California can gain tenure in just two years, so long as she gets a satisfactory rating. This is rather easy since most school districts don't conduct meaningful performance evaluations. By the way, only eight other states set a lower bar for gaining such job protections. Dismissing a teacher for poor performance or a felony conviction that isn't a sex offense, can be onerous. A school district may spend as much as $500,000 to go through a 10-step process that involves a panel whose members include a person appointed by the target of the dismissal itself and unlimited number of appeals.
Even after all that, there is no guarantee the teacher will be tossed out. The Los Angeles Times, for example, noted the case of L.A. Unified teacher Shirley Loftis, who kept her job despite a decade-long record of incompetence that featured incidents of students pulling down their pants and fighting with each other under her watch. This is why a mere 100 dismissal hearings were held between 1996 and 2005, according to the state's Legislative Analyst's Office, the legislature's fiscal watchdog agency. Save for Schwarzenegger's quixotic effort, California officials have done little to attempt the kind of teacher quality reforms being undertaken in Indiana or even the District of Columbia.
The No Child Left Behind Act has required all states to develop data systems for meaningfully measuring student and school performance longitudinally, or over years or decades. California has just gotten around to compliance this month with the launch of its CALPADS system after seven years and numerous delays and snafus. But the system still doesn't provide such important data such as individual student attendance records, or allows the student data it does collect to easily follow a child as he transfers from one district to another. Compared to Kansas, Virginia, and, most notably, Florida -- whose data warehouse is ranked among the best by the Data Quality Campaign for providing student performance information all the way to college graduation to every school and university -- CALPADS seems absolutely archaic.
Simply collecting data is a nightmare for bureaucrats, teachers, and parents alike. The state education department requires school districts to report through 125 different data collections. This includes reports on demographic data, school spending, and even a calculation of foreign students (which is appropriately called SNOR). Few of the reports offer useful data or in a consumer-friendly form. The School Accountability Report Card, which is supposed to be useful to parents, is merely a confusing mishmash.
This isn't exactly the education system with which Earl Warren, Edmund "Pat" Brown, or Ronald Reagan would be acquainted. During the 1950s and 1960s, the state was a pioneer in public education with such developments as the sprawling modern public university system and the transformation of so-called normal schools into the community college concept.
The state even pioneered school choice in 1991 when it joined Minnesota in becoming the first states to allow the formation of public charter schools. The state has authorized more of the publicly funded, privately run schools than any other; there is also one charter school for every 9,300 children, a higher ratio (and thus, more opportunities for choice) than the national average.
Despite all this and the presence of notable outfits such as charter school operator Green Dot Schools and the Milken Family Foundation, education reform has been an afterthought.
The very matters plaguing the rest of American public education -- including the low quality of teacher training at schools of education and the success of the NEA and AFT in insulating teachers from performance management -- are certainly factors. But reform-minded governors such as Jeb Bush in Florida and politicians such as former Indiana higher education commissioner Stan Jones have overcome such obstacles. For California, its troubles also rest on its tangle of political fiefdoms -- a legacy of the last century's Progressive era -- fiscal mismanagement, and a lack of political will.
State oversight of education is divided among an array of political operatives, including a state board of education and secretary of education -- both appointed by the governor -- and an elected state superintendent. At the local level, there are 967 school boards (which operate schools), 58 county superintendents (who provide technical services and occasional oversight) and 72 community college boards. Each of them, along with the thickets of political bodies within the state's two university systems, thwarts efforts by the others, ensuring lack of accountability.
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Pingback| 10.16.09 @ 7:06AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : Fool's Gold? [spectator.org] on Tops links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Eric Cartman| 10.16.09 @ 9:38AM
I love it. The Liberal scum who have transformed California into a cesspool of illegal aliens who can't speak English and plop their brood out for the rest of us to pay for is finding it difficult to train the hordes of future gang members and leaf blower operators they now have in their midst. And they think money is the problem ! Amazing!
Alan Brooks| 10.17.09 @ 11:02PM
and if you even ATTEMPT to discuss the illegals, you are a "racist."
Even my goldfish was racist-- I had to flush him down the commode this morning.
Eric Cartman| 10.19.09 @ 9:58AM
Great! Another illegal goldfish sneaking into our sewer system!
Houston Rao| 10.16.09 @ 12:44PM
Call me a cynic but I would hold my breath to see if it is indeed true reform or just an action to get their hands on some free money. The devil is in the details. Yes, parents may have the option of choosing schools outside of the district but there can always be bureaucratic hurdles and paperwork to stymie them.
Pat| 10.16.09 @ 1:33PM
Before a reader exhibits the desired Pavlovian response to this well written article, let's mull over some of the facts not mentioned. Detroit's school system is equally as bad as those in L. A. or New York City - only 25% of Detroit's high school freshmen class will actually graduate in 4 years - and, no, it's not because illegal immigrants and their school age kids are sneaking over from Windsor, Canada or swimming the Rio Detroit to disappear into the slums off Jefferson Ave. When rational folks point out that not all high school kids in S.E. Michigan are dropping out at the rate of 3 for every 1 that graduates, the normal reaction is to rush forward with "politically acceptable" excuses to vigorously defend our American concept of blessed plurality.
And when rational folks point out there are few basic differences between the good schools and the bad ones, they're answered with a chorus of "official" excuses to rationalize failure in the "bad" schools - "disadvantaged students", "not enough money", "class sizes too large", "not enough special ed or remedial programs" - another 50 excuses could be added to that short list.
But does that really explain the failure of these ghetto schools - or are these official excuses simply repeated endlessly to enforce the concept of America's strength through our glorious plurality? A teacher, a room with desks, chalkboards, students, books, lesson plans - common factors that somehow produce widely divergent results dependent on where the school is located.
To avoid examining whether "diversity" or "plurality" is as great a social strength as it's cracked up to be, we nitpick each common factor to divine why Detroit's schools consistently fail and Birmingham MI. schools consistently succeed - although they're only 4 to 12 miles apart in geographical distances.
But we can't clear the chess pieces from the board and start a new game - we're stuck with the folks we have, we're stuck with the "bad" students that Detroit's society produces in seemingly endless numbers - so when you can't change the players, the only option is to fiddle with the system vainly looking for the right combination of politically acceptable band-aids that will "solve" the problem once and for all.
Eric Cartman| 10.16.09 @ 2:04PM
Having been a student in the Detroit public school system from 10 - 12 years of age until moving to Lathrup Village (when it was still a good place to live), I know the underlying problem with it: the Black attitude toward Whites, learning, victimization, and family disintegration due to - wait for it - Liberal policies! Welfare, bussing, victimization attitude, etc.
LA schools, on the other hand, suffer from other Liberal policy foolishness. Most notable - illegal immigrant acceptance from every welfare and state "gimme" program imaginable to English as a Second Language debacle that makes it possible for the future leaf-blower operator to read the little "Pull" sign on his Briggs & Straton or the Bail Bonds advertising on the jail wall.
Both locals may be different, but they are infected with the same virus: Stupid Liberalism.
TQ| 10.17.09 @ 3:11PM
How about the government just get out of the education business altogether? Problem solved. Is it really a surprise that state run education is a complete disaster? And are you seriously suggesting that the state can fix the problems caused by, umm, the state being involved in education? Get rid of the labor monopoly of teacher's unions and get the state completely out of K-12 education (hell, the UC system ought to be able to run privately too) and then this nonsense all goes away.
Also, it isn't a problem if students don't graduate. They can either get a job with no education or they can't. It isn't the state's problem to make sure everyone makes good life decisions. If we didn't have minimum wage laws those high school drop-outs could be employed. Hell, they could be employed now if they went out into the fields and worked agricultural jobs getting paid under the table. Again, the state isn't responsible for ensuring the upward mobility of the children of illegal immigrants or any other segment of the Californian population. Is it really such a boon to society for all of Californians youth to go to college and be fed leftist propaganda for four years? All that does is increase the number of voters who believe in victimology, in statism, in cradle-to-grave government care, and all the other nonsense that has plagued California (and the rest of the US) for decades. The best thing is obviously to get those people out of the university system, in the real world earning money and learning the virtues of capitalism first hand.
Or yeah, I guess we could quibble about various ways the state could get more involved in it's own insanity.
Marc Jeric| 10.17.09 @ 3:50PM
Show me a strong union and I will show a dead or dying industry - automobile, steel, textile, electronics, apparel, etc. Not to forget the teacher unions and other government employee unions - but those jobs cannot be outsourced. The education system that 40 years ago was the wonder of the world is now an utter disaster. College entrants are given remedial courses in reading and writing! All government employee unions should be outlawed - they are a conspiracy against the people.
In Europe the school systems are based on this principle of natural triage:
1) Those pupils who cannot pass the basic requirements of literacy after 4 years of elementary schooling are allowed to repeat the fourth year 3 times; if they fail that is the end of their education and they can apply as apprentices for cleaning streets and common building areas, or attendants in public restrooms, etc.
2) those who pass can then go to high schools, where after 4 years there is a serious triage by means a small bac exam; those who pass can continue, those who fail can go to industrial apprentice schools to become factory workers, welders, installers, carpenters, etc.
3) At the end of the 8th class of high school there is a formal bac exam that includes essays in own language and in a foreign language, math, physics, chemistry, geography, history. Those who pass are allowed to compete for university by additional exams (about 40-50% pass); others become clerks, salesmen, reps, bank employees, or after taking specialized courses can become law aides, accountants, etc., or can join the military. University students finish their studies successfully between 40-80%; in my class in engineering only 40% got their diplomas after 4 years of classes plus 1-2 years of work on the final project.
This American system based of self-esteem and the false but politically correct conviction that everybody is capable of university education is a disaster for the country - economically and intellectually. Courses in gender, class, race etc. grievances are a total waste of time and effort. Colleges od education produce an unending stream of politically correct imbeciles incapable of teaching. Lack of discipline enforcement in class formally endorsed by teacher unions is a mark of criminal neglect. Incompetent teachers are protected by union rules; school boards are in majority composed of teachers.
A recipe for total failure!
Yosemeti Sam| 10.18.09 @ 10:20AM
OKkkkkkkkkkkk.
A given, is that California is an entrenched liberal strangling socio-experimental stronghold - writ large!
So, how cum this wreckage of affectedly institutionalized nanny education is thought now
to be strangely saliently amiss?
Liberals don't use drawing boards - they rely on
sand. The easier to conveniently wash away when their socio-experiments fail - Big Time.
UpChuck.Liberals| 10.18.09 @ 9:11PM
g eym a produk of the kaliforneyea skool sistem and eye'm doyin gest ok. meye selve esteem is perfick.
Now if they'd cut the crap and actually teach something .....
This goes for the rest of the posters here that really need spell check or a education to use it.
BTW Cum is spelled COME in the context you were using it.
Real American| 10.19.09 @ 1:23AM
Public education in California is run by liberal Democrats. Nuff said.
Pingback| 11.3.09 @ 12:18PM
Dropout Nation » Blog Archive » READ: Tuesday-Morning Quarterback Edition links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 11.17.09 @ 10:35PM
Race to the Top: The Battles to Come || Dropout Nation links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
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