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.
The initiative and referendum process that has captured the rest
of California’s budget into the hands of interest groups is also
bedeviling the school system. A three-decades-old referendum
requires the state to spend at least one-third of tax dollars on
schools, spurring spending booms and restricting the kind of
fiscal flexibility needed for school reform. A long-term problem
lies with the state’s teacher pension fund, which is mired in a
$22 billion deficit; in August, Fitch Ratings cut the pension’s
bond rating from AAA to AA-plus. Another $16 billion in unfunded
retirement healthcare spending also looms on the horizon.
Meanwhile California’s politicians spend more time on sparring
matches than on policymaking. Additional funding for CALPADS was
one reason behind last year’s overwrought budget battle between
Schwarzenegger and the legislature. Schwarzenegger and
Superintendent Jack O’Connell have had their own run-ins,
including a battle over revamping the state report card.
Money has a funny way of focusing the mind, and the interest in
obtaining the Race to the Top funds has led to quick action by
both Schwarzenegger — who called a special session of the
legislature just for this purpose — and the legislature. Yet the
state may still not get the money. Even with recent overtures,
the state lags behind its peers in the seriousness of addressing
its low graduation rates and abysmal teacher quality. Then there
is the politics. “The thought of the teachers union, school
districts, the business community and other key stakeholders
getting on the same page… is hard to believe without some
serious leadership,” according to Manwaring.
But for the first time since the birth of the charter school
movement, California may actually stop lagging behind the curve.
And possibly, get ahead of it.
