Assembly passes monumental reforms
Talk of Race to the Top will soon be superceded by all-encompassing anxiety over the state budget. But make no mistake: The two bills the Assembly passed Tuesday were historic; they will have long-lasting and far-reaching effects, whether or not California wins a dime of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition.
Despite full-bore opposition of the heavies in Sacramento – the school boards’, teachers union’s and school administrators’ lobbies – by this afternoon, the Legislature will have finally adopted measures thought implausible months ago. As a result, the state will be poised to:
- Take decisive action to fix the worst performing schools – an action it has resisted, flying in the face of federal law, for years.
- Revise its fundamentally sound but far from perfect math and English language curriculum standards. They had been viewed as sacrosanct until now.
- Create new nontraditional programs for people interested in teaching science and math, opening up the field to second career candidates with a lot to offer schools.
- Require participating districts to revise how they evaluate teachers and principals, incorporating test scores as one factor. Teachers unions that had dismissed any suggestion of “merit pay” will now collaborate in the process.
- Give parents stuck in terrible schools a new right to send their children to better schools in other districts. Even in its compromised form, which will give receiving districts ways to avoid their obligations, the parental choice provision marks a shift in governance and establishes a new principle: A child has a basic right to attend a good school anywhere.
Critics of the Race to the Top bills, SBX5-1 and SBX5-4 implied advocates were prostituting their values for one-time federal money that won’t even fill in 10 percent of gap in the K-12 budget for next year. And it’s probably true that, were they not desperate for dollars, California and other states wouldn’t be clawing to win the competition. Credit President Obama administration for figuring out how to move states to enact measures they would never have otherwise adopted.
But Race to the Top was never proposed as a solution to states’ fiscal problems. It’s misleading to judge it on that basis. The program will provide money for systemic reforms that states – especially those with teachers and parents demanding to roll back cuts — would never spend on their own.
The payoffs could be big, if. as state officials are implying, they will use the money to create new metrics to replace STAR tests as the sole of measure student progress. Or write online courses for career academies in high school. Or work with CSU education schools to improve their teacher preparation programs. Or establish programs to help principals assigned to struggling schools.
These are some of the possibilities of Race to the Top. They’re worth pursuing.
Yes a good step forward; but how does “Giving parents stuck in terrible schools a new right to send their children to better schools in other districts” help the low peforming school get better and the children still ” stuck” there get better educated? What is missing is fundamental change with regard to school consolidation. In Santa Clara county along we have over 30 school districts- some with one school. Let’s get real here! Here is another staggering and exceedingly troubling school statistic which needs some attention. “Cutting the dropout rate in half would reduce the number of juvenile crimes in California by 30,000 and save the state $550 million per year” This according to the University of California Santa Barbara- California Dropout Research Project. This sombering statistic should be enough to start the race to the high school graduation line.
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First a comment on the main post…
John — Please try not to get pulled into the “reformer” mindset that believes that everyone involved in the day-to-day work of education (teachers, administrators, school boards) is an entrenched special interest. Maybe, just maybe, they have some insights into the endeavor that politicians and think tanks might be missing.
I can think of no other field where the expertise of day-to-day practitioners is so routinely derided. Doctors are at least as entrenched a “special interest” as teachers or school boards, but few people think that H1N1 or even health care reform should be addressed by ignoring what doctors have to say about it.
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Agreed — and a valid point. Every disagreement shouldn’t be dismissed with labels of self-interest.
But I would apply the same scrutiny to the American Medical Assn. and the Trial Lawyers Assn. of America, which have resisted changes in their professions, too.
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Second, a comment on Peter Carrillo’s comment… Is there any evidence that district consolidation produces better schools. I know it seems more “efficient” on paper, but the reality of L.A. Unified or even San Francisco Unified seems more problematic. I think you run into difficulties when organizations get so large that the people in charge don’t have day-to-day contact people who have day-to-day contact with students.
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RDT- First and foremost it is Pete or Pedro, but please NOT Peter. Stop being lazy! You are correct that we do not need more gigantic school districts- but we certainly do not need 33 school districts in one county.
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But RDT is right: “I can think of no other field where the expertise of day-to-day practitioners is so routinely derided.” That’s different from keeping in mind the agenda of a “special interest.” The widespread public and media view is that teachers’ opinions should be wholesale disdained and scorned as self-serving, while instead the views — and, unfortunately, magical thinking — of opinion leaders who never set a foot in the classroom should be given full credit. (And if you get me started here in San Francisco on Chronicle editorial writers who send their kids to elite private schools and/or live in privileged suburban enclaves themselves but know EVERYTHING about how to fix our urban public schools… well, never mind. They know who they are.)
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Pete — apologies for the name confusion. Maybe 33 districts is too many, but I remain very skeptical of consolidation as an efficiency builder. It’s effective when the groups consolidating really feel they have a common purpose. But without that, you end up trying to get people who are naturally tending in different direction to all move in the same direction, which tend to add layers of bureaucratic herders.
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