Oakland, LAUSD to get SIG money after all
State Board gets waiver from feds to sue extra $100 million
With an hours-old waiver from the federal government in hand, the state Board of Education on Tuesday approved spending $413 million to turn around 92 of the state’s lowest performing schools. That will include $100 million from a reserve that the feds now said could be divided among two dozen schools in Oakland, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and other districts that had argued they’d been unfairly excluded.
The vote ends the suspense for districts that started the school year having made commitments to hire teacher coaches, add programs and extend the school day without knowing whether they’d get federal School Improvement Grant money. Some had put off critical planning for their school transformations during the summer because of approval delays. The larger schools will receive as much as $6 million over three years as long as they adopt one of four improvement models prescribed by the Obama administration.
Faced with time pressures, board members approved the grant recommendations of Department of Education staff with some sharply voiced misgivings.
- The department revised the distribution formula somewhat to reduce huge grants for small and medium-size schools. But apparent inequities remained. Doug McRae, a retired test publisher from Monterey, pointed to “Golden Fleece” awards that he said indicated poor scrutiny by the department: $4 million for a 131-student charter school in San Diego with millions going to the district for oversight and possibly services and millions also going to the Coachella Valley district office for oversight of a high school on the list, among his examples. But Deputy Supt. Deb Sigman countered that all of the proposals had been independently vetted and warned that changing grant amounts for some schools could delay or jeopardize grants for all schools. It wasn’t apparent why that was true.
- The same was true with grants for thee charter schools. Board members would have eliminated all money for them on the grounds that lowest-performing charters should be shut down, not rewarded. But the board backed off on Sigman’s advice. Board President Ted Mitchell said that the board should consider instead new regs for revoking charters of failing schools.
- Board members from Los Angeles also questioned the department’s recommendation to deny any money to three Los Angeles Unified schools run by non-profit partnerships, , including Crenshaw High. The board heard testimony that in at least one case, Manual Arts Senior High, the school’s disqualification was caused by budget changes that the Los Angeles Unified district office made to direct more money to itself without informing the school. Board members promised to look into the dispute further but felt hamstrung to reject the recommendation.
The $416 million allotment to California is a huge infusion of one-time money to improve failing schools. The federal government wanted states to put a quarter of it aside. But granting the waiver to use it now means that the additional 96 schools on the lowest performing list that didn’t get a SIG grant will have little money to apply for next year. McRae had urged the board to set aside $50 million by capping how much district offices could take and by further restricting grants by school size, but the board adopted the department’s proposal intact.
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With so much money going out as a de-facto “reward” for low-scoring schools, perhaps we should rename the School Improvement Grant program “Race to the Bottom.”
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Doug McRae did some heroic work. Any chance we could see him on the SBE some day? It would be a service to us all.
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John — Your post is super gentle on what was a truly coyote ugly state board meeting yesterday. On the golden fleece front, the approval involved exorbitant unjustified district office funds not only for Kings Chavez Arts charter school and Coachella Valley, but also Semitropic Elem and San Francisco USD [SFUSD got in effect $4 million extra for closing a school (Willie Brown Elem, Enr = 221) that directly got only $50,000]. By my count, upwards of $24 million in golden fleece support was approved for central offices for the approved LEAs. CDE staff acknowledged they had no cap for district office requests, nor did any budget specs call for uniformity of district office vs school requests, loopholes that made a mockery of claimed school size caps. Suffice it to say that the vetting of budget requests was low quality and thoroughly embarrassing. Also, there was total failure to consider the longer range strategic implications of awarding the full 2010 amount immediately and in effect pushing the 96 schools that did not apply or could not muster “qualified” applications under the bus. The discussion yesterday showed that at least one of the DQ or $0 award schools (of 21 in this category) — Manual Arts in LAUSD with Enr near 3500 and a track record for reform — was goose egged by behind-the-scenes invisible CDE staff action for budget discrepancies involving roughly 5% of the $5.6 million requested. That’s not only harsh, it’s totally uncalled for given the crushingly short application timeline. On the charter school issue, CDE staff claimed charters had to be treated the same as non-charters according to the rules in CA’s application that was approved by the Feds — that claim was a total contradition to funding priority language in CA’s application for SIG funds approved by ED on 6/24/10 and posted on the ED website [page 8, top of the page, and quoted in my linked 3-page written purblic comment]. But there is plenty of blame to parcel out, from totally inadequate CDE staff work to an unengaged State Board that voted to approve the CDE recommendation after being jammed by both the CDE and the Ofc Sec Educ into approval without adequate time to vet of the implications. Particularly vexing was the claim by CDE staff (supported by the OSE) that failure to approve the entire CDE application immediately would jeopardize the full $416 million grant for CA — a unfounded claim in that many other states received ED approval for SIG grants after CA and are proceeding on a slower pace for LEA funding allocations than CA. Unfortunately, the jamming of the State Board into ill-considered approvals of CDE staff recommendations is happening with increasing frequency. An example of such jamming happened last March for this very SIG issue for the last minute unvetted CDE staff recommendation for eligble schools for this program, with at least 30 middle-of-the-pack schools [API Decile 2-3 on the most recent current status indicator] on a total list of 188 that was supposed to represent the lowest 5 percent of schools in the state, a stunningly irresponsible action that could have been avoided by the State Board with time for reasonable time to vet. Of the 30 or so Decile 2-3 schools that clearly should not have been on a credible lowest 5 percent persistently low-achieving schools list, a total of 15 schools were approved for about $70 million in SIG funds yesterday, 1/6 of the total amount awarded, a clear indication of the mismanagement of this education reform program by CDE staff as well as lack of responsible oversight by the SBE and OSE. For the fortunate receipients of the windfall, it is too late and would be unjust to try to correct the mismanagement, but for the purportrators of the mess there should be consequences. Doug McRae, Retired Test Publisher, Monterey, CA.
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Doug makes important points. which, in my gentle manner, I apparently understated. There were unwarranted grants to small schools and seemingly excessive amounts going to district offices for oversight, although CDE says that the money may also constitute services as well. Regardless, there should have been a cap on oversight amounts. SIG is not supposed to be a relief act for central offices. The state board took the easy and expeditious route of seeking a waiver to add schools to the list instead of putting limits on the awards to free up more money for future use. Yes, the districts that put a huge effort into getting their applications in on time should be applauded and deserve substantial funding. But there was nothing sacrosanct about the huge amounts that the CDE proposed. The board should have been more outspoken at the Aug. 2 meeting and sent the list back for more substantial revisions.
And districts like Compton that were disqualified for technical reasons and LAUSD, with dozens of schools on the list, deserved more of a chance for grants next year. There will be little money for the more than half of the 188 schools on the list.
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Agreed… we all benefit from Doug’s oversight at the SBE. As to your comment, Eric: we in Los Angeles are only too familiar with the protocols that reward “failure” but do little to build the capacity within school communities to do a better job of decision-making regarding ANY funding.
Parents sitting on school councils who dare to ask how decisions are monitored or evaluated for results are viewed as pariahs. Someone else said it best: culture eats change for lunch.
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Having watched much of the board discussion, I think the board members actually were engaged — they just didn’t get the information or support from CDE and OSE staff to pursue a solution that would have addressed their concerns.
Also, I heard from some in the room that the charter school association staff was applying undue pressure too, in their case by threatening to sue if any charters were excluded from final funding list. Seems like more than CDE staff blanket statements, it might have been the charter’s threat of legal action that made the difference.
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@Doug – I am probably being naive here but why can the state not have a clawback rule for golden fleece type awards that don’t pass the smell test? I do not understand why you say, “For the fortunate receipients of the windfall, it is too late and would be unjust to try to correct the mismanagement…” Sounds like there was a biggest pig at the trough mentality with applicants which should not be rewarded, IMO. I could be all wet so please set me straight. (apologies for so many metaphors..)
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To Dave: I guess the “it is too late and would be unjust” sentiment is based on the observationt that once the SBE approves an award a LEA is entitled to spend that money and it would be wrong to retroacdtively ask for that LEA to return money already spent. I would point out that individual district office and individual school award budgets are yet to be approved for some of the LEAs approved yesterday [the LEAs with an * on the CDE recommended list] and that circumstance provides a potential opportunity to deal with some of the golden fleece amounts. However, I am afraid that most of the damage that was done was irreversible once the item was closed yesterday afternoon, and that it will be very hard to unring the bell. Doug
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