Seeing silver lining in Robles-Wong
For plaintiffs, case could yet roll their way
A Superior Court ruling narrowing the scope of two suits challenging the state’s system of funding education is distressing to those favoring more money for California schools. But while disappointed, lawyers for the cases say they’re not despondent – or ready to give in.
Three factors are giving them hope, as they plot strategy over the next few weeks: Serrano, Proposition 8, and Judge Steven Brick’s ambiguity.
Serrano. That’s the name of the landmark court case that found funding schools largely through property taxes to be unconstitutional because of huge revenue disparities it created among districts. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Steven Brick cited the case in his ruling this month, though in ways in which attorneys for the two funding cases – Robles-Wong v California and Campaign for Quality Education v California – disagreed.
But the point is that the trial judge in the original Serrano lawsuit 35 years ago threw that case out, too. The state Supreme Court overturned the ruling, let the case move forward, and the rest is history.
Brick hasn’t thrown out the two cases, though he has rejected the thrust of the arguments – that the state Constitution’s imperative, in Article IX, to establish public schools, also requires that the Legislature fund education adequately. Now lawyers have until Feb. 14 to decide whether to recraft their lawsuit in a way that Brick may accept or, perhaps eventually, to appeal the original claims with the hope that this Supreme Court would be open to overruling a trial judge, too.
Proposition 8. The substance of the state’s gay marriage ban isn’t directly related to the education lawsuits, but plaintiffs’ lawyers are heartened by the state’s response to it. After a federal district judge declared last summer that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, Gov. Schwarzenegger and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown refused to appeal; they said they agreed with the decision.
Schwarzenegger and Brown opposed the funding suits brought by the Education Coalition, Public Advocates, and other attorneys representing disadvantaged kids. And so far they have won. But Brown is now governor, and Kamala Harris is the new AG. Would they actively fight a narrower lawsuit, one that addresses the big swings in funding levels under Proposition 98, the inequities in funding formulas that have built up over the last 25 years, and the failure to address the academic needs of low-income children and English learners? Might they start negotiating, as Schwarzenegger did in the Williams case, a slimmed down Robles-Wong that the state settled in 2004?
There’s been no indication that they would welcome a settlement, but it’s been 10 days, and neither Harris’s office nor Brown’s has uttered a word about Brick’s ruling. Good omen or just evidence that they’re focused on more immediate problems?
Brick’s ambiguity. Brick was clear about what he didn’t want: to be drawn into a protracted adequacy funding case, like those that have persisted for years, sometimes decades, in other states. But Brick was vague, no doubt intentionally, about what issues he might permit to go to trial. He concluded that Constitution doesn’t require any particular level of education funding – no matter how devastating the impact of minimal funding. However, he implied that there may be an equity claim – that the state’s system of funding is irrationally or inequitably funded.
The lawyers for Robles-Wong and Campaign for Quality Education argued that the Legislature has approved rigorous state academic standards but has not calculated the costs of sufficiently funding them. Brick implied there may be grounds for trying the claim that all students lack an equal opportunity to learn them.
The question is, How broad a scope would Brick allow? If it’s limited to arguments over efficiency – how best to shift already skimpy education funding around – or over money redistribution – pitting rich against poor districts – then the coalition behind the suits (the PTA, California School Board Assn., California teachers and administrators associations) might fracture. But if Brick were to allow a claim that state funding and the Education Code put low-income children and English learners at a disadvantage, then the case becomes bigger.
Mike Kirst, Brown’s campaign adviser and now his State Board president, has recommended redirecting money from earmarked special programs, known as categorical programs, as a weighted funding formula with extra money for disadvantaged students. But it might take significantly more funding to do this in a way that would at least guarantee that all districts wouldn’t lose any money.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers might relish a chance to force the Legislature to make that choice. They have three weeks to state their case in a way that Brick might find palatable.
When Governor Schwarzenegger’s Committee on Education Excellence issued their report in 2008, the committee (made up of everyone from the ACLU on the left to Hoover on the right) unanimously recommended a student-centered funding model that acknowledged English learners and poor students require more money to teach.
Kirst’s comments echo the immediate reaction of many observers then that the recommendation is a non-starter until every district who does not have significant numbers of low-income or English-learner students is guaranteed to, at least, remain whole in any shift in funding. At the time, the recommendation assumed that a recovering economy would provide the “extra” money needed under the payback provisions of Prop. 98 to make this possible. I have no idea whether that would still be a feasible option — or even if it was one then.
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Well might we pursue school funding through the likes of Robles-Wong. How strange, then, that we’re willing to throw away $1.5 billion to secure a Race to the Top grant that has already been denied. Read further in my current article in Sunday’s LA Daily News:
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California drops its standards: A cautionary tale
By Doug Lasken
Los Angeles Daily News
Posted: 01/23/2011 12:00:00 AM PST
http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_17168645
Our new governor Jerry Brown has warned us that our education budget will be pared to the bone, with cuts of up to 25 percent. It’s surprising, then, that we are still considering spending upwards of $1 billion in pursuit of President Obama’s Race to the Top education grant, a grant we will not receive.
RTTT, under the management of Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, dominated education news last year primarily because of its $4 billion payload, to be divided between states that complied with its requirements. These were a motley assortment: states had to accept national “Common Core” standards instead of those already in place, commit to implementing new data systems that would give longitudinal readings on each child’s school career, make progress in turning around the lowest-performing schools, and finally create new methods to evaluate teachers, including use of student test scores, which would be used to “reward teachers success,” the implication being that student test scores could affect both salaries and job security. As a sort of sub-text to the requirements, a state’s teachers unions were expected to support the package.
As a consultant for several educational institutes, including Fordham and Pioneer, I was involved in studying the wisdom of replacing individual state standards with one set of national standards. Towards that end I did a study of all fifty states’ standards in the area of language arts. As one might expect, some were quite good and seemed in no great need of replacement, and some were rather shabby. I, and virtually everyone involved in this work, considered California’s standards to be in the “no need to replace” category, first because they are among the best in the nation, and second because replacing them would be very expensive.
How expensive? There are a variety of estimates, but they have in common that they come to many millions of dollars. Consider that the Schiff-Bustamante bill passed in California in 1998 allocated $1 billion over four years to pay for textbooks aligned with the then new California standards, in addition to the $70 million per year already allocated for textbooks. Grim projections come as well from the nonprofit group EdSource, which estimates that California will incur costs of $800 million for new curriculum frameworks, $765 million for training teachers and $20 million for training principals, plus assorted minor costs, coming to a total of $1.6 billion.
In addition to questions of cost, the Common Core standards exist in draft form only, and one would think a decision as important as replacing a state’s standards would require a finalized replacement. Regarding the draft, the language arts section seems decent enough, but I and most of my colleagues see no compelling improvement over the current California standards.
For reasons we can only surmise, however, the California State Board of Education, members of which had been appointed by former Governor Schwarzenegger, voted unanimously in August to discard our standards and adopt the draft Common Core standards. The primary argument in support of the vote was the promise of our part of the RTTT money, estimated to come to about $400 million. The State Board apparently did not think it important to ask how $400 million could cover an expense in excess of $1 billion.
Sadly, that is not the end of the tale. Although the state attempted to comply with all RTTT requirements, including dropping a state law that forbade the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, the state’s teachers unions did not buy into the RTTT process, and presumably for that reason the California RTTT application was rejected (the Department of Education does not give reasons for turning down RTTT applications). We now, therefore, have no money to cover the expense of replacing our standards.
Before the midterm elections in November, some of Duncan’s comments seemed to imply that California might get another shot at its slice of RTTT’s $4 billion. As noted, this had been estimated at only $400 million, clearly insufficient to cover our expenses, but much more, apparently, than what we might actually get after the new Congress finishes with RTTT. Duncan reportedly will ask for $1 billion, but some of the estimates of what he will get are closer to $500 million. That’s $500 million for the whole country. And none of this diminishing figure is guaranteed to California or any other state.
In the context of our decimated education budget and the prospect of continued layoffs of teachers, nurses, librarians and custodians, will Governor Brown and his newly constituted State Board be able to accept unfunded expenditures that will only benefit test writing companies, textbook publishers and related industries? One would hope that Brown will see the fiscal madness of our current course and ask the State Board to reconsider its vote to drop our standards.
Doug Lasken is a retired Los Angeles Unified teacher, education consultant and freelance writer. Write to him at doug.lasken@gmail.com
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Doug: I followed the common-core debate and attended or watched sessions at which the State Academic Content Standards Commission reviewed the standards. There was general agreement that the common core’s English language arts standards improved on California’s standards in a number of areas and that California would benefit from the new assessments that the two states’ consortia would create. The focus of the commission’s attention was on math — 8th grade algebra and high school math. Applying for Race to the Top money may have been a factor, but the commissioners did a serious comparison of the state standards and common core and felt comfortable adopting the latter.
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I don’t see a problem with going to common core over time, but I haven’t heard a really good reason to switch to common core as soon as possible (other than RTT). If the state felt it needed to have a strong influence on the assessments at least that would be a reason to become an early participant in common core. Is California still playing the silent partner in the development of the assessments?
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