Desperate times for education
Sacramento Bee 3/19/07
The visitors included Susanna Loeb, director of the Stanford Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice; Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Kristi Kimball, education program officer atewlett Foundation. Following are excerpts from the conversation the Hewlett Foundation; and Marshall "Mike" Smith, education program director at the H:
What is this project about?
Smith: We are in desperate shape at this point. The system is broken in many, many ways. Children aren't succeeding in the way they need to succeed. The Public Policy Institute of California study, "California 2025" was very clear. If we don't go about making fundamental changes in the state of California, the state's going to gradually erode down, down, down. The state won't meet the demand for educated workers. Our economy will fall far behind. There's a slam dunk reason for this project to happen.
Hanushek: The motivation for all of this is absolutely crystal clear: California's schools are just not supporting the level of education that they have to be. Looking into the future of the California economy, if we don't make major changes, it won't be California students who are the engines behind growth. It will be kids educated in other states and other countries for the most part.
The fact is, compared to other states, the schools of California are doing badly by everybody. White kids do badly compared to those in other states. The kids of college-educated parents do badly. The black kids. The Hispanic kids. The average black and Hispanic kid in California would be at the bottom third of the distribution in Texas. It's not that Texas does so well. It's that we are doing so badly. Point one is that it's not yet as evident as it should be the magnitude of the problem that California faces.
Secondly, you have to have a way of learning over time which of the things you try are working and which aren't. California simply doesn't have that knowledge. The state has dragged its feet on developing effective data systems that track the performance of kids over time, that matches those kids to the programs and resources they're getting. There's this thought that developing data systems might be expensive. Well, it's actually a trivial cost relative to the $60 billion that we're putting into schools today. But without that, there is no set of reform policies that can be effective. And the other part of this is to take decision-making away from Sacramento and move it down. But if the state moves it down, you have to have some way to track what's working.
Highlights of the research
Loeb: The first is that the finance formulas, the way that money goes to districts, is very complex and really irrational. You have districts that are very similar but get largely different amounts of money. And you could think of reasons why districts that differ would get different amounts of money -- they have different needs, they are in different regions, they have different prices that they face -- but those differences aren't treated in any coherent fashion in the system.
The second problem is how highly prescriptive regulations are. They keep local actors from being able to respond to any incentives that the new accountability system has put into place. Many states, when they came up with standards and implemented accountability, they freed up local actors to respond to those incentives. California didn't. Florida is an example of a state that relaxed regulations when it did this.
The third area is the general area of teacher work force policies. First, there's been a focus on requiring generic units -- such as requiring master's degrees or a certain number of hours of professional development. There's no indication that any of that is effective. There's evidence that teacher education and professional development can be effective if it really focuses on what goes on in the classroom. Another issue is that in surveys, California principals respond much more than principals in other states that it's difficult to dismiss teachers. California has earlier tenure than in most other states. Prior to tenure it's fairly easy to dismiss teachers in California, but it's much more difficult after. Another issue is pay scales. Currently, most pay scales are based on education and experience. Within districts that leads to difficulties in hiring teachers in schools with low-performing students and in areas like science and special education. And it creates fewer incentives for teachers.
The fourth area is that at every level of the system, policymakers, teachers and principals at the school level and parents are all lacking information that they need to make good decisions about education policy and practices. That hinders them from making progress in the classroom.
But it all comes down to this idea that we need a general overhaul of finance and governance -- and not one policy. This isn't something we can change tomorrow by extending the length of the day a couple of hours or by putting in one or two small fixes, an extra coach or something. But we really need to figure out what works and move in that direction.
Kimball: We need to foster innovation. We just haven't figured out yet how to get a lot of the schools with high-poverty kids above the benchmarks. So we really need to just empower those folks at the local level to innovate and learn, and track what the impact is of what they're trying.
Smith: Over the next three or four years, the (Legislative Analyst's Office) has projected that Proposition 98 will have some more money. Those are substantial increases. If those increases are spent well, there's a real opportunity here.