More money! Fewer rules! Tastes great! Less filling!
Sacramento Bee 3/21/07
Predictably, with so huge a set of documents, many of them mired in academic abstraction, there's something to reinforce almost every position and support almost every headline.
The release was split into two parts, the first on productivity and efficiency, the second on how much more money it might take to give every California student a chance at academic success.
That ranged from a modest additional $1.7 billion to a number too large to quote in a family newspaper. (The midrange was around $20 billion to $25 billion, a 40 percent increase.)
The governor, not surprisingly, showed up for the first leg, but not the second. Fix the broken system, he said, before we put more money into it. He promised he'd work on the problem next year. This year he's too busy with health care and global warming and, very likely, a budget with another fat deficit.
The postponement is probably a good thing since nobody in his office has the capacity to analyze or otherwise deal with the report's many elements.
There's little in it that's new, and a lot that's debatable, but it's all packaged in one comprehensive, high-profile set of diagnoses that will be cited for years: over-prescriptive state mandates that hamstring local schools and their leaders; lack of data to evaluate programs; money allocated without logic or reason; the near-inability of principals to fire bad teachers; lack of any rational policy to improve teacher quality and get them where they're most needed and, as a strong afterthought, the state's inadequate funding.
The report itself is ambivalent. It doesn't like categorical programs but, in calling for more targeted resources for poor and minority kids, seems to want to add some of its own. And despite its implicit swipe at the powers of teacher unions, its wish to give districts more fiscal discretion seems to throw more money on the bargaining table.
More telling, in arguing for fewer top-down prescriptions, the report's summary assumes that the state's high standards and corresponding accountability system alone will keep districts focused on raising student achievement.
But its iteration of California's weak student test scores vis-à-vis other states on NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, ignores the big gains California has made on the very standards and tests it expects to drive the system.
In the years between 1999, when California's accountability system was put in place, and 2005, California's lowest ranking elementary schools -- the bottom 10 percent -- gained 190 points on an 800 point scale, exceeding the academic scores of the state's midrange schools in 1999. All schools in the ninth decile in 2005 would have been in the top rank in 1999. More improvements are expected when new rankings are released next week.
Similarly, in the period from 2003 to 2006, the number of students rated proficient in algebra, regarded as essential to later success, rose from 103,000 to 163,000; in biology the number went from 124,000 to 174,000.
None of this suggests that California schools are flawless. Blacks and Latinos continue to lag behind Asians and non-Hispanic whites. Most of the schools that serve them have weaker teachers, too few counselors, shoddier facilities and often inadequate equipment. Thousands of California State University freshmen still need remedial work.
But the report's emphasis on NAEP scores, which don't measure the same academic skills mandated by the state's standards, buys into all the familiar generalizations about failing schools.
Different states also have different rules on which and how many English learners and learning handicapped students are excused from NAEP or "accommodated" with extra time and other advantages. For a study that's supposed to be based on research and involved a platoon of Ph.D.s, it takes its most fundamental assumption largely for granted.
Broad-brush negative assessments of schools are always convenient, both for the left, which wants more money, and for a lot of people on the right, who would rather cut funding or throw the whole system open to vouchers. If they can agree on anything, it's that the schools stink.
In releasing the report, Susanna Loeb, the Stanford researcher who headed this massive project, made clear that cherry-picking the report was not going to fix the state's large problems of governance and finance and won't do much for school quality or student achievement.
There's not much chance of that. Major reforms can't be engineered without additional funding; they go together. But Republican legislators weren't interested in the project to begin with and the unions aren't in business to make it easier to get their members fired. California has no strong lobby for quality.
Still, despite its flaws, the report may start the long overdue debate about rational and adequate funding that California so badly needs. It could also launch a thousand lawsuits. Either way, it should concentrate the mind.