Peter Schrag
Listening to even the best people in California’s school reform discussions doesn’t leave much clarity about the direction our money-starved education system should go or much confidence that things will get perceptibly better any time soon.
Many of those good people know what’s needed. It’s just that they don’t all know the same thing, or don’t know it at the same time. That much at least was apparent once again at a forum in Sacramento last week on school finance sponsored by PPIC, the Public Policy Institute of California.
What they agreed on was that the fixes of the last 30 or 40 years – what state School Board President Michael Kirst called “the historical accretion” of programs – wasn’t working. It has become, State Sen. Joe Simitian said, “the Winchester Mystery House” of school finance, rooms added willy-nilly to solve one or another problem.
Neither the policymakers nor the reformers are entirely – or maybe even mostly – to blame. In a