School ‘reform’ more like regression
For observers of California’s public schools who look past the normal narratives and distractions, something bordering on despair is in order.
Consider the legislation now advancing in Sacramento to gut the Stull Act, the 1971 law mandating that student performance be a factor in teacher evaluations. Sen. Carol Liu, D-La Canada Flintridge, and Senate President Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, have won Senate passage of a measure to have each individual school district devise teacher evaluation systems in collective bargaining. Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, have won approval of a very similar measure in the Assembly.
This is billed as a reform. It is the opposite of reform. It is nonsensical to not have a statewide standard for evaluation of teachers. By pushing standard-setting to the local level, where teachers unions are nearly always the most powerful political force, the Legislature seeks to end meaningful, consequential evaluations. This has long been a goal of the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, the powerful, wealthy unions that appear to dominate Sacramento more than ever.
As for the presumption that Gov. Jerry Brown will act to protect California’s 6.2 million K-12 students by vetoing these bills, that faith is based on Brown’s noble rhetoric about the importance of helping struggling students become productive members of society — not his record. In June, the governor underscored the emptiness of his rhetoric when his administration announced that funds disbursed via the Local Control Funding Formula — the 2013 reform under which billions of dollars was supposed to be funneled to troubled schools to directly help English learners and foster children — could instead be used for broad raises for teachers. That’s exactly what’s being done in many of the urban school districts that got the most extra state funding, starting with Los Angeles Unified, with the governor’s blessing.
Brown’s high-profile 2012 comments, in which he denounced the “siren song” of trendy education reforms and endorsed “subsidiarity” - a fancy word meaning more local control — look downright sinister in retrospect. They appear to be the starting point of a long con job in which the governor and the Legislature first got a fake funding reform in place to help teachers get raises and now are seeking another fake reform to give teachers who already have vast job protections even more guarantees of permanent employment.
And that’s not all Brown has done. There’s also his support for two 2014 bills that are now law. The first forces school districts to spend down their fiscal reserves — a mandate that school administrators looking at California’s boom-and-bust budget cycles properly consider insane. The second — nominally a teacher discipline bill making it easier to fire deviants — instead gives most categories of troubled teachers even more insulation.
As for Atkins’ role in the attempted gutting of the Stull Act, she never would have become Assembly speaker without the CTA’s and the CFT’s support. But California isn’t just opposing or ignoring the education reform policies touted by President Barack Obama; state leaders are going full-bore in the opposite direction, making accountability even less likely.
This is not an inspiring legacy. It is an awful one.
