Carl Cohn to oversee California’s school district spending
CLAREMONT >> Carl Cohn’s the man who’s going to give report cards to California’s public school districts and charter schools.
In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown announced a sweeping change to how California’s public K-12 schools are funded.
The Local Control Funding Formula replaces the countless narrowly tailored categorical funds that provided money to districts for highly specific needs with a single lump sum that factors in how many poor, foster and English language-learning students the district teaches.
To keep the districts on track with serving those students, districts had to come up with a Local Control Accountability Plan to map out how the district would improve outcomes for all students and specific benchmarks to measure their progress.
And Cohn, a Claremont Graduate University professor and the former superintendent of Long Beach Unified, is in charge of helping districts stay on track. On Sept. 1, he begins his new job as the head of the newly created California Collaborative on Educational Excellence, a state agency that oversees the implementation of the LCFF and districts’ LCAPs.
“This was a part of the original historic legislation,” he said. “It’s the final piece, and I think everybody got caught up with the initial aspects, but now the new, collaborative board has been in place since January.”
The Palm Springs resident took his place at the head of the organization on Sept. 1. The new laws give local districts more control over how they spend their educational fund. But Cohn and his colleagues are in charge of making sure districts keep to the commitments they made to their residents as part of their LCAPs.
“We’ve got to make sure that districts are following what’s in the statute for LCFF and LCAP,” Cohn said. “You can’t just trust that everyone is going to do the right thing.”
The collaborative isn’t a police agency so much as it is an advisory one, providing assistance to districts, charter schools and county departments of education. The organization isn’t big enough to do much more, even if members wanted to.
“Flat, agile, nimble. I’m not building a new bureaucracy or duplicating a new bureaucracy -- the idea, the goal is to just help people without a lot of politics,” Cohn said. “The ideal is really a new kind of a state agency that isn’t so much about policing as it is about getting help to places, becoming a repository for best practices.”
He “can’t imagine more than a dozen or so” CCEE employees ultimately. But, he thinks, that should be enough:
“I’m a huge fan of local control. I actually believe that when people own something at the local level, it’ll stand the test of time.”
Cohn has reason to believe in local school districts: He served as Long Beach Unified’s superintendent for 10 years in the 1990s and early 21st century.
“I became superintendent in Long Beach two months after the Rodney King riots,” he said. “I’m bullish on local control.”
Cohn intends to spend the first month listening to local officials on how the LCFF and LCAP are going so far. He already has some cause for concern:
“I spent a week at Stanford with superintendents from around the state,” he said. “What it seemed they were saying that the LCAP, even though it was well-intentioned, has become a huge compliance concern.”
The intention of the law was that the LCAP was for local community members to set local priorities, not that it would become a new bureaucratic nightmare.
“If a mid-course correction is needed, we need to get to that,” he said. “You’re not supposed to bog Carl Cohn to oversee California’s school district spending:
