Putting California first in driving education reform
To Brown, the answer is clear. California, not Washington, should be the driver of reforms dictating how schools will be held accountable for how well, or badly, their students do.
Referring to the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, which he championed, Brown said he is “proud of how California has led the country in the way it is returning control to local school districts.”
“For the last two decades, there has been a national movement to micromanage teachers from afar, through increasingly minute and prescriptive state and federal regulations,” he said. “California successfully fought that movement and has now changed its overly intrusive, test-heavy state control to a true system of local accountability.”
The issue is still on the table because of the recent federal law signed by President Barack Obama, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which will go into effect in the 2017-18 school year. It replaces the now widely discredited No Child Left Behind law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, but there is no assurance that the reforms in place in California will be any more successful in reading their goals than the No Child Left Behind
Just a week before Brown’s speech, Sue Burr, one of his closest advisors on education, pointed out at the State Board of Education meeting in Sacramento that the state will spend $71 billion of its own money on schools, and only about $7 billion will come from the federal government. “As Carl Sagan used to say,” Burr said, “that’s ‘b’ for billion.”
Her argument is that while California should adhere to the federal law, the state should not be turning itself inside out to adapt its reforms to fit the federal ones. Instead, she said, the locus of change should be here in California. “We are responsible for our children in California,” said Burr, a Brown appointee to the state board. “We have to look at what they (the federal government) have offered us, and how do we make it conform with what we are trying to do as well.”
“The state has to be the leader in proportion to our contribution (in school funding) and our responsibility (under the state constitution),” Burr said.
But the issue is far from settled, and is a central point of contention as the U.S. Department of Education draws up regulations to implement the new federal law. Late last month, 37 advocacy and civil rights organizations, including the NAACP and MALDEF, made the case that the law – the successor to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act – is in essence a civil rights law, and will require “robust and thorough” federal regulation “to close opportunity and achievement gaps.”
The U.S. Department of Education, the groups asserted in a letter to the department, “has the weighty responsibility of developing regulations that are comprehensive enough and sufficiently detailed to ensure that state and local implementation is consistent with the intent of this law and the longstanding federal role in protecting the civil rights of all Americans.”
This includes requiring states to identify the bottom 5 percent of lowest-performing schools and intervene when necessary. The groups also called for “meaningful enforcement” by the federal government of provisions in the law to ensure that minority students have equal access to quality teachers. They also asked for “thorough oversight” of reporting of per-pupil expenditures, school discipline, school climate and access to courses students need to be Putting California first in driving education reform | EdSource:
