California education reform must be multi-faceted, support students and teachers
The teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, bolstered by vociferous support from parents, forced the 500,000-student L.A. Unified School District to agree to reduce some class sizes and hire more nurses and counselors. Teachers in Oakland are now following suit with similar demands.
Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom has commissioned a study of how charter schools affect public school funding, which is also a beef in the teacher labor unrest. A suite of bills pending in the Legislature would pretty much halt the progress of charters here.
Despite support from wealthy philanthropists who tout standardized testing, charter schools and the closing of low-performing schools, the school reform movement’s chosen candidate for governor — Antonio R. Villaraigosa — never came close. Their candidate for schools superintendent was also bested by a candidate backed by the California Teachers Association.
Remember the “parent trigger” law? It was going to shift the paradigm in California schools by giving parents whose kids attended low-performing schools unprecedented new power. Parents would be able to force various reforms at their child’s school by signing a petition — including changing it to a charter school.
When’s the last time you heard about that happening? Yeah, I can’t remember either.
The school reform movement isn’t dead, but it’s definitely taken a beating. It has itself to blame. Too many new initiatives were hailed as the great new thing and later turned out not to be so great.
At times, they were unfairly punitive. The combination of intense focus on tests, including forcing teachers to program their lessons around the tests, turned college students off of teaching careers. The charter movement’s general “blame the teacher” attitude also helped.
Ten years ago, President Obama was at the forefront of pressing for a range of unproven reforms, including unlimited charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to their students’ performance on tests. The latter eventually proved to be an ineffective way to help students learn.
When the Every Student Succeeds Act was making its way through Congress, I asked then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan, an ardent reform proponent, how he would keep those measures going under a new law that empowered states far more than the old No Child Left Behind Act.
“The state improvement plans will have to be approved by my office,” he said. “So we’ll make sure they’re strong ones.”
Duncan was soon gone. Early attempts by his successor, Betsy Devos, to tighten those state CONTINUE READING: California education reform must be multi-faceted, support students and teachers | The Sacramento Bee
