SI&A Cabinet Report – News & Resources:
Signaling a likely transition to student testing based on the common core standards by spring 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown announced Tuesday a plan to earmark $1 billion of the spring revenue windfall to help schools buy new textbooks, make technology improvements and provide teacher training to implement the new curriculum standards.
Brown’s revised May budget – buoyed by close to $4.5 billion in tax collections above estimates made in January –also moves to tamp down political opposition to his plan to restructure school finance, the Local Control Funding Formula.
He would use some of the additional revenue to increase the per-pupil base grant given to all districts under the formula from an average of $4,920 per average daily attendance to $5,421.
Brown’s May budget would require that the existing deficit factor reduction to revenue limits be restored before the weighted student formula is fully implemented.
The governor has also proposed that the phase-in period for his Local Control Funding Formula increase from five years to seven years.
“This budget builds a solid foundation for California's future by investing in our schools, continuing to pay down our debts and establishing a prudent reserve,” Brown said at a Capitol news conference this morning. “But California's
May waiver calendar at SBE includes relief from Open Enrollment
By Tom Chorneau
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Six school districts with test scores at or above the state’s performance benchmark have been granted permission to remove schools otherwise targeted by the 2013-14 Open Enrollment Act’s list of lowest performers.
The California State Board of Education, however, rejected a separate waiver request from a seventh district whose scores on the Academic Performance Index last year fell just short of the 800 mark.
The Open Enrollment Act, adopted in 2009, calls on the state to identify a list of the lowest achieving schools – later renamed ‘open enrollment schools’ – and gives families attending those schools the option of transferring to any other school statewide.
But the criteria used to identify the low-performers also required that no more than 10 percent of schools in a single school district could be placed on the transfer list. As a result, each year the 1,000 “lowest-achieving schools” identified by the state for the purposes of open enrollment also includes a significant number of schools that have achieved API scores well above the 800 mark.
Since the Legislature has since been unable to resolve the issue, the state board’s waiver authority has served as a reasonable alternative. As practiced, the SBE waiver allows districts with API scores of at least 800 to have their schools removed from the Open Enrollment Act’s list of low-performers.
While schools receiving relief are not subject to public labeling as “low-performing,” the waiver comes with the condition that the district honor any request to transfer.
Legislation to eliminate the 1,000-school limit and expand the program to every school in the state was rejected
High-stakes testing and communities pushing back have been all over the news lately. Just this week, Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference opposing the implementation of Keystone exams, mandatory end-of-course state exams which will go into effect for September's 9th grade class. Amidst a backdrop of unprecedented statewide level cuts under the Corbett administration, Senate leaders said the Keystones would "cost taxpayers dearly" and were being implemented "without a full understanding of the benefits for students, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers.”
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