Saturday, July 9, 2016

Will you answer the call for democracy and education? – Cloaking Inequity

Will you answer the call for democracy and education? – Cloaking Inequity:

Will you answer the call for democracy and education?

My entire life I have been inspired by the 1963 March on Washington. If I close my eyes, I can see and hear Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the I Have a Dream speech. Our generation must, we MUST continue the social change that this nation requires. The 2016 SOS Coalition People’s March for Public Education & Social Justice occurred on the step of the Lincoln Memorial on July 8.

A coalition of grassroots groups, union organizations, and activists gathered to organize and march for:

Full, equitable funding for all public schools; safe, racially just schools and communities; community leadership in public school policies; professional, diverse educators for all students; child-centered, culturally appropriate curriculum for all; and no high-stakes standardized testing!

It was incredible to be a part of the mass gathering of children and adults who rallyied and marched in support of education and social justice this summer!

In my speech at the Lincoln Memorial I implored those listening to answer the call for democracy and education. I also asked attendees to press for community-based solutions in education policy.

My Great Grandmother Z. Louise Scott was at the 1963 March on Washington. In fact, she also heard the I Have a Dream Speech when it was given first in Detroit by Dr. King. So, I was very emotional when I started the speech, you can probably hear my voice cracking.

But her memory, and her remembering her on the mall more than 50 years ago gave me the strength to give the most important speech of my life to date.

Will you answer the call for democracy and education? – Cloaking Inequity:

John Thompson: What’s Behind the “Third Wave” of Resegregation | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: What’s Behind the “Third Wave” of Resegregation | Diane Ravitch's blog:

John Thompson: What’s Behind the “Third Wave” of Resegregation

John Thompson, teacher and historian in Oklahoma, writes here about the resurgence of segregation in America’s schools.

He writes:

Are we heading into another resegregation era? A half century ago, at least in terms of urban education, “White Flight” gave Jim Crow a new lease on life. Then, Reaganomics subsidized more “suburban flight” as “Supply Side Economics” provided subsidies for moving good-paying jobs from cities to the exurbs. This further stimulated the “Big Sort,” or resegregation based on personal preferences. Segregation by choice, this time accompanied by gentrification and competition-driven corporate school reform, fired a second shotgun blast at inner city schools; this occurred as the Rightwing accelerated the destruction of our industrial base, and they were followed by New Democrats seeking to “end of welfare as we know it.”

Research by Cornell’s Kendra Bischoff, Stanford’s Sean Reardon, Ann Owens of the University of Southern California, and others raise the specter of a third wave of resegregation. Bischoff and Reardon recall that income segregation increased by 4.5% per decade since 1970. It has accelerated greatly since 2007. By 2012, more than 1/3rd of families in large metropolitan areas lived “in neighborhoods of concentrated affluence or concentrated poverty,” as “middle-class neighborhoods have become less common.” Moreover, Bischoff further explains why this segregation is so damaging to schools, “Local environments are important for children’s early and adolescent development, so the more polarized communities become, the more unequal the opportunities available to high- and low-income children.”

Reardon and Ann Owens add nuance to the sorry tale that we’ve always known – how flight from desegregated urban schools played a huge part in dividing modern America against itself. In doing so, it severely damaged our social and physical environments and our physical as well as moral health. Owens finds “that neighborhoods in the 100 largest cities became steadily more isolated by income between 1990 and 2010–but the segregation was driven by families with school-age children.”

She explains:

Whenever we talk about neighborhood and school segregation, they really go hand-in-hand. … There’s really a feedback loop, and it’s often framed as, we can never have integrated schools while we have John Thompson: What’s Behind the “Third Wave” of Resegregation | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Seattle Schools Community Forum: "De-Tracking" on Track in SPS

Seattle Schools Community Forum: "De-Tracking" on Track in SPS:

"De-Tracking" on Track in SPS

Welcome to NPE! - Network For Public Education - http://wp.me/P3bR9v-o7

The Times has an article this morning on "de-tracking" which is quite illuminating.

First, the expert they site, Carol Burris, is the head of a group I belong to, the Network for Public Education.

Carol Corbett Burris became Executive Director of the Network for Public Education Foundation in August 2015, after serving as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in NY since 2000. Prior to becoming a principal, she was a teacher at both the middle and high school level.

Dr. Burris co-authored Detracking for Excellence and Equity (2008) and Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness (2012), and authored On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the 21st Century Struggle against Re-segregation (2014).

She is one of the brightest lights in pushing back on corporate ed reform and a great thinker on public education.

The Times' article cites her work in New York where she helped her district's de-track middle/high school students and that work showed an increase for African-American students as well as white, Latinos and Asian students, for the Regents Diploma (for A-A students, the rise was from 32-82% in four years.)

I again note that Maple Elementary tried this in 2006 by having Spectrum-level teaching in all their classrooms. It worked but Maple had to fund this on their own and when they found they could not carry on, the district did not step Seattle Schools Community Forum: "De-Tracking" on Track in SPS:

Facing tough questions from Calif. officials, virtual charter school operator settles with attorney general | 89.3 KPCC

Facing tough questions from Calif. officials, virtual charter school operator settles with attorney general | 89.3 KPCC:

Facing tough questions from Calif. officials, virtual charter school operator settles with attorney general

A national operator of online schools has agreed to pay $8.5 million in settlement costs and complete a long checklist of reforms at the 14 online charter schools it runs in California, all as part of a deal to close a long-running investigation by the state Attorney General’s office.

In exchange, the A.G.’s office will not pursue civil suits against that operator — Virginia-based K12, Inc. — and the California Virtual Academies on claims the schools falsely inflated their attendance numbers and made misleading claims about their course offerings, class sizes and student test scores.

Additionally, K12 will write off $160 million-worth of credit it had extended to the California Virtual Academies, also known collectively as “CAVA," as part of a settlement filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday.

Though a company spokesperson said K12 never expected repayment of these credits, officials with the A.G.’s office said they felt expunging these credits was an important step toward putting more distance between the for-profit K12 and the individual, non-profit CAVA schools.

“This settlement ensures K12 and its schools are held accountable and make much-needed improvements,” said California Attorney General Kamala Harris in a statement, which also noted K12 had cooperated with the state’s inquiry.

More than 13,000 students attend California Virtual Academies. Different school districts across the state hold the charters for each individual CAVA school; for instance, the West Covina Unified School District authorizes the two L.A. County-based virtual campuses, which enroll a combined total of 3,700 kids.

But each of these individual non-profit entities has a curriculum provider and administrative office in common: K12, Inc. The company furnished everything necessary for students to attend courses and complete assignments entirely online.

In 2012, a whistleblower alleged CAVA teachers were fudging attendance records, counting students who’d logged in for as little as one minute as being present for a full day. This, the attorney general’s office alleged, had the effect of inflating the schools’ funding, since in California, daily attendance determines a school’s funding level.

As part of Friday's settlement, K12 and the CAVA schools agreed to several fixes designed to ensure teachers accurately record attendance and account for students' learning time. They also agreed to remedy a litany of other problems unearthed in the California Department of Justice's lengthy investigation. A few of them:

The California Virtual Academies will hire a third-party expert to review and recommend changes to the schools' special education policies. The schools must create a staff training program to "ensure effective understanding of legal requirements related to delivery of special education services."
The schools will correct several claims on CAVA websites and in advertisements and that the A.G. described as misleading. (They had said CAVA's public communications included inflated statistics about the growth in students' academic test scores, claims that parent satisfaction rates exceeded 94 percent when they were in fact lower; and false advertisements for class sizes ranging between 15 and 20 pupils, when in actuality, class sizes occasionally topped 30 students.)
CAVA schools will provide a $20 subsidy each month to each household to help pay for access to high-speed internet.
"To ensure an arms-length relationship between the not-for-profit CAVA schools and the for-profit education management company," each school will adopt conflicts of interest policies preventing K12 employees or their family members from holding seats on the boards of any individual California Virtual Academy. K12 officials will also remove themselves from check writing authority from CAVA schools' bank accounts.

Spurred on by an investigation into CAVA's practices by The San Jose Mercury News, California lawmakers are now considering whether to bar non-profit schools from contracting with for-profit firms to provide instructional services.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the California Charter Schools Association condemned what she termed "the predatory and dishonest practices employed by K12, Inc. to dupe parents using misleading marketing schemes, siphon taxpayer dollars with inflated student attendance data, and coerce CAVA School nonprofit employees into dubious contracting arrangements."

But K12 CEO Stuart Udell pushed back in a written statement of his own, pointing out the settlement did not include a statement of fault or wrongdoing from either the company or the individual schools.

"Opponents of K12 and skeptics of public online education have spent years making wild, attention-grabbing charges about us and our business,” Udell. “The State of California used the full authority and investigative resources of the Office of the Attorney General to investigate these charges for over eight months. In the end, we demonstrated industry leading levels of service and compliance with regulations and benefits to families."

Of K12's $8.5 million total settlement payout, $6 million will reimburse the state for the costs of its investigation.

An audit by the California State Controller's Office into the CAVA schools, which state schools superintendent Tom Torlakson requested in late June based on similar concerns, will still continue. The settlement does not preclude further action based on new findings in that inquiry.Facing tough questions from Calif. officials, virtual charter school operator settles with attorney general | 89.3 KPCC:

Just Released: My 3rd Book, School Choice: The End of Public Education? | deutsch29

Just Released: My 3rd Book, School Choice: The End of Public Education? | deutsch29:

Just Released: My 3rd Book, School Choice: The End of Public Education?

It is now officially published. (As of this writing, it is only available in paperback; stay tuned for the electronic version.)

Here is a brief promo summary of the book:

Proponents of market-driven education reform view vouchers and charters as superior to local-board-run, community-based public schools. However, the author of this timely volume argues that there is no clear research supporting this view. In fact, she claims there is increasing evidence of charter mismanagement–with public funding all-too-often being squandered while public schools are being closed or consolidated. Tracing the origins of vouchers and charters in the United States, this book examines the push to ”globally compete” with education systems in countries such as China and Finland. It documents issues important to the school choice debate, including the impoverishment of public schools to support privatized schools, the abandonment of long-held principles of public education, questionable disciplinary practices, and community disruption.School Choice: The End of Public Education? is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the past and future of public education in America.
Book Features:
* Provides a comprehensive historical account of the origins of vouchers and charters.
* Includes accounts of intriguing historical experiences.
* Examines the defunding of neighborhood public schools in favor of often-under-regulated charters.
* Reveals charter school ”churn” that often follows the closing of a mismanaged charter.
* Provides a cogent counternarrative to the claim that charters are necessary for America to compete globally.

And here is the enticing table of contents (click images to enlarge):

In upcoming posts, I will feature some excerpts.

Until then, feel free to pore over my table of contents.

Thank you for reading.

Schneider’s other books are A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education and Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?.

Don’t care to buy from Amazon? Purchase my books from Powell’s City of Books instead.

Just Released: My 3rd Book, School Choice: The End of Public Education? | deutsch29:

The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog

The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog:

The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER

Why did a Gates supported NGO (Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education) oppose a citizen’s petition to allow those citizens to determine their state’s educational policies?

The only remedy to yet another blatant public education takeover (allowed by the judiciary) to special interests is to take your child out of public school. The judiciary has adopted the tactics of the education reformers (NGOs) and the Federal Department of Education: it has ignored the right of citizen redress of government/NGO unaccountability. A Massachusetts citizens’ petition, to decide whether to keep Common Core or revert to the state’s own educational standards, was set aside on a technicality by Chief Justice Margot Botsford. Sandra Stotsky writes in Our judiciary failed our public schools – and our democracy:

Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts stopped voters from weighing in on a citizen-backed initiative to repeal Common Core.
In her opinion, Chief Justice Margot Botsford blocked on a technicality the petition to let voters decide whether to keep Common Core or revert to the state’s own educational standards. Her reasoning? The measure, she wrote, was unconstitutional because the portion of the ballot question that required the state to release used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests.
Got that? Justice Botsford thinks that release of used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests and standards as a matter of coherent public policy.

The petition had been approved by the Attorney General’s office and the arguments raised by the judge run contrary to past educational practice in Massachusetts:

It was an oddly-reasoned decision since any classroom teacher in Massachusetts could have told her that the annual release of all used MCAS test items in the Bay State, from 1998 to 2007, was clearly related to the transparency of the state tests and very useful to classroom teachers. Among other things, the information allowed teachers to find out exactly what students in their classes did or did not do well and to improve their teaching skills for the next year’s cohort of students.

Botsford could have asked test experts as well. Any test expert would also have told her that the transparency of an assessment begins with an examination of the test items on it, followed up first by the names and positions of the experts who vetted the items on all tests at each grade level, and then by information on how the pass/fail scores for each performance level were determined, and the names and The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Why Companies Like Achieve Inc Now Want You To Opt Out Of State Assessments – Exceptional Delaware

Why Companies Like Achieve Inc Now Want You To Opt Out Of State Assessments – Exceptional Delaware:

Why Companies Like Achieve Inc Now Want You To Opt Out Of State Assessments

A blog called NYC Public School Parents published the results of a survey about testing and opt out a couple of days ago. The findings were a bit bizarre in my opinion. The fact that it came from Achieve Inc. is very troubling. For the past couple years, maybe longer, parents have been opting their children out of the state assessment. That’s a good thing. But the fact that Achieve Inc. would publish findings that show parents are presumably getting sick of testing and more suburban moms know about opt out is a bit of a farce in my opinion. At this point, Achieve wants you to opt out. They want you to complain about too much testing. They want you, the parents of America, to make such a loud noise that the feds and the states will be forced to change testing environments. Yes, one of the biggest corporate education reform companies in America is finally in agreement with what we’ve been saying all along! Finally! But guess what… this was the plan all along.

If you are royally confused, follow me. Achieve Inc. helped to set up the Common Core, way back when. There are some who say they took the work of the Common Core steering committees, ditched it, and came up with their own set of standards. You know how so many people say “Common Core sucks” and “It’s federal intrustion” and all that stuff? They are right. I believe it was intentionally designed to be messed up. And the tests based off it, like the Smarter Balanced Assessment and PARCC? They were designed to be bad tests. No one will say this officially. But they wanted enough parents to opt out to make some noise. Not a full-blown, everyone opts out noise. But enough to draw attention to the subject of assessments. And they responded. Florida, Delaware, and many other states conducted Assessment Inventories. In Delaware, ours was initiated by, who else, Achieve Inc. These inventories served a double purpose. It kept the subject of “too many assessments” in the minds of those who followed this type of thing. It also helped to stop some states from moving forward with opt out legislation. I’ve seen a Delaware Department of Education email stating our Senate Joint Resolution #2 was a solution against opt out.

You’re still confused. I understand. It’s hard to explain this in any way that makes sense. The Common Core-High Stakes Testing era of corporate education reform is coming to an end. Very soon. But that was just a phase. It allowed the states to get all their data systems in place. It allowed career & technical education initiatives to get their start. But the biggest thing Common Core and the state assessments did was open the door to something else. We are now entering the next phase and the groundwork was laid a long time ago.

Welcome to the Competency-Based Education era! Instead of your child advancing through grade levels, they will now advance once they master the material. Don’t get me wrong. The state assessments will still be there. But parents most likely won’t even know when their child is taking it. Because it won’t be the same test. It won’t be students cooped up taking the same test over a period of weeks in the Spring. It will be all year. The same tests, that we have loved to hate, they will still be here. They may tweak them up a bit, but they aren’t going anywhere. They laid the trap, and we all fell in it.

How is this even possible? Through modern technology. Through personalized learning. Don’t be fooled by the term personalized learning. There are actually two kinds. The concept has been around for decades. More one-on-one instruction from teachers, Why Companies Like Achieve Inc Now Want You To Opt Out Of State Assessments – Exceptional Delaware:

‘For black lives to matter, black #education has to matter.’ - The Washington Post

‘For black lives to matter, black #education has to matter.’ - The Washington Post:

‘For black lives to matter, black #education has to matter.’

A demonstrator holds up a Black Lives Matter sign near the Capitol on Thursday as a protest march on police brutality arrived after having started near the White House. (Paul Holston/AP)

"For black lives to matter, black #education has to matter." @JessedHagopian #Peoplesmarch16 #SaveOurSchools @BadassTeachersA #TBATs
— undercoverBAT (@undercoverBAT) July 8, 2016

It would be easy on a Friday so dominated by news of deadly violence in different parts of the country to ignore everything else, but there is an event in Washington that shouldn’t be overlooked.

It’s the annual conference of Save Our Schools, a coalition of educators, parents, students and concerned citizens fighting against corporate school reform and for the health of America’s public education system.

It is one of several conventions now being held every year by public education activist groups, including United Opt Out and the Network for Public Education — all of which illustrate the growing effort among activists to strategize together to achieve greater impact on the education debate in this country.

Activists over the last several years have been successful in bringing national attention to problems with high-stakes standardized testing, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, elements of the school choice movement and other key issues in the world of education. And with achievement gaps still gaping, some 22 percent of American children living in poverty, and schools being more segregated today than they have been since the 1960s, these activists have consistently pressed federal officials and legislators to focus their reform efforts on bringing educational equity to all students.

The tweet above says it all rather succinctly. The author is identified as “undercoverBAT,” a reference to a teacher who is a member of the Badass Teachers Association, a group of thousands of teachers who are highly vocal about their discontent with reform and who are participating in the Save Our Schools convention Friday and Saturday. The author stays unidentified because of a desire “to stay employed,” according to the user’s Twitter bio.

These are the stated goals of Save Our Schools, which held its first gathering in Washington in 2011, an event at which actor Matt Damon spoke in defense of public schools and teachers:

[Matt Damon’s clear-headed speech to teachers rally]

Equitable funding across all public schools and school systems
An end to high-stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation
Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies
Curriculum responsive to and inclusive of local school communities
Professional, qualified and committed teachers in all public schools‘For black lives to matter, black #education has to matter.’ - The Washington Post:

Judge rules in favor of SN&R in Kevin Johnson lawsuit - Sacramento News & Review

Judge rules in favor of SN&R in Kevin Johnson lawsuit - Page Burner - July 8, 2016 - Blogs - Sacramento News & Review:

Judge rules in favor of SN&R in Kevin Johnson lawsuit

It’s been a long time coming.

In March of 2015, SN&R’s Cosmo Garvin filed a Public Records Act request for emails related to Mayor Kevin Johnson and the National Conference of Black Mayors. The City of Sacramento didn’t release them all, and a legal battle ensued. Read the most recent updates here and here.

Finally, SN&R and the mayor’s lawyers at Ballard Spahr LLP met today in court. The mayor’s lawyer requested a re-examination of several emails, resulting in a fairly exasperated Judge Christopher Krueger.

“Every document an attorney has seen doesn’t become a legal document,” Krueger said, adding that a “talismanic invocation” of attorney-client privilege doesn’t make it so.

With the exception of one redaction, Krueger ruled that most of the remaining emails will be turned over to SN&R. Ballard Spahr has until July 18, but it is still possible that they’ll file an appeal.

What does this mean for SN&R? The mayor? How the city will deal with Public Records Act requests in the future? Nick Miller will dive into all of that in next week’s SN&R.Judge rules in favor of SN&R in Kevin Johnson lawsuit - Page Burner - July 8, 2016 - Blogs - Sacramento News & Review:

Court orders release of Mayor Kevin Johnson’s emails

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson testifies in the arena court trial on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 in Sacramento, California. The City of Sacramento must release more than 50 emails relating to Mayor Kevin Johnson’s controversial takeover of an embattled black mayors group in 2013, Sacramento Superior Court judge Christopher Krueger ruled on Friday, July 8, 2016. Hector Amezcua hamezcua@sacbee.com

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article88605127.html#storylink=cpy

The city of Sacramento must release more than 50 emails relating to Mayor Kevin Johnson’s controversial takeover of an embattled black mayors group in 2013, a judge ruled on Friday.

Sacramento Superior Court Judge Christopher Krueger said the contested communications should be considered public records and must be turned over within 10 calendar days.

Scott Humphreys of law firm Ballard Spahr argued on behalf of Johnson and the National Conference of Black Mayors that the emails, many between city staff working for Johnson, should be covered by attorney-client privilege.

Krueger admonished that attorney-client privilege required more than “talismanic citation of those words,” and that after a close review, the emails and attachments did not meet the standard of communicating legal advice, opinions or analysis. In some cases, he pointed out that they did not appear to be legal in nature at all, such as one memo suggesting exit interview questions for an employee that Humphreys argued had been reviewed by his firm.

“Every document an attorney has ever seen does not become attorney-client privilege,” Krueger said.

The legal case stems from Johnson’s bitterly contested seizure of power at NCBM and its subsequent bankruptcy. An investigation by The Sacramento Bee, including more than 6,100 pages of emails and 16 documents obtained through the Public Records Act, outlined years of work by Johnson’s paid city staff and volunteers to solidify Johnson’s leadership of the organization after years of mismanagement had diminished its stature.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office said he would not fight the ruling. “Since the beginning we’ve always contended that whatever emails the judge ruled were not privileged should be released,” said spokeswoman Crystal Strait.Court orders release of Mayor Kevin Johnson’s emails

Anita Chabria: 916-321-1049, @chabriaa

Stanford's Michael Kirst, an innovator for education | News | Palo Alto Online |

Stanford's Michael Kirst, an innovator for education | News | Palo Alto Online |:

Stanford's Michael Kirst, an innovator for education
Longest serving state Board of Education president and longtime professor has played key role in giving local school districts more control

Revolutionary change in public education is rare.

Yet California's public school districts are today in the midst of a sea change, due largely to the efforts of Michael Kirst, the longest serving state Board of Education president and a longtime professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education.

Kirst, close to 80 years old, is now in his 52nd year of an uncommon career in education policy. Despite an intimidating CV that spans decades of education experience, from the White House to the California school board, the retired professor conveys neither self-importance nor pretensions. Mild-mannered and affable, Kirst seems at home in his comfortable Stanford office, reflecting on years past while sitting beneath a ceiling-high wall of books (some of which he's authored) and a black-and-white photograph of his younger self shaking hands with President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. On a recent summer afternoon, a single large window was thrown open to let in the breeze and the sounds of campus visitors.

Despite the late stage of his career, Kirst recently shepherded through a dramatic shift in how California school districts operate -- from government-driven, top-down budgeting to an emphasis on local autonomy and community involvement. He has been called the "key architect" of the state's new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which since 2013 has required California school districts to develop three-year Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAP), which spell out how they will spend funding to improve education for all students. When Gov. Jerry Brown signed this bill into law on July 1, 2013, he called it "truly revolutionary."

"We are bringing government closer to the people, to the classroom where real decisions are made, and directing the money where the need and challenge is greatest," he said. "This is a good day for California, it's a good day for school kids, and it's a good day for our future."

While the governor and many others have championed the new funding formula as a historic reform for California's encumbered public school system, it has also been criticized by some advocacy groups who worry more local flexibility and less accountability could hurt high-needs students. However, independently conducted studies of the local-control formula that have uncovered concerns about transparency and accountability are nonetheless optimistic about this next era in California education.

The Local Control Funding Formula set uniform funding rates based on districts' average daily student attendance across particular grades. It aims to help the districts that need the most aid by providing supplemental funding for certain student subgroups, such as English language learners, low-income students and foster youth, and concentration funding for districts whose English-learner and low-income populations exceed 55 percent of their enrollment. It eliminated approximately 75 percent of special state programs created to serve needs not met by general fund regular education programs, known as categorical programs. Now only 14 are left.

This was "almost an 180-degree turn" for a system entrenched in decades of categorical programs and incremental funding, Kirst said in an interview with the Weekly.

"You were stage managing the local," he said. "It was, as I call it, a historical accretion with no underlying rationale and no linkage to student needs. For every categorical program that helped low-income students, they passed one for the middle-income (students). It was very complex.

"That spurred the idea that we need to move back to some simple principles, pass these simple principles, unload the past and start with a new paradigm," he said.

Welcome to the new paradigm. Three years in, school districts across the state are adjusting to the new formula, which provides districts dollars based on the demographic profile of the students they serve. Despite representing a step back for the government, it also put in place "enhanced" accountability requirements, Kirst wrote with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson in an August 2013 letter to superintendents and charter school administrators about the impending changes. Among other criteria, the formula requires strong parent involvement -- a requirement that has spurred new levels of community participation in what was a previously opaque, inaccessible budgeting process, Kirst told the Weekly.

Asking districts to create multi-year budget plans that are updated each year with the help of the community has also led to improved long-term planning while also encouraging transparency, Kirst said.

Despite the fact that Palo Alto Unified is among 15 percent of school districts in the state, according to the California Legislative Analyst's Office, that do not receive additional revenue through the new funding formula due to its high per-pupil funding rates, the district is still required to follow the LCFF process. Palo Alto must hold public meetings to collect feedback and input as it annually updates its Local Control Accountability Plan, measuring itself against past years and setting goals for the future. The Palo Alto Board of Education approved this update at its last meeting of the school year on June 21.

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It's hard to believe that Kirst, one of California's leading education policy analysts, fell into the field by happenstance.

Kirst, who grew up near Reading, Pennyslvania, was recruited by Dartmouth College as a high school football player. He attended the private New Hampshire college on a need-blind scholarship, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1961. Attracted to public Stanford's Michael Kirst, an innovator for education | News | Palo Alto Online |:

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