Local Accountability: Community Input in Education Funding
Will a community-based approach to accountability and school funding work? This piece will contain a lot of acronyms and include some of my insights on the implementation of Local Accountability.
I’m a classroom teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District, and large urban local in California (43,000 students, 38% are English Learners, and over 60% are low-income). I am also active in my union local, Sacramento City Teachers Association, and I was elected as a representative to the State Council of the California Teachers Association (CTA). The opinions in this piece are only my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of either my school district, my local, CTA or NEA. I also blog at Reflections on Teaching.
This discussion centers around the new funding formula being used to allocate how California gives money to local school districts. For a host of reasons (lawsuits requiring funding-equity, Proposition 13 affecting local property taxes as a funding base for education, etc.) school monies in California for most districts come from the state. Traditionally, that has been in the form of base funding, and what are called categoricals, or specific funds for specific purposes, like English Language Acquisition funds, Foster Youth Programs, Migrant Programs, etc. Governor Brown has come up with a new formula that will allocate extra money, but allow local districts to come up with plans for how it will be spent. This is called Local Control Funding Formula or LCFF. The plans that districts have to write are called Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs).
The commentary from a previous guest blogger here on Cloaking Inequity and their discussion about Local Accountability pretty much agrees with what I’ve seen. Implementation of LCFF in the first year is all over the map throughout the state. Dictatorial and controlling districts are writing LCAPs that do not have any meaningful stakeholder input. Other districts are involving teachers representatives in a variety of areas of discussion like curriculum and instruction. Some districts have already had contract provisions for this, and for site-based decision making. Some districts have had well functioning school site councils (which included teacher, community and parent representatives) that are able to contribute to this process. Others sadly, still have SSCs that are a rubber-stamp for the site administrator or the district. Many districts are just confused.
Two things will likely need to be “tightened” in how LCAPs are created. First, the implementing language says districts must “consult” with stakeholders (teachers, parents, community). That word, consult, has lost any meaning at this point. For example, a district will hold a town hall on a issue, present their side, and take some questions. They will then proceed with their original proposal, without any changes or input from this meeting, and claim they “consulted” the public.
This happened in DC with Rhee, and in districts run by Broad Superintendent (it’s in their rule book) and gone on to be a widespread practice. Consult has come to mean, “We’ll tell you what we’re doing, listen to you whine about it, then do it anyway.” This was a concern that I heard more than once at CTA State Council in March of this year.
They will either need to define “consult” better, or add other language like “based on a consensus of opinion from stakeholders” (this language suggested by one State Council member). The state and CTA are saying we need to give the process time and look at it after the first year and that’s fair enough. But, I don’t think these problems will resolve themselves without districts being forced to change how they do Local Accountability: Community Input in Education Funding | Cloaking Inequity:
