Commentary: Mike Kirst sizes up Excellence Committee report
I provided Stanford education professor emeritus Michael Kirst a copy of the report by the Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence and asked him to share his thoughts on it. Kirst, a past chairman of the State School Board, is co-author this year of the study “Getting Beyond the Facts: Reforming California School Finance.”
by Michael W. Kirst
The Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence produced a blueprint for overhauling California education from preschool to grade 12. It should be the first place the public goes to understand what is wrong and how to improve the system. It is clear, compelling, and specific.
But it advocates coherent, comprehensive state legislation in a year of large deficits and
leftover legislative priorities from 2007 including health care and water. The report warns correctly that “cherry-picking their proposals could make the current intolerable situation worse.” The state Legislative Analyst has projected billions of new dollars available for education in the next five years, in part caused by declining enrollment, so the reforms can be phased in as the economy recovers.
How would the master teachers be selected and trained? How much would it cost for master teachers’ increased pay and replacements for the master teachers who are not teaching children?
The report is a harsh indictment of the current state education system rather than students and educators. Among the criticisms are a system riddled with inefficiencies, hobbled with red tape, and impossible to understand. State policies are tolerant of failure, lack assistance and rewards for educators, and leave everybody and nobody in charge. More funding is needed, but not until numerous systemic flaws are remedied.
The report has many outstanding recommendations in its five major areas … strengthening teaching and leadership, school funding, governance, data, and preschool. For example, the state role maintains its focus upon high student test scores, but the Committee wants much more local control of how to attain these outcomes. Now the state specifies not only what students should attain, but also how to do it through a 100,000-section education code and 85 earmarked programs.
State deregulation of districts and school procedures, accompanied by state rewards and sanctions for student progress, is a major theme. The Committee supports more state funding but allocates it to individual schools based on the number of needy pupils without the Byzantine complexity of current state funding formulas.
The preschool agenda is ambitious including increasing kindergarten from half days to full days and providing new high-quality learning standards. A new state data system would encompass preschool through college. Now California can only report results at the school level but not for each teacher or pupil as they move up the grades.
A key issue is whether the Committee package will improve classroom instruction
significantly. In many ways everything else is necessary but not sufficient for enabling
teachers to continuously improve their instructional effectiveness. The Committee’s ideas need more refinement.
The key recommendation is intensive professional development in each teacher’s classroom delivered through master and mentor teachers who provide regular coaching for the needs of each teacher. No state has developed this kind of assistance for hundreds of thousands of teachers. How would the master teachers be selected and trained? How much would it cost for master teachers’ increased pay and replacements for the master teachers who are not teaching children? Perhaps the state should experiment with these concepts before going to statewide scale.
The Committee encourages deregulation of teacher training by breaking up the education school monopoly. This is reasonable, but there is no developed system for making sure the new teacher-training entrants are any more effective than those that complete education schools.
Overall, the Committee’s diagnosis of the state systems’ problems are on target, and the recommendations would go a long way toward solving them. But in the past, state politicians treat these kinds of reports like a Chinese menu and select a few unrelated items for consideration. The report makes clear this needs to be an interlocking coherent policy reform.
While the Stanford study is well-intentioned, the outcomes may not be what its authors think. To put the responsibility for determining where the education money goes into the hands of local academics (superintendents of school districts) may have the result of making pure academics a little top heavy in the system, and leave students unprepared for the work world. In some coastal districts, all programs but academics may be reduced because of declining enrollment and a crumbling infrastructure.
I would be the first to agree that the education funding system is arcane. However, I would devote a little more thought, stakeholder participation, and strong analysis into planning reform legislation. I would like to see a a committee that specializes in studying possible outcomes of proposed legislation before enacting it. We may then get legislation that actually serves California students and its taxpaying citizens.
Look it’s Deja-vu all 0ver again. Back in 2004, this was quoted and stated on a blog : ” But, Schwarzenegger’s steadfast refusal to re-examine how schools are funded or to raise taxes means that important programs will be eliminated, and that the losses will disproportionately fall on poorer districts. A recent Los Angeles Times editorial said of the budget, “the only losers, aside from California’s future, are cities, counties and local schools, which were fleeced in return for promises of future protection.” Yes calling ‘education reform’ as a bye-product of ‘budget cuts’ ad mist trying to raise the academic standards with an ever growing population of non-English learners.Puts all in jeopardy. Schwarzenegger did not create this mess; he inherited it. He grabbed the helm of California’s sinking fiscal ship and has tried to right it. But California’s beleaguered educational system suffers as Schwarzenegger refuses to budge on his disingenuous “no-tax” pledge. Remember this, In May 2004, Field Poll, 62 percent of Californians (and a plurality of Republicans) said that taxes will have to be raised to resolve the state’s budget deficit. But the Golden State’s golden boy refuses to contemplate inconveniencing the affluent. Instead, the governor is borrowing billions, deferring debts, and betting on an improved economy. All the while California’s students endure undeserved hardship.
Arnold’s EDUCATION FIX MISSES THE POINT, Part 2.
Schwarzenegger’s “Year of Education”: Missing The Point at the Outset By Robert Cruickshank
The basic elements of Arnold’s education reforms have begun to make their way into the press, and unsurprisingly, they’re not good. Arnold intends to use his “Year of Education” to make a power grab at the expense of teachers, students who have different educational needs, and even basic democracy.
The most dramatic reforms appear to have been abandoned due to the budget crisis, as Arnold is in fact likely to propose balancing the budget on the backs of students. But other changes that don’t involve money will still appear in his State of the State address on Tuesday:
“In his State of the State address on Tuesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to announce an ambitious but controversial education agenda that includes merit pay for teachers, more local control of school finances, and essentially barring 4-year-olds from entering kindergarten.”
Additionally, the AP adds some more proposals that seem likely to be unveiled:
“Business leaders who advise Schwarzenegger say failing schools need to be held accountable first. They want Schwarzenegger, through his education secretary, David Long, to use the tools of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to punish schools with large numbers of failing students.
“Many of those schools are in high-poverty neighborhoods and have a high proportion of black and Hispanic students.”
2008 will indeed be “the Year of Education” in California, but not in the way Arnold intended. We will have to engage in a major fight if we are to protect education from crippling budget cuts and the imposition of a business-based agenda that parents oppose and that does nothing to actually improve learning and achievement.
The first thing to understand about education reform, before even looking at the specific proposals here, is that it so often misses the point. The problem with education in California isn’t that it is universally bad. I am a product of California public schools, from my first day in kindergarten in suburban Orange County in 1984 to my graduation from UC Berkeley in 2000 - and I had a great education the whole way. The problem is instead that it is uneven, and that students of color, and those from poor backgrounds, do not have the same educational opportunities or outcomes.
One of the most accurate predictors of student achievement is the income level of the student’s parents. Lower-income families tend to live in districts with inadequately funded schools, but also aren’t able to give students the kind of external support, such as test prep or computers, they need to succeed. Idealistic teachers who go to work in, for example, Oakland often burn out due to the lack of state support for their work and either find another career or take a job in Walnut Creek.
Those teachers who remain often give what they have to their students, but education is not a substitute for economic opportunity. To target poor children for aid but not their parents or their neighbors, as many have come to understand, is not a likely recipe for success.
We do indeed have an achievement gap in education in California. But it isn’t going to be addressed by abandoning the poor and students of color, by attacking teachers, and by reducing the amount of democratic control over education. California has an education problem because it won’t spend money on improving it, and Arnold, with his firm opposition to any new taxes, refuses to do the only thing that will help remedy the situation.
In that light, educational reform proposals such as those Arnold are proposing have to be seen in a different light. They’re proposed to achieve political goals, not educational goals. Over the next three days I break down the proposals according to three categories: Teaching, Funding, and Democracy. A lack of respect for each is at the core of Arnold’s plan, as is a desire to seize power over education in California.
Will Democrats rise to the occasion? Last year was to be the Year of Health Care. Arnold proposed individual mandates, and Democrats pooh-poohed it. But, 11 months later, there was the State Assembly, controlled by Democrats, approving a plan that incorporated Arnold’s basic proposals, with some slight differences in the details. If the Year of Education is to have a better outcome than the Year of Health Care, we need Democrats to stand firm for public education, for students, and for teachers.