O.C. Educators Skeptical of New State School Reforms
January 8, 2010
A series of sweeping education reforms intended to make California compet itive for up to $700 million in federal stimulus funding was signed into law Thursday, a milestone that Orange County educators say might prop up struggling schools – or bury local educators under new bureaucracy and costly regulations.
The new laws encompass the education reform agenda outlined under President Obama’s federal Race to the Top grant program, allowing California to apply for a slice of $4.35 billion in federal stimulus funding. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the legislation Thursday afternoon at a press conference in Los Angeles.
Melissa Bravo, left, and Maria Bermjo, both fourth-graders at Santa Ana’s Madison Elementary, use a computer-based math tutorial program developed by Matthew Peterson, center, of the Orange County MIND Institute. Education officials say local educational programs like the MIND Institute stand to benefit tremendously if California wins federal Race to the Top stimulus money.
2007 FILE PHOTO: ANDY TEMPLETON, FOR THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTERKey reforms
Teacher evaluations: Students’ academic performance may be used to evaluate teachers and principals in California. School districts must get their local teachers unions to agree to this plan for it to take effect at the local level, but the new state legislation provides the legal framework.
Open enrollment: Students at the 1,000 lowest-performing schools in California may transfer to a better school anywhere in the state, including in the same school district. Previously, students’ transfer options at California’s worst schools – as defined by their Academic Performance Index score – were limited.
Failing schools: School districts will be forced to adopt a specific Obama-backed reform plan for failing schools. The reform plan could mean closing the school, firing the principal and up to half of the teachers, or turnin g the campus into a charter school.
Parent empowerment: At poor-performing schools, a school district must adopt a reform plan if at least half of parents at the school sign a petition demanding a turn-around. The initiative will be limited to 75 schools.
Charter school cap: California will no longer cap the number of independent, public charter schools allowed to operate in the state. Lifting the cap on charter schools is largely symbolic – that is, intended to demonstrate the state’s commitment to Obama’s education reform agenda – as California has yet to reach its own previously set charter school cap.
Student assessment: California will create new framework and support measures for a fledgling state program that aims to track students’ academic progress from elementary school through college. Typical school data reporting systems tend to look at, for example, how eighth-graders perform from year to year, but the state’s longitudinal educational data system will track how a student performs in eighth grade and then ninth grade and so on.
"I don’t disagree with it, but the devil is in the details," Orange County schools Superintendent Bill Habermehl said. "When you look at this piece of legislation, you say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that.’ But when the bureaucrats write the (legal) regulations – and the people who enforce the regulations interpret things differently than we do – it costs us money."
The two complementary Race to the Top bills, which cleared the state Legislature on Wednesday after months of political wrangling, are being met with a mix of cautious optimism and trepidation by Orange County schools.
Perhaps the most controversial reform for Orange County schools is linking teacher evaluations to students’ academic achievement.
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The laws also create tough, new accountability measures for the state’s lowest-performing schools and empower parents to pull their kids out of failing schools or demand sweeping reform plans for them.
"One of the biggest concerns I have is that these are very simplistic solutions to a complex problem," said 18-year educator Susan Mercer, president of the Santa Ana Unified teachers union and an intermediate school math teacher. "At low socio-economic schools, the challenges are huge compared to middle-class schools. I don’t believe the state can identify and take into consideration all of those variables teachers have to deal with."
Costly reforms
While the Obama-backed strategies are laudable in theory, educators say, they require money to implement and sustain – and the government doesn’t have a perfect track record for putting money where its mouth is.
For example, the 20-to-1 student-teacher ratio in the classroom – introduced by state lawmakers in the mid 1990s – is chronically underfunded by the state, as are special education programs supported by the federal government. These funding shortfalls amount to hundreds of millions of lost dollars in Orange County alone.
"That’s every year we have to find money and make those (budget) holes disappear," Habermehl said.
Worse, new statewide reforms pushed down from Sacramento could have potentially harmful effects on the precarious academic gains made by struggling schools so far, educators say.
"We already have our own transformation model in place," said Chris Francis, president of the Garden Grove Unified teachers union and a 10-year educator. "Our lowest-performing schools are improving. With Race to the Top, there are a lot of broad areas you’re signing onto. We’ll be able to handle them in a much better manner at the local level."
Most districts on board
Most of Orange County’s school districts have tentatively signed onto Obama’s reform agenda.
At least 21 of the county’s 28 school districts submitted letters of intent to the state expressing their initial commitment to the legislative reforms in exchange for being able to apply for Race to the Top funding, should California win. Statewide, about 800 school districts and other educational agencies, out of about 1,500 total, have signed these intent letters.
By the end of the week, school districts must also file a memorandum of understanding with the state, which is essentially the formal application requiring them to commit to the state’s education reform agenda.
If the state’s Race to the Top application is too time-consuming or cumbersome, or if school districts anticipate facing opposition from their employee unions, some districts might drop out, Habermehl said.
The element of the plan requiring teachers to be evaluated based on student test scores could be a particularly hard sell with union leaders, Habermehl said.
"In Orange County, we have great schools that are well maintained, but underfunded and overregulated," Habermehl said. "So some of them are just going to say, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’"
Political wrangling
California’s Race to the Top legislation is the culmination of months of political wrangling in Sacramento over the bills’ language.
Although both houses passed a version of the legi slation late last year, the Senate’s initial version was viewed as harder on the lowest-performing California’s traditional public schools, while the Assembly’s initial version was viewed as harder on charter schools.
A compromise was not reached until this week.
"For too many years, too many children were trapped in low-performing schools," Schwarzenegger said in his State of the State address Wednesday. "The exit doors may as well have been chained. Now, for the first time, parents – without the principal’s permission – have the right to free their children from these destructive schools. That is great freedom."
Obama’s insistence on specific reforms as a prerequisite to apply for Race to the Top funds has rankled many in the educational community, including the California Teachers Association union.
"CTA opposed the bills, as they would create chaos in school districts and drain resources from local classrooms, and punish lower-performing schools without providing needed assistance," the union said in a statement posted on its Web site.
If California doesn’t win in the first phase of the competition, it can apply again for the second and final phase in June.
Federal officials have indicated only 10 to 20 states total are expected to win Race to the Top grants.