Finally -- a school funding lawsuit is filed against California

Today is a pretty big day for anyone who cares about school funding in California. This morning a broad coalition of people and organizations--individual students and parents, nine school districts (including SFUSD!), the state PTA, the California School Boards Association (CSBA) and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)--announced that a school funding adequacy lawsuit has been filed against the state.

The lawsuit, Robles-Wong v. California, requests that the current education finance system be declared unconstitutional and that the state be required to establish a school finance system that provides all students an equal opportunity to meet the academic goals set by the State.

In a press release, the plaintiffs said:

California's broken school finance system has undermined the ability of districts to educate our children by making no connection between what is expected of schools and students and the funding provided in order to meet those expectations.

California has set clear requirements for what schools are expected to teach and what students are expected to learn. But the state has failed in its obligation to provide the resources necessary to meet these requirements. The state's failure to support the required educational program adversely affects all students. Academic achievement results show California's irrational, unstable and insufficient school finance system denies students the opportunity to become proficient in the State's academic standards.

Adequacy lawsuits like this one have been successfully used in other states -- notably New York -- to force state governments to acknowledge the true cost of educating students and to provide adequate funding to reach the state's educational goals. The California lawsuit filed today does not just ask for more funding (though many of us working on behalf of public education in California believe that money has to be a part of the solution) but instead for a rational system of school funding that is aligned with goals for student achievement.

These requests -- money and a more rational system -- are not even controversial, as they are at the core of findings from the extensive and widely-cited "Getting Down to Facts" studies of the state's educational system released in 2007.

I'll close with some of the more gut-wrenching facts about education in California -- facts that provide convincing proof that drastic and decisive action is necessary. We've been asking the Legislature for relief for years, with no results -- going to the Courts is the last resort:

• California spends $2,131 less per pupil than the national average, ranking the State 44th in the country.
• When adjusted for regional cost differences of providing education services (using a national wage index), California spends $2,856 less per pupil than the national average, or 47th among all states.
• California spends less per pupil than each of the largest 10 states in the nation -- almost $6,000 less per pupil than New York.
• California ranks 49th among all states in student-teacher ratios; 46th in district officials and administrators; 49th in guidance counselors and 50th in librarians.
• California is tied for 47th among states in fourth-grade reading.
• California is tied for 46th in eighth-grade math.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | May 20 at 09:38 AM

Will Arne Duncan take California to the prom?

Is it just me, or is the on-again, off-again California-Arne Duncan romance just like a John Hughes movie? Education Secretary Duncan is like the cute popular guy who stood us up on our last date, coming around again all contrite and promising to make it up to us by taking us to the prom with a limo and everything. Can we trust him? Will his snobby friends accept us? How will it end for sweet, impoverished California?

What I mean is this: there's a lot of speculation out there that California might enter Round II of Race to the Top after all, but take things in a very different direction after our dismal showing in Round I of the national competition for education dollars. The state was reportedly just days away from dropping out of the race entirely, but after some heavy lobbying from Federal officials (Duncan reportedly made a personal call to Governor Schwarzenegger over the weekend, urging that the state resubmit its application), the state has come up with a new idea. John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation reports:

Instead of revising the state plan and then pitching it again to every district and union local, California would limit its application to a handful of forward-thinking urban districts with predominately minority, low-income students: Long Beach, Fresno, Los Angeles Unified, and perhaps a few others willing to commit to stronger reforms than in the first round.

The state would make the case that the three to six participating districts, with upward of 850,000 students, are still larger than most states, and would set an example for other California districts.

Maybe, but it's still a long shot. We didn't even come close the last time around, largely due to the lack of union support. I don't see that changing if the competition continues to demand things like setting aside seniority provisions and using test scores to evaluate teachers. The speculation is that Duncan is wooing California because he's worried too many states will withdraw from the competition, endangering Congress' support for the President's overall educational agenda.

That seems to sum up the administration's game (and our plot) pretty clearly: woo high-profile California with cash and encouragement, demand wide-ranging (and highly questionable) reforms, then drive off into the sunset with states that started with more per-student funding in the first place (AKA the well-endowed head cheerleader). I'd love to cast Duncan as the cute, smart bystander who sees our potential and gets the last dance, but it's really not looking like that's the part we can trust him to play.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Apr 29 at 10:17 PM

SB 955 represents radical change to CA teacher policies

Everywhere I look these days, there is another legislative effort to change policies on teacher seniority and evaluation. New York's legislature is considering a bill that would gut seniority provisions in that state's education code, and I just saw another article on a big fight brewing in Colorado over teacher evaluation and tenure. (Arizona banned seniority entirely last year, but then again, that's Arizona for you). California's foray into this discussion comes in the form of SB 955, a bill introduced by Republican Bob Huff of southern California. The California Teachers Association and other labor groups adamantly oppose the bill, which is supported by Governor Schwarzenegger, the California Charter Schools Association and Education Trust-West. It narrowly passed out of the Senate Education Committee (5-4) last week.

At tomorrow night's meeting, SFUSD Commissioners will hear an analysis of SB 955, and consider which alternatives to this bill, if any, the district might support. As a practical matter, SB 955 is highly unlikely to pass in its current form in our overwhelmingly Democratic legislature -- as an "urgency" statute, it requires a 2/3 vote. Still, it's clear that there is political traction for California to weigh in on the national conversation happening on teacher seniority and evaluation, and I'm told that an alternative bill is likely to be introduced by a Democratic sponsor. If that happens, it will be important for the Board to have a position on what provisions should be included or dropped.

Here are key provisions in SB 955:

• It would change the notification timeline for teacher layoffs. Currently, districts must issue a March 15 "intent to lay off" notice, and then a permanent notice on May 15. Even if an employee receives a permanent notice, the district can later call them back, but the danger is always that some staff will accept other employment before that happens. The other problem is that late state budgets extend the school district's uncertainty about our own budget until well after March 15. This bill would eliminate the need for a March 15 notice, which I actually think is a good idea -- I think it saves employees from needless stress in years (unlike this one) where budget uncertainties led us to issue far more March 15 notices than were ultimately needed.

• The bill would allow districts more flexibility in determining the order of layoff based on need and evaluation and allowing entire sites to be skipped. I think this goes too far in gutting the seniority system but it would be great to have some ability to limit the effect layoffs have on the hard-to-staff schools -- it's crazy to have two-thirds of the staff at a school facing layoff at the same time.

• The bill would also grant school districts wide latitude in assigning or transferring teachers to sites based on effectiveness and subject matter need rather than seniority.

• The rights of teachers to ask for hearings after dismissals or layoffs would be curtailed, along with changes to other provisions concerning those hearings.

I have to say that gutting the seniority system is a solution in search of a problem. Giving senior teachers more job security isn't a bad thing in and of itself, as long as we are regularly evaluating and adequately supporting those teachers. I do think it's a good idea to re-examine the timelines for notifying staff of layoffs, in order to better align those timelines with our budget process.

Finally, I'm sympathetic to the plight of junior teachers at hard-to-staff schools and would welcome the ability to introduce some safeguards to staff who want to work at such schools, but I continue to think the best solution would be to address the challenging conditions at these schools so that they aren't so hard to fill in the first place. Last week, Deputy Superintendent Carranza proposed a "clustering" system for district resources that seems like a good step in that direction.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Apr 26 at 09:50 AM

What to do with 'persistently underperforming' schools?

On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent's plans for our 10 schools labeled "persistently underperforming" by the state of California.

This list was created as part of the state's efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state's schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There's no choice in the matter, though it's unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks--and begin the work within six months.

I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that--D'oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools--no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)

In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly said that the desperate conditions in some of the nation's public schools justify the very prescriptive measures his department is advocating. But disliking the so-called "turnaround" models doesn't mean endorsing the status quo, because none of these models have any serious research behind them to prove their efficacy--the record is mixed at best. These prescriptions are essentially an effort by the Department of Education (and our state Legislature, which went even beyond the Federal requirements to qualify for Race to the Top) to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks, damn the unintended consequences.

Worse, because we have more than nine schools on the list, the Federal "rule of 10" kicks in: it means you can't use one strategy on more than 50 percent of your schools. So, were we to decide that replacing the principal is the least damaging strategy for our schools, we could only use that strategy on up to five schools. For the other five, we'd be required to take more drastic action even though in our local judgement those actions might not be necessary or even desirable.

As an article in this week's Education Week points out:

By tightly prescribing what districts must do to intervene in those schools, the Education Department hopes to avoid what federal officials see as the shortcomings of restructuring for the NCLB law. Under the 8-year-old law, most districts have opted for lighter-touch interventions that have produced few gains. But many state and district officials say the new, more stringent requirements are too rigid or even impossible to live up to.

"Rigidity never works when you are going to do a turnaround," said Sheldon Berman, the superintendent of the 98,000-student Jefferson County school system in Kentucky, which includes Louisville. "There are individual circumstances that impact individual schools."

Even policy experts who believe the Education Department's prescriptive approach to school interventions is superior to the NCLB's less restrictive approach have concerns. They worry about the capacity of districts to find new principals and teachers, especially when most districts will have less than six months to plan and execute a turnaround strategy.

"For the districts that have to make staffing changes, it's going to be very difficult to pull this off and to pull it off well by the start of next school year," said Rob Manwaring, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank. "By pushing this first group of schools to have everything in place by September 1, [the department] is already dramatically impacting the probability of success."

So what are our alternatives here in San Francisco? Are they all negative? That's what the Board will discuss tomorrow night. We already have school communities rallying around their principals (Community members from Carver Elementary and Willie Brown Elementary came to last week's Board meeting to express their concern about the effect any one of the proposed turnaround models would have on their schools. The Superintendent assured them that closure was not on the table, but that's cold comfort when your other choice is to lose your principal and/or half your teaching staff, or see your school "restarted" as a charter--not all that different from closure).

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Apr 19 at 04:18 PM

Lottery support for education is a 'sucker bet'

A few months ago, the San Francisco Board of Education asked our Parent Advisory Council (PAC) and Parents for Public Schools San Francisco (PPS-SF) to conduct community conversations on the district's budget situation -- a $113 million deficit projected through the 2011-12 school year. The idea was to inform our community about the awful choices we are facing, listen to community priorities, and gather input and ideas.

The two-month effort did all of those things admirably, but I was chagrined to read in the PAC/PPS report that more than a few people are still wondering why education funding in California is in trouble -- don't we have all that lottery money? Now, anyone involved in K-12 education in California knows that the lottery has never been a significant source of income for California's schools, no matter what voters were told in 1984 when the lottery was created. But how to explain why?

Thank goodness for the California Budget Project (CBP). I subscribe to their daily "California Budget Bites" e-newsletter (highly recommended, by the way!), and this week they sent out a kind of top ten list detailing urban legends about California's budget. Number four is "California's schools don't have a money problem," but I wrote in to ask whether they couldn't specifically address the lottery funds (or lack thereof) in a future post. A few days later, that explanation appeared! In a nutshell, CBP calls the lottery, as a school funding mechanism, a "sucker bet," because it provides less than two percent of revenues for education. Even if lottery revenues tripled, in 2007-08 that would have amounted to five cents of revenue for every dollar the state spent on education.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Apr 02 at 11:17 PM

Lessons from Race to the Top winners

The big news in education earlier this week was that Delaware and Tennessee were the winners in the first round of the Department of Education's Race to the Top competition. These states will win $600 million -- $100 million to Delaware and $500 million to Tennessee -- out of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund.

The more interesting question is why these two states won, and why California came in a dismal 27th out of 40 states that submitted applications for funds in this round. Education Week is reporting that support from all stakeholders -- most notably the teachers unions -- proved to be the essential ingredient for a successful application. However, the magazine also speculates that being a swing vote in Congress also didn't hurt:

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del . . . are the ranking minority members in the subcommittees in their respective chambers dealing with K-12 policy, and both are considered leading moderate voices on education who have worked well with Democrats in the past. In fact, in an interview with the Washington Post's David Broder, Secretary Duncan singled out Alexander and Castle as the two Republicans who had offered ideas that were incorporated into the administration's ESEA [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act]blueprint.

Of course, the Obama administration has stressed repeatedly that politics would play absolutely no part in Race to the Top and set up a process intended to keep just these sort of considerations out. But the fact that Tennessee and Delaware apparently submitted such stellar applications might be a lucky break for the administration as its works to get GOP support for its ESEA ideas.

Along with the winning applications, the Department of Education also released the comments and reviewer scores on unsuccessful applications, including California's. Analysis of the state's scores in the competition reveals that we were most hurt by our inadequate data systems to track student achievement. I'm sure it also did not help that the California Teachers Association (CTA) advised its members not to support the state's hasty and ham-handed efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. Time may well prove that CTA was right, but it would sure be nice to have that money, since we're being forced to implement the state's reform scheme anyway.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Apr 01 at 12:54 AM

State announces list of persistently underperforming schools

Today the California Department of Education released its list of 187 "persistently-underperforming" schools -- an action required under legislation enacted this winter to help the state qualify for Race to the Top funds (yeah, we know how that turned out). Ten schools in San Francisco appear on the state's preliminary list, which will have to be formally adopted by the State Board of Education at a meeting later this week. The 10 schools are:

Brown, Jr., (Willie L.) Elementary

Bryant Elementary

Cesar Chavez Elementary

Everett Middle

George Washington Carver Elementary

Horace Mann Middle

John Muir Elementary

John O'Connell Alternative High

Mission High

Paul Revere Elementary

Under state law, the district will be required to implement one of these four school intervention models at each of the 10 schools by the beginning of the next school year:

Turnaround Model: Undertake a series of major school improvement actions, including but not limited to, replacing the principal and rehiring no more than 50 percent of the school's staff; adopting a new governance structure; and implementing an instructional program that is research-based and vertically aligned from one grade to the next, as well as aligned with California's adopted content standards.

Restart Model:Convert the school to a charter. A restart model school must enroll, within the grades it serves, any former student who wishes to attend the school.

School Closure Model:Close the school and enroll the students in other higher-achieving schools in the district.

Transformation Model: Implement a series of required school improvement strategies, including replacing the principal who led the school prior to implementation of the transformation model, and increasing instructional time.

I don't like any of these options. Curiously, the 10 schools identified by the state are not San Francisco's lowest-performing, so it's not clear what critera were used to identify the pool of schools targeted for intervention (a preliminary explanation is posted here). Further, many of these schools have leaders and teachers that were hired in the last few years -- should we really fire these employees, even though turning around a troubled school takes years of work? (I would put some of leaders at these schools at the top of a list of our best principals). And then there's the ham-handed school closure or charter conversion options that sound more like kicking the problem down the road rather than true transformation.

Stay tuned for a more detailed plan from the school district to address achievement at these 10 schools -- hopefully one that takes into account the reforms we have already put into place.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Mar 08 at 10:08 PM

Supporting gay youth is a core San Francisco value

This week, a resolution (authored by Commissioner Fewer) on support services for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Questioning) youth in SFUSD got a lot of attention.

San Francisco has a long, proud tradition of supporting gay youth in our schools -- 20 years ago we were the first school district in the nation to establish Support Services for LGBTQ Youth, an SFUSD department providing curriculum, resources, and professional development to support LGBTQ youth in our schools. Last year, we launched a comprehensive web site to assist our teachers in providing that support -- also the first district in the country to take such a step.

We get hate mail all the time from people who think we are the radical fringe for providing this support. But consider these statistics, presented to the SFUSD Board of Education last night:

Based on student surveys, 13 percent of SFUSD middle school students (about 1,000 students) and 11 percent of SFUSD high school students (about 1,700 students) identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. An additional 450 SFUSD students (100 in middle school and 350 in high school) identify as transgender.

While 12 percent of heterosexual SFUSD students have "seriously considered suicide," 27 percent of lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) students and a whopping 54 percent of transgender students have considered it.

According to SFUSD student surveys, 7 percent of students who identify themselves as heterosexal have skipped school because they felt unsafe. By comparison, 11 percent of LGB students and 56 percent of transgender students say they have stayed away from school because of fears for their safety.

Finally, there is the very real spectre of teasing, bullying and humiliation: 84 percent of SFUSD middle school students and 82 percent of SFUSD high school students report hearing other students make derogatory remarks based on sexual orientation (e.g., "fag," "dyke," or "that's so gay.") Only 56 and 52 percent of those students, respectively, report hearing a staff member stopping students from making those kinds of derogatory remarks.

What's staggering about these statistics is that they are reported by San Francisco students, attending San Francisco high schools and middle schools. San Francisco, people! The first city in the country where LGBT people felt they could be themselves, safely. I was even more amazed when a teacher told us, during public comment, that she had caught her students using "yag" (read it backwards!), in order to escape punishment for using "gay" as a derogatory adjective. (e.g., "That's so yag!"). San Francisco, people!

But the thing that seems to have really gotten folks worked up is the cost of providing support to LGBTQ youth -- even in the face of the horrifying statistics I cited above. The original resolution, as introduced to the Board, called for total expenditures of $180,000, including a full-time staff person, resources to maintain and distribute the various curricula we've developed and the web site, and an interdisciplinary, one-semester class that would bring together interested students from all district high schools at a central location to study the history and literature of the LGBT movement. The Chronicle called it a "costly gay support program," citing the $120,000 cost of the staff and materials -- not even including the cost of the class.

And indeed, we are trying to dig out under the weight of a projected $113 million shortfall through 2011-12. I agree, it's no time to spend money on new or frivolous programs -- so when this resolution came to us at the budget committee, we fashioned a compromise of sorts: funding a half-time staff person and maintaining the web site and curriculum we've already created, so that once better times return, we'll hopefully be able to pick up where we left off. All that would cost $60,000, a truly trivial amount when you consider the suffering of our LGBT students, and an amount we will easily recoup through average daily attendance funds if we can keep these students regularly attending school.

I felt bad about being on the side of fiscal conservatism in the face of obvious need, and I was moved by the obvious emotion of many of the members of the public when they spoke of their own experience of being humiliated and terrified by their knowledge of themselves and their sexual orientation at an early age. But I felt better tonight, after a conversation with one of the community members who helped write Commissioner Fewer's resolution.

He reminded me that this is a start -- a line in the sand -- because always in the past the funding for the LGBT support program was dependent upon grants that had to be renewed from year to year. "It's not enough, I know," I said to him, as a way of apologizing for supporting the budget committee compromise that cut the funding for this program. "Are you kidding?" he asked me. "This is great. It's a commitment."

And that's exactly right. It's a (small) commitment to one of our community's core values. This commitment wouldn't play in Topeka or Terre Haute or Tuskegee (or even across the bay in Alameda!), but we're San Franciscans. Self-determination and human rights are values we believe in, and values we want to teach our children. Beyond that, we want our children to value who they are, and feel safe in our schools and on our streets. I'm proud of that.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Feb 10 at 09:30 PM

Feb. 25 town meeting will focus on investing in schools

Last month, Superintendent Garcia announced that the San Francisco Unified School District's expected budget shortfall for the next two fiscal years (2010-11 and 2011-12) had increased to a whopping $113 million. At the January 26 Board of Education meeting, the Superintendent outlined his plans for closing the gap -- including raising class sizes, cutting the school year short and asking for wage and work rule concessions from the district's labor unions.

But a grass-roots network of parents at schools all over the city has decided not to take this bad news lying down. They're mad at the prospect of already cash-strapped schools being forced to cut further, and they're organizing to find solutions -- everything from passing an emergency ballot measure to fund schools, to launching a massive fundraising effort to encourage businesses and city residents to support San Francisco's public schools.

"San Franciscans need to make a decision. Do we want a crime-ridden city with under-educated kids?" asks Crystal Brown, an elementary school parent and PTA member. "Everyone needs to take responsibility for this problem."

The first event in this advocacy campaign is a town hall meeting on February 25, where state legislators, district leaders, business leaders and other advocates will come together to discuss how we got here and ways we might get through this budget crisis. KQED-FM Forum host Michael Krasny will moderate the conversation, and members of the public will have an opportunity to submit questions and ideas. The meeting will be held at Marina Middle School (3500 Fillmore at Chestnut St.) from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. For details, and to RSVP, visit: www.fundingourfuturesf.com. All are welcome.

The parent organizers have put the focus squarely on an uncomfortable truth about San Francisco's public schools. That is, we are already the major U.S. city with the lowest per-capita child population; on top of that almost 30 percent of the families San Francisco does have send their children to private or parochial schools. In the city's affluent north and west neighborhoods, there are blocks and blocks with no children attending public schools. What this means is that most San Franciscans don't have a direct relationship with their public schools. Yes, voters have been extremely generous in passing school bonds and other measures supporting the city's public schools, but this isn't the same as the routine year-in, year-out support found in many suburban communities -- like writing an annual check to the school foundation, attending PTA fundraisers, and making sure to sign up for affinity programs (like E-scrip or Target's Take Charge of Education) that donate a portion of every enrollee's purchases to local schools. When you personally invest your time, shopping habits and charitable donations in your community's public schools, you're much more inclined to feel protective and supportive of those institutions.

This lack of a personal connection to "our schools" has also led to large inequities in fundraising between schools, as parents understandably focus their limited time and resources on "my school." In San Francisco we have some schools routinely raising several hundred thousand dollars per year in parent and community donations, while others are lucky to raise a few thousand. The district's school funding framework attempts to adjust for those disparities by having the most funding follow the neediest students, but in a year where our state funds are being slashed, the poorer schools are the ones who will feel the cuts most keenly.

It often seems to me that our schools are viewed as being mostly terrible with a few pockets of excellence, but the truth is pretty much the opposite -- the vast majority of San Francisco schools are good to great, with a handful that need major improvements. Hopefully, the Feb. 25 town meeting will start to open the conversation about how to get all San Franciscans to take pride in what we all have built, and feel they have an ongoing personal stake in a healthy, thriving school system.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Feb 07 at 08:34 PM

District's student assignment proposal takes shape

Well, as promised, last night district staff gave us a high-level overview of the proposals to redesign student assignment in San Francisco. The plan was to get feedback from Board members on each proposal, then incorporate that feedback into a combined proposal that would be formally introduced next Tuesday evening, Feb. 9. I've summarized the proposals below, but there's much more detail here; the staff presentation containing the proposals is here.

Essentially, the district would re-draw attendance area boundaries (the current ones are decades-old) so that every address in San Francisco would have an attendance-area school. Families would either be able to choose any school in the district, including their attendance area school, OR they would start the process with an initial offer to their attendance area school, and be able to choose whether to participate in a later lottery round. The application process would be vastly simplified, requiring families to submit just a verified home address and a list of choices, rather than the complex form we currently use.

The staff is proposing we dispense with the controversial "diversity index"--which doesn't work--and instead use a combination of local preference (meaning priority for one's attendance area school) and a new "academic diversity" measurement which would be derived from the average academic achievement data for the applicant's census tract.

In simulations provided to the Board in recent months, it appears that academic diversity is a reasonably good stand-in for economic disadvantage and other characteristics of "under-served" students. So while systems as complex as this one always have unintended consequences, the hope is that using the new "academic diversity" measurement will start to de-segregate our schools, which have rapidly re-segregated under the current process.

But here's the thing: the evening started with a report from two parent groups charged by the Board with gathering input from the community. The district's Parent Advisory Council and Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco conducted community conversations with almost 600 people; an additional 1,200-plus others took an online survey to share their views. And what observers seem to truly understand is that student assignment is really only one small part of the puzzle. Yes, we need our assignment process to support integration, and we need it to give everyone equitable access to educational opportunities offered by the district. Still, this excerpt from the PAC-PPS report sums it up:

People understood the problems associated with concentrating "under-served" students in the same schools, but they also pointed to the challenges of both achieving and supporting diversity at school sites. Parents noted that schools that are currently academically and ethnically diverse struggle to serve the complex needs of their students. Most participants questioned whether any of the options would achieve this goal and asked why the district's priorities for student assignment did not address improving schools.

Placing too much burden on a student assignment system to solve all of the problems in our schools would be a mistake, because we'd end up with a complex, opaque and expensive system that works about as well as the one we have now. And so, even though it feels a little underwhelming to have spent years on student assignment just to end up "tweaking" the current process, I'm likely to support a version of one or the other of the staff proposals. We need to get this done and move on to the important business of addressing other barriers to making every school a quality school: the lack of training and support for teachers, the lack of principal leadership, and a broken system of school finance in California that is bankrupting our once-admirable educational system in the state.

Posted By: Rachel Norton (Email) | Feb 03 at 11:52 AM