Executive director's note: Taxes, algebra and dropout rates: A midsummer’s nightmare

By the time you read this, I am hopeful that the state budget will have been enacted by the Legislature and signed by the governor, and that funding for schools will be considerably better than he’d originally proposed in his January budget—or even in his May Revision.

The only way that this will have occurred is if the Democratic majority in both houses of the Legislature and a small number of Republicans agreed on a package of revenues to fulfill our goal of not enacting a “cuts-only” budget. I have written before of the need for our elected officials to follow the lead of Republican governors Ronald Reagan in 1967, George Deukmejian in 1983 and Pete Wilson in 1991, who faced up to fiscal crises by developing budgets combining spending cuts and revenue enhancements (aka tax increases and loophole closures). Those governors recognized that it was more important to make sensible (if difficult) decisions than to approach these problems with a rigid ideological bent that would have devastated schools and other crucial public services.

I can’t say, as I write these musings from my limited vantage point of midsummer, what revenue enhancements might have been approved by the Legislature to get us through this mess. We can only hope that the gimmickry of past years—such as borrowing from funds that have to be paid back with interest—has been avoided, because such “get out of Dodge” budgeting never addresses the underlying problems. At best, they’re papered over until the next big wave swells California’s economy with a rousing chorus of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

One thing is certain: The only way to smooth out the peaks and valleys of revenues is to stop relying on volatile tax sources, to join the other states in this country that have figured out how to tax selected services—the fastest-growing sector of our economy—and to stop basing our tax policy on populist pandering like the rollback of the vehicle license fee, which now represents about $6 billion a year in lost revenue to the state.

Algebra 1 and horsewhips

Give the State Board of Education some credit—at least it managed to temporarily change the subject in Sacramento from economics to algebra. Frankly, though, I have rarely seen such collective outrage on the part of folks in the field as I have with the State Board’s ill-considered and unwarranted action to effectively require every eighth-grader to take Algebra 1.

I am astonished that the board would take this position without broader consultation from experts, especially since there was no particular urgency—let alone a requirement—to do so. Sure, the federal government has raised some concerns about our two-tiered system for testing eighth-grade math proficiency, but it’s not like the feds were insisting we subject every 13-year-old in the state to the finer points of polynomials and number theory. Few places do a better job of educating their students than the Long Beach Unified School District; yet, as Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser said at CSBA’s Curriculum Institute in Monterey this summer: “We don’t place all our eighth-graders in Algebra 1. … We wait until they are ready.”

Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag artfully skewered the folly of the decision, and of the process (driven by “academic hawks,” as Schrag labeled them) that produced it, in a column headlined, “The Quick Road to Math Success: Get a Bigger Whip.” Imposing a fiat from on high like this, and then pretending that continuously raising the bar will somehow encourage students to do better, is like whipping a horse tasked with pulling an impossibly heavy load. “At best, it won’t work; at worst, it will kill the horse,” Schrag wrote.

I have never seen such claptrap in my life. And all of the happy talk coming from folks who believe that this decision will enforce rigor is so misguided as to be absolutely laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

The Governor’s Office asserts that all this was necessary to enforce high standards and that, oh by the way, it may cost us “billions” of dollars to achieve in three years, but we’ll find the money somewhere. Who are they kidding? We’re already 46th or so among the states in per-pupil funding, and we’ll likely drop even further once this year’s budget is enacted—but we’re going to find billions of dollars to implement this requirement?

Talk to anyone in the school business, and I can assure you that if “billions” of dollars were to magically be made available to the public schools, providing Algebra 1 in the eighth grade would not be where that first dollar would be spent. It would far more likely go toward restoring the crucial support system for schools that has eroded in the past couple of decades—such as full-time, certificated librarians, so we could have libraries open before and after school, as an integral part of a school’s reading program. It would go toward improving the ratio of students to counselors, and maybe toward having fully qualified nurses in each school all day, every day, and maybe even toward funding robust and academically sound career and technical education programs.

Why can’t we seem to have a sensible conversation about whether or not every eighth-grader is developmentally ready for Algebra 1? Why do we insist on a one-size-fits-all approach to public school policy? And why are folks who try to raise these concerns always dismissed with that moldy old chestnut that they’re guilty of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”? When will we return to the days of sensible, coherent, and informed discussions about student achievement and closing the achievement gap, rather than having all of us jump to the tune of overt political agendas—no matter (to be charitable) how well intended they may be?

I have seen a lot of talk in the press about the real anger being registered among school leaders on this topic. Don’t be surprised if folks who would normally roll up their sleeves to try to make stuff like this work draw a line in the sand over this; they may just decide to defy the State Board rather than disrupting their budgets and staffs to carry out this awful decision. This issue might even have the makings for a civil disobedience movement!

What do school folks have to lose? If they don’t implement this back-door policy pronouncement, they’ll be thrown into Program Improvement by not meeting their “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind; and if they do implement it, they’ll be in PI because they won’t have enough “highly qualified teachers” (NCLB again) to teach Algebra 1 in the eighth grade.

This is called picking your poison.

Dropout data: good news, bad news and safe bets

And, finally, a word or two about the recently released reports on dropout rates.

The good news is that we may now be getting reasonably reliable data so that we can better inform policymakers at every level—from the state Legislature to the local school board—about the full nature of the problem in our schools, which means we can begin comprehensive conversations about what to do about it. (The K-12 schools are certainly trying to do their part; we even have a court settlement that requires them to provide an additional two years beyond the 12th grade to assist students who have not yet passed the high school exit exam.)

The bad news is that there continues to be a fixation on “seat time” toward the earning of a diploma. Even school-age kids with perfect attendance are going to spend less than a third of their time in class, and the kids most in danger of dropping out of school probably don’t have perfect attendance—or perfect anything else, I’ll bet you.

It doesn’t seem to matter to some people that one of the reasons adult education programs and community colleges were invented was that we needed them—that kids sometimes make bad decisions or are just not developmentally ready for all of the hurdles they must surmount to graduate from high school (see “Algebra 1 and horsewhips,” above).

I’ll bet you, too, that the business leaders and others who promoted Algebra 1 in the eighth grade will take the new dropout data and beat up us educators with it—without bothering to examine the quality of the support systems for kids outside of school. Do they realize that what goes on in kids’ homes and communities makes a difference in their academic performance? Are folks like me just unabashed apologists for the public schools? Is talking about what goes on in the real life of kids really just a smokescreen?

I’ve got enough money left to lay down one more bet: If all of the judgments and sanctions toward schools continue to be predicated on quantitative measurements—like dropout data—rather than qualitative analysis—of health care, crime prevention, families, communities, culture, you name it—then we probably won’t make much progress toward the kinds of conversations we need to have about the conditions of children and the challenges they bring with them to the schoolhouse door from the outside world.