Vantage point: Delivering California’s message to Washington
By:
CSBA President Josephine "Jo" Lucey
Published: March 1, 2014
Last month I joined school board members from across the nation in Washington, D.C., to participate in the National School Boards Association’s Advocacy Institute. It’s a pretty incredible feeling to pass the White House, visit the Executive Office Building and walk up Capitol Hill to the congressional offices. It drives home the realization that our government is a participatory one. And while the nation’s capital may be on the other side of the country, it’s critical that legislators and policymakers hear from California. We educate one in eight students in the nation. Our national student achievement will not improve without improvement in California. California matters.
California’s delegation reflected the diversity of CSBA’s membership. With participants from school districts and county offices, urban, suburban and rural, large and small—even tiny Fall Rivers Joint Unified in Shasta County—our group was able to directly address the diverse needs within our membership and the support we all need from our federal government.
We used California’s new Local Control Funding Formula to reiterate a message we have been delivering to Washington for years: While the current administration has a penchant for using competitive, grant-based funding to enact policy (e.g., Race to the Top), federal funds are best allocated by formula. Federal dollars, particularly Title I funds, should be allocated to the students with the most need, not to districts or states with the greatest facility for writing grant proposals. Fortunately, with the repeal of sequestration this year, there is a formulaic reinvestment in Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
We also advocated (again!) for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, recommending flexibility and transparency complemented with clear accountability. After years of ESEA’s focus on assessments, we sought an investment in curriculum, instruction and staff development, particularly with the implementation of Common Core standards now under way in nearly every state. We also asked for full funding of IDEA and talked about the need for funding for our increasing number of autistic students.
We also talked a great deal about the federal E-rate Program. Living in Silicon Valley it seems incomprehensible that some students do not have viable connections to the Internet, yet many areas in California simply don’t have reliable broadband service. Decades ago, when Ma Bell was wiring the country with phone lines, rural areas were connected using the regulated monopoly’s profits gained elsewhere. Internet access, however, is delivered by a patchwork of organizations driven by profit. It will take federal and state policies and incentives to truly connect every area.
All in all, it was a worthwhile visit. I thank all the school board members who came, and I encourage each of you to think about joining us in the future. This is our government. It isn’t perfect, and it’s often messy, but advocacy is part of our role. We speak for the students of California.
If you don’t show up and voice your opinion, how will your representative ever know what you think and what you value?