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LCFF Collaborative Working Group discusses 2015-16 LCAPs  

Opportunities and challenges on the horizon for latest round of LCAP development

Members of the LCFF Collaborative working group took the opportunity to reflect on “year one” of the LCAP process during the Collaborative’s April 16 meeting, held at CSBA’s offices. The group identified and assessed a series of promising practices and areas of opportunity as the process moves into its second year and as local education agencies statewide are updating and advancing their own LCAP’s for 2015-16.

“For a first year effort, clearly there was a lot of work that went into these LCAPs and it was very exciting to review,” said Teri Burns, CSBA senior director, Policy & Programs. “Clearly there’s an opportunity for them to be even stronger.”

Prior to the meeting, Burns and members of CSBA’s Policy & Programs team reviewed LCAP’s of the 17 LEAs which makeup the LCFF Collaborative, a partnership effort between CSBA and California Forward. The Collaborative meets quarterly to identify promising practices and systemic challenges in LCFF implementation and to share its findings with educators around the state.

“You can clearly tell that there is a strong foundation to build upon for the coming years,” said Nathaniel Browning, CSBA Policy & Programs officer. “Districts have a really good baseline and show where their goals are going to end up as the timeline progresses. Several LCAPs discussed closing achievement gaps and a few even called out unique populations beyond what was required. All members extensively focused on local goals to meet student achievement needs.”

In examining goals and metrics, the Policy & Programs staff discovered a broad spectrum of clarity and completeness among the 17 LCAPs – aligning with frustrations that have been expressed by several community and public interest groups that have been evaluating LCAPs since last year.

In response to CSBA’s findings and to the ongoing concerns from stakeholders, Collaborative members shared some of their lessons learned and LCAP best practices during the meeting – the group’s third since it was formed in October 2014.

John Zickefoose, a board member from Corona-Norco USD, offered feedback on the district’s efforts to enhance student engagement.

“We’ve now set up on five different high school campuses and we specifically want to capture that student voice from the entire campus,” he said. “We also came up with the idea of [creating] student ambassadors - instead of us running these input sessions, let’s train them and hear their voice - it’s just so refreshing to hear how articulate our students are and what a wonderful voice they have.”

Riverside USD superintendent Mike Fine echoed the need for authentic student engagement in the LCAP development process.

“We involved students very intentionally (last year) and we continued that this year; however in community meetings it backfired on us,” Fine said. “I met with student leaders a month ahead of their meetings and encouraged them to start dialogue, and that was very authentic. This year we formalized it a bit, but found we didn’t get the authentic comments. We made up for that with focus groups, with just the students instead of trying to fold them into the input process and giving them a script – that input is critical to us.”

LCAP: “More than a template”

“If you can lay it out so there’s a nice map and show — here’s the goal, metrics, baseline data, measurable target, timeline, who is expected to participate — you draw that picture for your parents, for media, for community groups and for your school boards,” Burns said.

Similarly, the need to create easily-understandable “whole picture” scenarios for the community became a common theme throughout the April 16 meeting. CSBA Director of Strategic Initiatives and Development David DeLuz moderated participants in a discussion of the evolving LCAP feedback process and how it would change for this upcoming year of planning. It was agreed that districts needed to share stories of accountability with the public, despite challenges to doing so effectively.

Antioch USD superintendent Donald Gill spoke to this issue while outlining his district’s strategic and consolidated action plan for the next year. Gill noted that telling the accountability story effectively would change a district’s LCAP from a “compliance document into a useful community document – then people would think of it as a great strategic plan, measured with metrics.”

Planning for the next phase

Bakersfield USD Superintendent Robert Arias too felt that there needed to be more clarity on the story being told, and on completing LCAP templates. Arias posed the question, “should we be writing goals based on state priorities or based on goals of local LEA?”

“We all just assumed we should do the same process,” Arias added. “But in the reality, we can’t always be planning and going through a very complex engagement process, because we’ll never get to the work. We need to take that next step and ask, ‘how is the LCAP timed to connect to school site improvement?’”

“The real challenge is, you need to have a compliance piece, but you also have to be able to tell the story so that stakeholders can understand what this compliance means,” added Katie Baude, board president of Los Angeles County Office of Education.

The group agreed that meeting both needs is possible, but they needed more examples of best practices of how to tell their story of accountability.

Craig DeLuz, board president of Robla ESD, wants to challenge the growth mindset of the Collaborative and to reach farther than meeting a bare minimum that only speaks to the LCAP rubric.

“What the state requires — that’s the floor not the ceiling,” DeLuz said. “When we talk about creating an LCAP that speaks to the rubric. As leaders, we have to change that mindset, we’re talking bare minimum and pass/fail. I want our districts to do more than just ‘pass.’”

CSBA Review of LCFF Collaborative Member LCAPs

As referenced above, CSBA’s Policy and Programs staff reviewed the LCAPs of the 17 LEAs forming the LCFF Collaborative Working Group prior to the April 16 meeting. The Collaborative members were selected based on LEA size, geography and student population, in order to have a statistically strong statewide sample. The examination of strengths and weaknesses of LCAPs from the first year of implementation serves to better evaluate and address the concerns voiced by community groups also reviewing LCAPs. The analysis focused on the most common student subgroups (as outlined by law), and on the scope, scale and clarity of LEA goals and metrics. Staff found several key commonalities that suggest promising practices, as well as some noted areas of opportunity.

Promising practices:

1. Most LEAs addressed all of the required priority areas and exhibited baseline data, measurable timelines, and easily definable targets.
2. LEAs heavily focused on pupil achievement by adding additional localized goals and metrics.
3. Many LEAs discussed the use of professional development to obtain their outlined goals.
4. A few LEAs developed differentiated goals based on subgroups or race/ethnicity.  For example: LEAs may have identified goals to reduce disproportionate suspension rates for each of the various racial and ethnic subgroups. 
5. A few LEAs called out special populations such as Gifted & Talented Education and African American males.
6. Many LEAs identified a number of important local goals that were well defined, obtainable and addressed many of the state priority areas.
7. A few LEAs mentioned their work with community partners in order to address state priority areas.

Areas of opportunity:

1. Some LEAs did not address all of the state priority areas.
2. Many LEAs did not address all of the required metrics associated with the state priority areas.
3. Many LEAs focused solely on “all students” with little or no mention of the state identified subgroups. 
4. Very few LEAs created differentiated targets based on the varying needs of those subgroups. For example: many expressed a desire to close achievement gaps, but only identified all students rather than identifying specific populations. It seems unlikely that gaps in achievement will be closed if it is not precisely identified where those gaps are. 
5. Some LEAs did not display baseline data for which their goals were established. However, a few LCAPs noted goals for which they had not yet identified baseline data, but also noted that baseline information will be recorded after the first year. They continued to also note well defined targets for each subsequent year after the baseline is identified.
6. A handful of LEAs did not include baseline data even when data was available (i.e. graduation rates through CALPADS); such practices made it hard to decipher actual and definable goals.
7. Some LEAs only provided ambiguous goals without specific measurements or targets.
8. Some LEAs did not provide information on whether their goals were set on an annual basis or over the next three years. 

LCFF Collaborative Members Weigh-in on Changes to LCAP Process

CSBA and California Forward staff send regular surveys to the 34 superintendents and board members who form the Collaborative. This dialogue helps staff develop topics of discussion and plan for future meetings. The Collaborative meets quarterly to identify promising practices and systemic challenges in LCFF implementation and to share its findings with educators around the state. In March, CSBA and California Forward asked Collaborative members to: Please share how your district’s approach to LCAP development will differ in 2015 compared with what you did in 2014 and why.

Here is what Collaborative members had to say about their 2015 LCAPs:

• Because the template for LCAP development has been simplified, we will be able to write more cohesive and implementable goals and objectives, set more understandable and realistic metrics, and determine and assign appropriate funding to each goal.
• In 2014 we used a great deal of data. We developed a data presentation for the district and one for each of our 25 sites. All stakeholders discussed the data, reviewed our district priorities and proposed action steps. Stakeholders were then were asked if there were needs we were not adequately addressing, and asked to prioritize any newly identified needs as well as the existing actions. For 2015, we are lacking the same level of data. We will be using a survey to collect parent and staff feedback. All stakeholder groups will review the survey results, identify areas to be addressed and areas to be enhanced. We will modify our 2015-16 plan based on the feedback from these groups and will review the draft with them.
• For 2015, we formed an LCAP Advisory Committee with an English Language sub-committee. These committees are replacing our District Advisory Committee and District English Learner Advisory Committee. We also are hosting ongoing community-wide meetings on LCAP development. We are also looking at deploying parent ambassadors at each school and the principals to get input at the school site level.
• We are focused on increased parent outreach and inclusion; we have hired a parent facilitator and are instituting parent training workshops. We are also generating increased pupil engagement through an Aftercare program to support students after leaving juvenile court schools.
• We are more clearly identifying the base, supplemental, and concentration grants going to each school in our district, while refining the strategies used to improve student achievement by schools and the outcomes and adjustments made for students.
• We have decided to establish a year-long process in order to build capacity and strengthen a continuous-improvement cycle.
• We have held two additional community forums in order to solicit more feedback.