Questions mark new school year
Back-to-School Webcast frames education issues
Published: October 18, 2010
With major issues of education reform and finance still in flux as the 2010-11 school year began, a panelist at CSBA’s Sept. 23 Back-to-School Webcast captured the uncertainty and challenges confronting educators in one quick vignette. Fittingly, it concerned a conversation with one of his son’s teachers during an open house at the start of the academic calendar.
“Here’s what we’re going to cover in the second semester. I just haven’t figured out how we’re going to do it with five less days yet,” Abe Hajela said the biology teacher told him.
From fewer instructional days—one of the stopgap options state lawmakers have temporarily allowed to help schools cope with drastic state funding cuts—to changing academic standards, measurements of their attainment, consequences for falling short, and the level of funding for the school year that’s already begun, schools face a hazy mixture of uncertainty and hard choices. Back-to-School panelists helped to put the picture in focus in a wide-ranging discussion that’s now archived for viewing anytime on CSBA’s website.
Robles-Wong v. California, the issue that put Hajela on the Back-to School panel, pertains to many of those issues. Hajela is a special counsel advising the association on the groundbreaking legal challenge to the constitutionality of California’s school finance system. Students and their families are the lead plaintiffs, joined by CSBA and its Education Legal Alliance, the Association of California School Administrators and the California State PTA.
“We have this standards-based system … [that] says what every kid is supposed to know at each grade level in each subject,” Hajela explained. “What we’re saying to the state is, you need to get a funding system that’s aligned with that program, so the program can be delivered to all kids.”
Issues coming to State Board
Other important education issues are expected to come before the State Board of Education, whose last scheduled meeting of the year will be Nov. 9-10 in Sacramento (see related story). They include:
- permanent regulations for California’s new Open Enrollment Act
- regulations governing revocations of school charters by the school districts or county offices of education that granted them, or by the State Board of Education
- a plan under development by the California Department of Education to align curricular materials and frameworks to the common core academic standards for English-language arts and math, which the State Board adopted last August
Federal issues
Turning to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—the cornerstone of federal education law—CSBA Principal Legislative Advocate Erika Hoffman said Congress may not take up reauthorization until 2012. But, she warned, the minimum acceptable levels of students’ “adequate yearly progress” will continue to ratchet up under the federal rubric created the last time ESEA was reauthorized in 2002 as the No Child Left Behind Act.
And state interventions in school districts that get trapped in Program Improvement under NCLB will continue, even when schools are making progress, agreed Holly Jacobson, CSBA’s assistant executive director for policy analysis and leadership development.
CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Rick Pratt noted that U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan has wielded unprecedented power to influence policy through his department’s nearly autonomous control of billions of dollars in competitive federal grants.
“The administration is seeking even more of that in the ESEA reauthorization, but Congress is likely to balk at that,” Pratt said. He noted that Duncan has been supplanting decades of near-universally accessible entitlement programs such as Title I’s aid for economically challenged students with competitive grants—the largest of which, the $3.2 billion Race to the Top program, bypassed California and all but a dozen other states.
“Is that the proper role for the federal government?” Pratt asked.
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