Open enrollment, charter revocation regs under way
Published: October 18, 2010
Proposed regulations for the Open Enrollment Act are among several issues due to return to the State Board of Education in November following preliminary action in September. Others include charter revocation regulations and teacher and administrator performance evaluations tied to student achievement data.
The Open Enrollment Act has been particularly controversial, both when the State Board took up emergency regulations in a limited rollout of the law this school year and in the board’s continuing effort to promulgate permanent regulations.
“Even the advocates of the open enrollment law have come to the point where they realize the statute was very poorly drafted,” CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Policy Analysis and Leadership Development Holly Jacobson said during the association’s Back-to-School Webcast Sept. 23 (see related story).
The law’s requirement for annual lists of 1,000 “open enrollment schools” has been one concern. The law primarily targets decile 1 schools on the state’s Academic Performance Index, but other provisions include a prescribed ratio of elementary, middle and high schools and a requirement that no more than 10 percent of a district’s schools can be listed. Under those conditions, the list developed by the California Department of Education for the current school year cast a wide net—snaring schools in 500 of the state’s nearly 1,000 districts, and including 16 schools with APIs higher that the state goal of 800.
Parents of students attending schools on the annual list will be able to seek their children’s transfer to higher-performing schools, even outside their district of residence. While the transfer eligibility won’t take effect until the 2011-12 school year, Jacobson said districts should begin preparing now.
“Districts have to develop, essentially, policy for circumstances under which they will accept or reject admissions or transfers into the district,” she said during the Back-to-School Webcast. “They need to be looking at program capacity, school capacity, the extent to which additional students displace kids who are already in the district. A lot of work will have to happen.”
Jacobson added that CSBA will develop a sample policy to guide districts once the regulations are finalized—which could occur at the State Board’s November meeting.
Charters, evaluations
Also expected to return to the State Board in November are regulations for revoking school charters. Like open enrollment, the issue was on the board’s September agenda and was addressed during CSBA’s Back-to-School Webcast.
Under the proposed regulations, local authorizers—school districts or county offices of education—could revoke charters for schools that fall short of the goals established in their charter petitions. The State Board could revoke operating authority for academically low-performing charter schools, whether they were established under local authorizers or the State Board itself. While some concerns remain concerning State Board revocations, CSBA Senior Policy Consultant Stephanie Medrano Farland’s message during the webcast mirrored Jacobson’s: Prepare now for the regulations to take effect.
“District boards [need to] really take seriously their role as authorizers of charter schools, and make sure that they have processes and procedures in place to oversee their charter schools in an effective manner—and do that rather quickly, unless they want the State Board coming in and making the decisions for them,” Farland advised.
Regarding performance evaluations, representatives of the Los Angeles Unified, Fresno Unified and Long Beach Unified school districts updated the State Board last month on their work with employee bargaining units to tie evaluations of teachers and administrators to pupil performance data. The State Board has invited them back to the November meeting, hoping to find ways to support their work and provide resources that could be used statewide.
The State Board will meet Nov. 9-10 at CDE headquarters in Sacramento.
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