State board OKs open enrollment for 1,000 schools in Program Improvement
Parent petitions to require reforms in underachieving schools also authorized
Published: July 20, 2010
Two controversial provisions of legislation tied to California’s pursuit of competitive federal grants moved closer to realization last week, when the California State Board of Education approved emergency regulations to allow parents to apply to transfer their children from specified underachieving schools to higher-performing schools in other districts, or to petition for fundamental reforms at some schools in their third year or beyond of Program Improvement.
The unanimous votes, on a series of agenda items that consumed much of a 14-hour day for the SBE, initiated a process that will include hearings before the Office of Administrative Law before the new requirements take effect. The California Department of Education is accepting comments on the open enrollment provisions through Thursday and on the parent petitions through Friday, Because these are emergency regulations, they are subject to an expedited approval process. The OAL is expected to review and make a decision on the proposed regulations by the end of the month, after which they will either take effect or be returned to the SBE for possible revision.
Open enrollment
Employing regulatory language that school board members will understand but that may alarm their constituents, the SBE found that “the emergency regulations adopted are necessary to avoid serious harm to the public … especially for public school pupils attending Open Enrollment schools.” Senate Bill X5 4, the Open Enrollment Act, “[gave] students from 1,000 low-achieving schools the right to leave the school in which they reside and enroll in higher achieving schools” in other school districts.
SB 5X 4, approved by the state Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in January to bolster California’s chances for the first round of competition for federal funds under the Race to the Top, required the SBE to issue open enrollment regulations on an emergency basis. The requirement remains, even though the state did not get any initial RTTT funding and its application for the second round will remain in limbo until phase 2 winners are announced around September. The act takes effect this school year but is not expected to be used much because the regulations will not afford much time for it to be invoked.
Governance teams at those 1,000 schools may have a harder time understanding why their schools are on the list in the first place, a point that the SBE’s members struggled with themselves during a lengthy session July 15.
The Open Enrollment Act established a formula for the state superintendent of public instruction to use in establishing the list of 1,000 underachieving schools on what’s now called the “open enrollment list,” starting with the lowest-achieving schools on California’s Academic Performance Index. However, the law specifies that no district is to have more than 10 percent of its schools on the list, and court, community and community day schools, and charter schools are exempt. Additionally, the law requires the ratio of elementary, middle and high schools on the list to match “the same ratio of elementary, middle, and high schools as existed in decile 1 in the 2008-09 school year.”
As a result, six schools with APIs over the current state target of 800 wound up on the list. “Ninety-five elementary schools are in the fifth decile— close to the state average; 33 are in the sixth decile, making them above average,” according to an analysis by Educated Guess blogger John Fensterwald. Meanwhile, schools with lower APIs were excluded under the law.
“That’s the very vexing problem in making the regulations match the legislation,” SBE President Ted Mitchell said, signaling that he will seek legislative remedies to modify the formula, which will be used to generate a new 1,000-school list every year once base API numbers for the previous year are released each summer.
Each school on the list must inform parents by Sept. 15 that the school has been declared an “open enrollment” school; however, objections from CSBA and other groups and individuals persuaded the state board to drop a proposed requirement that districts willing to accept the student transfers do so by Nov. 1 of this year.
Districts will be allowed to reject enrollment applications based on their capacity to serve the new students or adverse fiscal considerations.
The SBE unanimously adopted the emergency regulations and a similar set of permanent regulations, with the list of 1,000 schools attached, and forwarded them to the Office of Administrative Law for review.
Parent trigger
The SBE also adopted emergency regulations to implement another provision of SB X5 4, one that’s come to be known as either the “parent trigger” or “parent empowerment.” It allows parents of children in many schools with an API below 800 to petition the local educational agency’s governance team to implement one of the four interventions laid out in Race to the Top—interventions that have come to be referred to as turnaround, restart, closure or transformation.
Schools targeted by petitions signed by at least half of parents or legal guardians will have to either adopt the intervention the parents request or select another from among the other three options. In addition to parents of students currently attending the school, parents or guardians of elementary students attending “feeder schools” that those students would matriculate into can sign petitions targeting the upper-level schools.
Schools that are already counted among the state’s 5 percent of persistently lowest-achieving are exempt because they may be or already are targeted for one of those interventions under a beefed-up federal School Improvement Grant program. Controversy also surrounds that list of 188 schools; many of those schools’ SIG applications are expected to go before the SBE in September.
As with open enrollment, permanent “regular” regulations governing the parent trigger option will be refined by a work group to be established by SBE; CSBA is expected to participate.
Comments accepted
The two sets of emergency regulations allow for public comment on the open enrollment provisions through Thursday, July 22, and on the parent empowerment petitions through Friday, July 23; the proposed regulations and related materials are posted on the SBE’s Proposed Rulemaking & Regulations Web page.
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