Back-to School Webcast addresses uncertainties facing educators
Published: October 5, 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 story. 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
Many other important changes in state and federal education policy and practice discussed at the Back-to-School Conference are already in place, but often with outcomes that remain to be seen. Others are poised for action in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but frequently with timetables that are subject to change.
Webcast speakers alerted school governance teams to some of the more immediate concerns that are expected to come before the State Board of Education, whose last meeting of the year will be Nov. 9-10 in Sacramento. 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.
“Even the advocates of the open enrollment law have come to the point where they realize the statute was very poorly drafted,” Holly Jacobson, CSBA’s assistant executive director for policy analysis and leadership development, said during the Back-to-School webcast.
“Districts have to develop, essentially, policy for circumstances under which they will accept or reject admissions or transfers into the district,” Jacobson said, adding that CSBA will develop a sample policy to guide districts once the regulations are finalized. “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.”
New curricular materials can be expected “probably around 2014,” Jacobson said, but schools ought to begin preparing now—as they should for the Open Enrollment and charter revocation regulations.
“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,” CSBA Senior Policy Consultant Stephanie Medrano Farland advised during the webcast.
Possible changes in regulations of teacher and administrator evaluations are on a longer timeline, but even there Farland urged local governance teams to begin preparing now. Evaluation procedures, also addressed in growing education reform discussions nationwide, have been in the headlines since the Los Angeles Times tied teacher performance to student academic data in a controversial report in early September.
“Districts need to start having those initial conversations with their local bargaining units to talk about how they can strengthen teacher evaluations,” Farland said during the Back-to-School Webcast. “This issue isn’t going to go away, and I think most bargaining units realize that and actually want to strengthen the evaluation process and strengthen teaching and learning in our schools.”
ESEA
Turing 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.
However, state interventions in school districts that get trapped in Program Improvement under NCLB will continue, panelist Jacobson agreed, even when schools are making progress.
“We can expect to see the State Board of Education continue to ramp up [its] involvement” in school takeovers, Jacobson warned, “which will be problematic.”
Rick Pratt, CSBA’s assistant executive director for governmental relations, 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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