California’s public schools need better oversight and guidance from the state

Shortly after beginning his second stint as governor of California in 2011, Jerry Brown began promoting a two-pronged overhaul of how the state finances public schools.

Brown proposed to eliminate, or at least reduce, “categorical aids,” which were earmarks for specific purposes and instead provide additional funds to schools with large numbers of kids falling behind on academic skills.

Brown said what came to be known as the Local Control Funding Formula would give local educators flexibility and additional resources to design curricula that match what their pupils need to succeed, buttressed by input from local parents and civic leaders.

It was the pet concept of Stanford University Professor Michael Kirst, who had long been Brown’s most trusted education advisor.

Education reformers who had been pressing politicians and the education establishment to do something about the mediocre — at best — levels of academic achievement of California’s schools generally supported the concept, except for one aspect.

Brown wanted to leave implementation to local school boards and administrators, a concept he dubbed “subsidiarity,” extrapolating it from a Catholic Church doctrine of empowering individuals.

Reformers were worried that putting more money into the hands of local school districts, without oversight to ensure that it was being spent effectively, would lead to its diversion into administration and more generous union contracts rather than hands-on instruction for kids who needed it most.

Brown insisted that the mechanism built into the new system, requiring local schools to  adopt plans to improve outcomes, bolstered by broad state measures of accountability, would suffice.

Experience proved otherwise.

The state’s accountability program turned out to be a jargon-filled mishmash of academic and non-academic items on a “dashboard” that was almost impossible to understand and did not give parents an accurate picture of whether their kids were learning to read, write and use mathematics.

The local plans that were supposed to guide educational improvements were equally dense, often written by formula rather than truly reflecting parental wishes. Districts, especially the large ones, would fudge on how the money was being used and if caught, would be given passes by state officials. Reformers often had to sue to get districts to use the money as Brown said it would be.

Finally, 13 years after the Local Control Funding Formula came into being, its shortcomings in accountability have been recognized in a massive study of California’s public school system, titled Getting Down to Facts, issued this month by Stanford University.

It explored many aspects of the system other than Brown’s handiwork, but it leaves no doubt that subsidiarity hasn’t worked well.

“California has many accountability tools and data systems, but they are not well connected to one another or to clear guidance and support” for schools and educators, Susanna Loeb, director of the study, says in her summary.

“Governance structures are fragmented and policies have proliferated over time, often creating disconnected, contradictory, and burdensome guidance to schools,” she wrote. “The system produces information without consistently turning that information into action.”

School districts face a lot of ambiguity about “what constitutes effective practice” and have heavy administrative burdens, she added: “In areas such as math instruction, tutoring, and curriculum, local leaders must navigate consequential decisions with limited clear guidance and heavy compliance demands, even where the research base is strong.”

The state dashboard and local improvement plans Brown touted are singled out for criticism in the report, essentially validating concerns that reformers had voiced but were ignored.

Loeb notes that California’s schools are at “an inflection point” on many levels. Maybe the study will persuade those in the Capitol to pay attention this time.