Three years ago, Gov. Jerry Brown persuaded legislators to overhaul how tens of billions of dollars in state aid flows to schools.I'm wondering if the best California legislators can do is end daylight savings time.
It pumped more money to schools, virtually eliminated strings on billions of dollars that had been restricted to particular programs, and gave additional aid to districts with large numbers of poor and “English learner” students.
The rationale was that educators would have more money and flexibility to improve educations for 6-plus million kids and close the “achievement gap” that separated – and still separates – poor black and Latino students from their white and Asian American classmates.
Simultaneously, the state was abolishing its test-driven oversight system, creating a new “multiple measures” system that would be, it was said, “a flashlight and not a hammer,” and trusting local school officials to do the right thing through “Local Control Accountability Plans” (LCAPs) that would involve parents and taxpayers.
So how’s all that working out? No one knows.
The “multiple measures” system is still being drafted in impenetrable educational jargon, and the LCAPs are drawing criticism for their own opaqueness. New academic tests, keyed to a new Common Core curriculum, have been administered, but educators insist that they are too new to be meaningful.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Education Spending News Out Of California
From the major Sacramento newspaper:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Then, there was this piece a while back:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/may/31/the-governor-who-didnt-bark/
----
On July 1, 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the Local Control Funding Formula, depicting it as a “truly revolutionary” change in California public schools. Instead of the previous basic formula of paying districts based on average daily attendance of students, the new method directed 20 percent more money to “high-needs students” – English learners, foster children and those from impoverished families. The additional resources were to go directly to help these students improve their performance, not to general school budgets.
[...]
Twenty-three months later, it is difficult to not be deeply cynical about what’s happened to this much-trumpeted reform. Districts up and down the state have put LCFF dollars into operating budgets to help pay for raises and general programs. In the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, the United Teachers Los Angeles specifically cited the additional funds as being a source to pay for a 17.6 percent raise it sought. The UTLA ended up with a two-year, 10 percent raise.
Impossible! Impossible, I say!
Post a Comment