Education Reform: California Prepares to Compete for Race to The Top Funds
California State Assembly Speaker Karen Bass recently announced that the Assembly will likely be back to work in mid-December to vote on legislation that would improve California’s chances at winning “Race to the Top” federal stimulus funds.
The Assembly Education Committee will hold a Dec. 9 hearing to consider legislation aimed at ensuring California schools are eligible to receive between $350 million and $700 million of the $4.3 billion in competitive grants up for grabs. The Assembly is expected to vote on the issue shortly after the legislation is approved by the committee.
The Senate has already approved its version of “Race to the Top” legislation, SBX5 1.
Because that bill, which follows the plan offered by the Schwarzenegger administration, was crafted and passed before the final application guidelines were released, the Assembly will consider either making adjustments to Romero’s bill or creating its own package of legislation in response to the final rules, Bass and Education Committee Chair Julia Brownley said in a call with reporters.
Several requirements that made it into the final regulations, such as an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, were not addressed in the Senate bill, they said.
What are Race to the Top Funds?
The $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund is the largest ever federal competitive investment in school reform. It is intended to reward states for past accomplishments and create incentives for future improvements. Race to the Top funds provide by the US Department of Education require States to advance reforms around four specific areas:
- Adopt standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
- Build data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
- Recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
- Turn around our lowest-achieving schools.
Awards in Race to the Top will go to States that are leading the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform. Race to the Top winners will help trail-blaze effective reforms and provide examples for States and local school districts throughout the country to follow as they too are hard at work on reforms that can transform our schools for decades to come.
Governor Schwarzenegger’s Legislative Package intended to ensure California is eligible to apply and be highly competitive for Race to the Top funding includes:
Linking Student Achievement and Teacher Performance Data:
- Having linked data will increase transparency around how California’s students, teachers and schools are performing. With this information, the specific needs of students, teachers and schools can be better addressed.
Measures to Turn Around Struggling Schools:
- Repeal California’s charter school cap, which is an unnecessary barrier to innovation.
- Give parents more freedom to choose the school that best serves their children by both authorizing open enrollment for students in the lowest-performing schools so they can attend any school in the state and by removing the cap on “districts of choice” so any student in the state can attend school in a participating district.
- Focus efforts on the bottom 5 percent of lowest-performing schools, helping ensure all California students can reach the state’s academic standards.
Measures to Help California Recruit and Retain High-Quality Teachers and Principals:
- Reward teachers who are consistently doing the toughest jobs. Alternative pay schedules highlight effective teaching practices and create incentives to improve our education system.
- Measure student progress to help identify what works in the classroom. Every child is different and looking at both growth measures and overall achievement scores provides a better picture of a student progress over time.
Improving Accountability for Schools:
- Modifying how the state uses data to measure performance will help more accurately track the progress of students, teachers and schools on an annual basis so that California can make continuous improvement in our education system from year to year.
Here is an analysis by Education Sector, a non-profit education think tank, on California’s standing in the key areas required for Race to the top Funds:
- Standards and assessments: Standards are high quality; assessments are standard aligned but nothing special. The assessments are not yet approved by the federal department of education because the state can’t agree on whether it should be testing all students in 8th grade in algebra or not. And the assessment does not have a vertical scale.
- Data systems: Behind other states. They only meet 6 of the 10 Data Quality Campaign benchmarks. There is virtually no access to state data, and it is tough to use data to improve instruction when you can’t access it. Some districts in the state have done a great job of developing their own data systems (think Long Beach or Garden Grove), but this is a state grant competition not a district one.
- Teacher quality: Like many states this is an area where the state has a long way to go. They do have some alternative pathways into the profession. They have beginning teacher mentoring. But that is about it. Nothing noteworthy for teacher evaluation, differentiation of compensation, information on the quality of teacher preparation programs, investment in common planning time …. California is the home of the Milken Institute, developers and backers of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) and there is not a single TAP school in the state. That seems problematic.
- Low performing school turnaround: California does have charter schools and lots of them, but they do not have a very good charter school oversight process. They have lots of low performing schools, and not much urgency about fixing them. There are over a thousand schools in program improvement restructuring in California, and most of them are using the infamous “other major restructuring” option. So this state has not used the turnaround models that Secretary Duncan is backing in the Race to the Top.
- Education reform environment: The state has clearly not made education a funding priority, and has used most of the stimulus funds to backfill for state cuts (and then cut schools some more). The budget makes almost any reform discussion a non-starter. And more cuts are on the horizon, as the state will likely face another $15-20 billion shortfall for the 2010-11 budget. And the thought of the teachers union, school districts, the business community and other key stakeholders getting on the same page about how to reform California is hard to believe without some serious leadership and a lot of hard work.
What others are saying about Race to The Top Funds
The California Parent Teacher Association offered these formal comments:
This one-time money, while substantial in total, when measured out to the states that qualify, will represent only a small portion of the drastic cuts that schools have faced. The federal government has in the past mandated programs such as IDEA and NCLB without providing the promised ongoing funding commitment required to sustain the programs. Education reform must not be just one or two sprints, but a marathon of ongoing commitment to give our students the education needed to compete in the global economy.
The Heritage Foundation has urged caution on the Federal Race to the Top Incentive Program:
We should also be concerned about what Secretary Duncan is trying to incentive with the “Race to the Top” funding. Writing in the Washington Post, Sec. Duncan listed “working toward common, internationally benchmarked standards” as his top requirement for states to win “race to the top” funding.
The California Education Coalition, representing nine vital groups: CTA; the California Federation of Teachers; California State PTA; Service Employees International Union; California School Employees Association; Association of California School Administrators; California School Boards Association; California County Superintendents Educational Services Association; and the California Association of School Business Officials, has cautioned against rushing to change the state’s education system for a shot at the one-time batch of funds.
We need to be very careful about creating new legislation for competitive fund. We should really try to restrain ourselves from creating new laws that helps us go after a competitive grant that the laws might stay in place even though we don’t get the money to implement to them.
The California School Boards Association:
The three proposed interventions for low-performing schools in the bill (converting to a charter school, putting them under private management or restaffing) have been shown by multiple studies to be ineffective. The most recent charter school study, conducted by Stanford University, shows that charter schools actually underperform non-charter schools more than twice as often as they outperform public schools.
The provisions in SBX5 1 regarding the “Open Enrollment Act,” which are not even needed to comply with proposed federal requirements, also raise serious policy concerns. While ostensibly prohibiting it, the bill does not provide enough real protection against “cherry picking,” the process of recruiting and accepting the best students from neighboring districts.
