That’s why our current conversation about reopening public schools, after a year of COVID closures, is beside the point. So-called grownups are talking about when we might reopen, or the conditions under which we might restart certain schools or certain grades. But we never really answer the question of who—amid all the fear and politics—will pry open the schoolhouse door for every California child.

It won’t be the federal government. President Biden has effectively abandoned his pledge to reopen all schools in 100 daysthe first volume of a handbook for reopening, and the Centers for Disease Control continues to produce confusing guidance for whomever does the reopening, but neither has the authority to call class in session.

It won’t be state government. The Newsom administration loves to spin out new frameworks and matrices so that other levels of government can think about reopening. But if you really think this state will successfully execute a major logistical operation like school reopening, well… let’s just say there’s an unemployment check in the mail for you.

It won’t be our local governments forcing the reopening either. Our counties are consumed by their pandemic-era public health obligations. Our cities are criticizing or even suing school districts to demand schools reopen, but they lack the power to force classes back into session. Our school districts do have the power to reopen, and some are bringing back a few early grades, but for the most part, they’re caught between ever-shifting guidance from other levels of government, union opposition, and divisions among parents. Meanwhile, too many local school board members and superintendents, instead of fixing distance learning, are filling the hours with gaslighting communiqués, fruitless negotiations, or school-name changes.

Of course, our teachers’ unions, by far the most powerful political forces in this state, could force a reopening. But with their members able to work at home and still be paid, these labor groups just keep pushing back the timelines for return—until COVID is entirely gone, or all living beings in the Milky Way galaxy have been vaccinated, or the Rapture. Whichever comes first.

All these realities point to the same hard fact: California’s various educational constituencies are never going to come together and reopen all school themselves. If our state is ever going to resume universal public education, as required under its constitution, we Californians will have to outsource the task.

And given the scale of our state, there is only one entity that could pull this off.

It’s time to ping Amazon.

Outsourcing school reopening to Amazon isn’t a radical idea. To the contrary, it perfectly fits our state’s COVID-era strategy: leave the hard work to somebody else.

Take masking. Officials at all levels have talked, incessantly, about the need for everyone to wear masks and keep our distance—but no one in power has been willing to enforce these regulations aggressively. The tricky work of compliance has been left to store employees and entrepreneurs who are trying to save their jobs and businesses, and to everyday Californians foolhardy enough to confront their maskless neighbors to slow the spread.

A similar dynamic has emerged in vaccination. With the state and counties failing to turn their months of planning into an effective system for immunizing people, Gov. Gavin Newsom outsourced the job to the not-for-profit health insurer Blue Shield of California. This was achieved through an emergency authorization, without bids, and in the full knowledge that Blue Shield is not a health provider and has no real experience in putting shots in arms. What Blue Shield does have is skill in managing data, a statewide network, and a reputation for getting its way in California.

Outsourcing school reopening to Amazon follows similar logic. It’s not an education business, but it is great at data and operations. Amazon has the warehouses, supplies, and delivery network to get the right protective materials to the schools on time. (Maybe it could even pick up science-denying teachers from their homes and transport them to vaccination centers and then classrooms). Amazon also operates efficiently and cheaply—so a school reopening contract wouldn’t break state or local budgets.

But the real reason California needs Amazon for this chore is its scary ruthlessness, its willingness to ignore criticism and rules in the service of delivering on its promises.

Who will dare get in its way? Amazon owns the political class—just look at how it used donations and lobbying to win subsidies and tax breaks from state and local governments—so it doesn’t have to worry about politicians’ challenging its school reopening operations.

Amazon, famous for crushing small businesses that get in its way, also might be our best bet to shut down scofflaw retailers and other entities that, by not complying with COVID regulations, contribute to the community spread that might threaten school reopenings.

And Amazon, having fought unionization of its own employees nationwide, would probably revel at the prospect of putting California teachers and their unions in their place.

Because the company is so accustomed to being loathed, Amazon—worth a cool $1.65 trillion as of February 12—could be useful as a scapegoat for all of California’s anger and angst over school reopening. Instead of the state government and local school districts continuing to blast each other publicly, and instead of parents and teachers attacking each other over Zoom, we could all agree to blame Amazon.

I suspect Amazon would do this if asked. Amazon recently wrote President Biden to offer “to leverage our operations, information technology and communications capabilities and expertise” in this emergency. And given its diminished public reputation, including questions about how its treatment of warehouse workers during the pandemic, Amazon would likely seize such an opportunity to build some good will.

Few school leaders will admit this publicly, but they would be delighted if Amazon—or another outside entity—stepped in to handle reopening. Such an intervention might be the only way to save a California education system that is falling apart. School enrollment has seen record declines in the pandemic, and many families with school-age children are leaving the state. Even stalwart supporters of public schools are now talking up private schools or school vouchers.

In other words, California faces its own school choice: Outsource school reopening now, or watch its schools crumble as families outsource their children’s education somewhere else.

The post There’s Only One Entity Ruthless Enough to Reopen All California Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sweetwater rarely makes the statewide news, but it should: It’s the largest secondary school district in California. Sweetwater’s high schools and middle schools serve oft-forgotten communities between central San Diego and the U.S.-Mexico border—Chula Vista, Imperial Beach, National City, and San Ysidro.

And while some kids succeed in Sweetwater schools, this border district is flunking the very basics of school administration, with phony budgets, questionable borrowing, and unsustainable union giveaways that now threaten student services and teachers’ jobs. Indeed, Sweetwater’s record is so egregious that it should make California rethink how it intervenes with failing local governments.

In many ways, Sweetwater is emblematic of California—a full 87 percent of its students are racial or ethnic minorities and it has working-class demographics, with 40 percent of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch. But the other thing that makes the district emblematic is its sorry finances; like too many school districts around the state, Sweetwater is in fiscal peril.

Most California school districts are in a serious, but peculiar, financial bind. Their revenues are way up, as the economy grows and the state devotes record amounts to schools. But school districts’ costs are rising even faster than revenues, in part because of exploding expenses for employee and retiree benefits.

In Sweetwater, income has risen a healthy 37 percent in the past five years—but benefits costs, including pensions, have doubled over the same period.

But Sweetwater’s problems run even deeper than those of most other districts, for reasons Californians should find profoundly unsettling. Sweetwater’s mismanagement goes back so many years that no one can point to its exact origins. These recurring episodes have mixed incompetence and corruption, bribery and bogus budgets. The fact that most of this misbehavior went largely unchecked for so long begs the question if other school districts are hiding similar problems.

While Sweetwater leaders have acknowledged financial and management difficulties going back decades, only in the last year has the district been called to account. San Diego County’s Office of Education has effectively taken over its finances, and reports say that state and federal authorities are investigating. The resulting budget cuts—so far limited to after-school programs, technology, and bus routes, but likely to deepen—have some students threatening walkouts.

But none of the oversight, investigations, or potential strikes are likely to be enough to fix the district’s schools. Indeed, Sweetwater’s persistent problems argue for creating a strong process to terminate government entities that can’t seem to govern themselves.

Sweetwater is in some ways an artifact of a very different time. It was founded in 1920 to fund modern local high schools for children living amongst the lemon groves of southwest San Diego County.

But the area grew, through waves of industry, military expansion, and housing development. Today, Chula Vista—where the district is headquartered—has more than 271,000 people, making it the 15th most populous city in California. Sweetwater now has 30 campuses, including 14 high schools, as well as a robust adult education program. It’s known for its champion academic decathlon teams and for a compact with San Diego State University that makes it possible for more students to attend college.

But the larger district has struggled mightily to manage itself. For the past two decades at least, Sweetwater has drawn scrutiny for questionable decision-making. A series of property transactions during the 2000s went south, and at the beginning of this decade, a massive bribery scandal resulted in charges against some district leaders and Superintendent Jesus Gandara went to jail.

A 2014 election produced a new group of district board trustees who pledged reform, but they have made little progress. In 2015, the state warned the board of future budget problems, particularly as student enrollment leveled off in the district—to no avail.

Last year, the county effectively took over fiscal control of the district. And the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), which intervenes in troubled school districts, investigated. In a report released just before Christmas, it showed that Sweetwater’s budget was riddled with mistakes (302 false entries), suggesting systematic fraud.

For four months during the 2017-2018 school year, the district reported payroll spending of $0, according to the report; the district was surviving only through legally dubious borrowing from its construction funds. Sweetwater ignored auditors and repeatedly overestimated enrollment and state funding. As a result of all these failures, the district has spent tens of millions of dollars more than it reported, leaving it in debt.

To read the FCMAT report is to understand that the district is not merely broke, but fundamentally unable to do the basic work of managing itself. The notion that it can carry out a plan to dig itself out of the current hole is ridiculous.

Even worse, the district’s leaders—in administration, on the board, and in its powerful teachers union—seem so oblivious to their collective failure as to make one wonder what they’re drinking in Sweetwater. In recent years, despite its financial troubles, the district ramped up hiring of central office staff, granted union employees across-the-board raises that it couldn’t afford, and approved an expensive and unnecessary early retirement plan.

Such irresponsibility condemns teachers to unnecessary layoffs and students to cuts in services. But rather than grapple honestly with the problem, Sweetwater resists the county and offers increasingly pitiful defenses. The most pitiful one, offered by district officials and union leaders, is this: Sweetwater has been mismanaged for so long that it’s somehow unfair to hold today’s district officials accountable for its current crisis.

To the contrary, Sweetwater’s long-standing failures suggest that California’s approach to failing districts should be more aggressive. On its current path, Sweetwater will endure years of cuts to schools as the county tries to pressure the district administration to remake itself. If Sweetwater doesn’t recover, it might need a state takeover before its local administration is restored.

But there is no guarantee that Sweetwater will be any better managed after these interventions, even if they’re drastic. And why bother spending precious time fixing a district and an administration that have failed for so long?

There is a better—and permanent—solution: The state should eliminate Sweetwater as a separate district.

The district could be used to establish a new procedure: a death penalty for local government entities that can’t manage themselves. In a state barnacled with thousands of local governments, many of which struggle with basic management, a process of closure and consolidation is desperately needed.

Sweetwater’s schools and students would still be around, but they would be relocated to districts with more administrative capacity. The natural landing point for Sweetwater schools would be San Diego Unified School Distract, since Sweetwater already serves some communities in the city of San Diego. Such a switch would make education in the Sweetwater Valley the responsibility of all of greater San Diego.

This would require politically difficult local action and state legislation. But Sweetwater is one border crisis that the state of California can’t blame on President Trump, and has the power to solve itself.

The post Why California Should Close Failing School Districts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On many mornings, I think my state senator has the best policy idea in California.

The rest of the time, I think he’s missing the point.

The idea involves the sleep of schoolkids, and the state senator is Anthony Portantino, who represents me and nearly one million other residents of one of California’s nerdiest regions, the San Gabriel Valley.

Portantino has won plaudits for a bill that would require middle and high schools to start the school day later—no earlier than 8:30 a.m. The bill is grounded in research showing that additional sleep and a later start would reduce tardiness and absenteeism, which in turn should increase school funding (which is tied to attendance) and improve students’ academic performance.

My two older sons’ school starts at 8:10 a.m. So, at around 8:02 a.m., Portantino’s bill has such obvious appeal that I wonder why he doesn’t extend its protection to elementary schools.

Some days, just eight minutes before school starts, I must climb to the top bunk to wrestle my oldest son, a second grader, out of bed, and into his clothes. Sometimes I must dive deep into the lower bunk to pull out my middle son, a kindergartener. I’ve strained my back with both maneuvers and raised my heart rate while racing three blocks to their classrooms before the bell rings.

One could argue this is a failure of my parenting. I could wake them earlier—but this causes conflict, and doesn’t necessarily get them out of bed. I try my best to get them in bed at 8:30 p.m. so they’ll wake up earlier, but they resist, and stay up reading Harry Potter and Captain Underpants books. So another 20 minutes of wiggle room, courtesy of state law, sounds pretty good—even if it makes me arrive later to work.

But when my back stops throbbing and my pulse returns to normal, I remember that the real problem in California education is not how early the school day starts.

It’s how early the school day concludes.

Put simply, California’s idea of a full day of school is far less than a full day. The state requires only half-day kindergarten, which amounts to just three hours and 20 minutes, about the length of a pro football game. First through third graders are required to have only four hours and 40 minutes of instructional time per day. It’s five hours for grades four to eight, and six hours for high schoolers.

School districts are free to do more. But given funding challenges, they rarely can. The calendar at our local elementary school is thus typical. My kindergartener is with his teachers from only 8:10 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. My second grader is in class until 2:25 p.m. four days a week; on Friday, there’s often early dismissal at 1:05 p.m. These shorter school days happen in a California that, following American tradition, guarantees just 180 school days a year.

This has the feel of hypocrisy (our children are our future, but not our educational priority), of rationing, and of missed opportunity. Despite the low reputation of California education, our teachers and schools have made big gains in achievement over the past generation, especially when one considers our relatively low levels of funding and our challenging student populations. So many of the teachers I’ve encountered in California schools are nothing less than magicians. Why can’t we give our kids more time with them?

The biggest answer is money: More hours of school would cost more, and California’s rickety school funding regime struggles to pay for the instruction we currently have. Many educational interest groups—from teachers to school boards to parents—have pushed for more instructional time. But proposals have run up against concerns about inconveniencing certain parents, create scheduling hassles after school, or adding to traffic, since more kids would be transported during rush hour.

But extensive research shows we must find a way to fund and organize more instructional time. Dozens of studies of campuses with longer school days and years have found that such schools do better, especially in serving students considered to be at-risk.

Some schools in California have acted on such research, with strong results. Catholic schools in Southern California extended their school year to 200 days some six years ago. The chain of charter schools known as KIPP has become a national model by increasing learning time with a school day that extends more than eight hours, typically from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Beyond educational needs, a longer school day would address other social problems. California politicians of both parties often talk about the need to offer more and better child care. Extending the school day would be a straightforward approach to that problem. It also might blunt the effects of inequality, since better-off parents can fill off-school hours with enriching activities.

Both my wife and I work more than full-time. We cope with short school days by enrolling our elementary school-age children in the after-school program offered on campus. That costs more than $700 a month, combined, for the two boys. (As a result, our 6-year-old typically spends twice as much time at school in day care as he does in his actual classroom.) We’re spending another $1,500 per semester on after-school enrichment classes in subjects like robotics and Mandarin, offered by our community’s educational foundation and by our city’s Chinese club. We’re lucky we can afford this. It’s unfair so many other parents can’t.

Up in Sacramento, there’s talk about legislation to exempt teachers from some taxes. Okay, give the tax breaks if you like, and pass Portantino’s bill right along with it. But there ought to be one condition: a huge increase in the length of the school day and the number of days in a school year.

What would that look like? Well, 9 to 5 was good enough for Dolly Parton. And if a longer day means the kids come home tired, so much the better. Maybe they’ll finally get to bed on time, and wake up early enough that I don’t have to wrestle anyone out of his bunk.

The post California’s Idea of a Full School Day Doesn’t Make the Grade appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Californians may think we have a system of public education. But what we really have is a state system for rationing public education.

I got a personal taste of this in the spring, when I took my five-year-old son to our local school district offices to determine his educational future. This being California, the determination was made not by a test of his abilities or an assessment of his educational needs. Instead, it was a lottery. A school administrator pulled names out of the hat to determine whether he would get one of 24 coveted spots in our elementary school’s new Mandarin language program.

The month of September, early in a fresh academic calendar, is the time of year when we hear fine speeches and noble promises about how our state and its school districts are committed to doing the very best for every child. School superintendents and politicians often point to our state constitution’s commitment to universal education, which includes a funding requirement to deliver on that commitment. But when you experience how our schools operate, you learn quickly that such lofty, sweet sentiments and guarantees are so much Fang pi (a Mandarin approximation for cow dung).

In California, when it comes down to who gets precious educational resources, schools as a matter of policy and law leave much to chance.

We do this for two reasons: scarcity and avoidance. Educational resources here are scarce—there is simply more demand for schooling than the state’s wobbly budget system can accommodate. And so we’ve come to use lotteries and formulas, so that our officials can avoid the work of deciding who deserves resources, and so that the rest of us Californians can avoid reckoning with our collective failure to support public education.

Yes, it’s true that K-12 (and community college) education is the top spending item in the state budget, but there is no area in which our school spending—which remains below the national average despite recent increases—meets education needs.

By all reliable accounts, there aren’t nearly enough good, experienced teachers in our schools. The state offers only 180 days of instruction (when research suggests there should be more than 200 days and more hours of instruction), and only provides half-day kindergarten. And the inadequacy of newer programs and schools offered by some districts in the name of educational choice only underscore the ongoing scarcity. There are simply not enough Advanced Placement classes, career-readiness programs, charters, magnets, or language immersions to meet the demand for high-quality options.

There’s little hope of trying to do more to meet those needs. California long ago decoupled school funding from educational needs. Our school funding formulas, known collectively as Prop 98, are baked into the state constitution, and are driven by tax revenues, the budget, and income growth, not academic needs. Effectively, Prop 98 guarantees only a portion—you might say a ration—of the state budget to schools. (Tellingly, that money is supplemented by a small amount—usually $1 billion or less than 2 percent of annual education funding—from the state lottery).

So in the absence of funds to meet all our students’ needs, we turn to education’s version of lotteries to allot scarce resources. State law (mirroring federal guidance) directs school districts to use a lottery system for charter school admissions once the number of pupils who want to enroll exceeds the number of spaces. Districts with magnet programs do the same. Many of these lotteries have complicated rules and exclusions, often to help kids go to schools in their own neighborhoods, keep siblings together in the same school, or to make sure campuses are diverse. L.A. Unified has a system of points to govern its lottery for magnet school placement so complicated that a cottage industry (check out “Ask a Magnet Yenta” ) has sprung up to help parents navigate it.

Of course, such lotteries are not all that fair. The winners in lotteries are more likely to be the children of parents who have the time and resources to investigate their local educational possibilities, sign their children up for the lotteries and, in some cases, write letters or pursue strategies to help their chances.

And the lotteries raise a bigger question, now being debated in California’s courts. Does “random” allocation of educational resources really represent justice?

Earlier this summer, the California Supreme Court showed itself to be divided on the question. A 4-3 majority of justices refused to hear challenges to the state’s systems of hiring and firing public schoolteachers and funding schools. The challengers said that those systems were violating the rights of students, because they didn’t produce enough money and qualified teachers to meet the state constitution’s guarantees of education for all. But the Supreme Court majority, in declining to hear the challenges, endorsed the position that while there might be problems with funding and teachers, these weren’t constitutional problems—because the impact of bad policies was random and arbitrary, and not felt by any particular group of students.

Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuellar, a young associate justice of the Supreme Court, dissented powerfully from that logic. Curtailing access to educational opportunity, the justice argued, doesn’t become justifiable simply because it’s done arbitrarily.

“Arbitrary selection has at times been considered a means of rendering a governmental decision legitimate,” he wrote. “But where an appreciable burden results—thereby infringing a fundamental right [like the right to an education]—arbitrariness seems a poor foundation on which to buttress the argument that the resulting situation is one that should not substantially concern us.”

The brilliantly cynical filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.” He wasn’t wrong—our parents, where and when we were born, the people we happen to meet, all influence the direction our lives take, through no fault or deed of our own.

My own son was lucky. His name was pulled 16th out of the hat, giving him a place he now enjoys in that Mandarin immersion kindergarten. His own luck will transfer to his younger brother, who is automatically eligible to join the program when he reaches kindergarten age.

But California is not as fortunate in leaning its educational system so heavily on luck. Our schools are supposed to be equalizers, helping counter the lottery of life. Instead, they are emulating it.

The post California’s Bad Bet on School Finance Leaves Too Much to Chance appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Up until recently, that question has been mostly hypothetical. For some, it’s a fantasy: Conservative education reformers believe that drumming labor out of the classroom would improve test scores and teaching. For others, it’s a nightmare: Teachers worry they would be left with little protection from the whims of said reformers, not to mention superintendents and school board members.

This year, the question has become more urgent. With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court is now divided 4-to-4 on the validity of the funding model for public employee unions. So this November’s presidential elections could be a life-and-death question for some teachers’ unions. If the country elects a Republican president, the likely result would be the appointment of a conservative justice who would vote to stop unions from collecting money from nonmembers, weakening teachers’ unions so much that some might disappear from some school districts around the country.

What would that mean for teachers, schools, and parents? It’s impossible to know for sure. But California offers one fascinating and complicated example: the Clovis Unified School District.

Clovis Unified is by far the largest school district in California without a teachers’ union. While Clovis is known as a small city of 100,000 neighboring Fresno, the full district is much bigger, sprawling over nearly 200 square miles that encompass big swaths of Fresno and other communities. It’s the 16th largest school district in California (smaller than Riverside Unified, bigger than Stockton Unified), with 42,000 students, 49 schools, and 5,000 employees. It also happens to be one of California’s most representative districts. It’s diverse, with about half of its children on free and reduced lunch, and with no ethnic majority among the student body.

Parents, teachers, and administrators in Clovis tend to be proud of their schools. Academics and athletics are strong, and graduates have a tradition of excelling in the military. But residents don’t brag—publicly, at least—about their lack of a teachers’ union. This isn’t because they want a union, I’ve found on visits. It’s because they’re skeptical that Clovis’ one-of-a-kind structure could be a model for anyone else.

Clovis Unified teachers and administrators see their district as having a peculiar history that has given it an accidental, if effective, method of governing itself. This history starts with Floyd “Doc” Buchanan, the district superintendent from 1960 until 1991. Deeply respected, Buchanan was known for being close with teachers and valuing personal relationships over rules and bureaucracy. In the 1970s, California’s teachers’ unions won the right to represent teachers in districts throughout the state, but Buchanan resisted, arguing that his district would so empower and serve teachers, there was no need for a union. And teachers believed him, and voted against union representation.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Instead of a union, Clovis’ teachers and Buchanan formed a “faculty senate”—the goal was to have something worthy of a university—to give teachers more of a role in the governance of the district. Teachers were elected to represent each school, and in turn elected officers to a faculty senate “to be an effective advocate for teachers at all levels of policymaking, procedures and expenditures, in partnership with our administration, fellow employees, and community as a quality education team.”

And, unlike a union, there were no dues to pay.

Of course, Clovis Unified could only be so different. In California, state law governs most of what happens in school districts, including matters central to debates about unions, such as teacher tenure and the firing of teachers. But, as the faculty senate evolved, the teachers it represented began to exert more power, by creating committees with other district stakeholders for almost every conceivable matter: benefits, wages, the district budget, the scholar calendar, curriculum, and school safety. “If there’s a committee, we’re on it,” says Duane Goudy, the faculty senate president. “If there’s a meeting, we are part of it.”

As faculty senate leaders explained this committee-heavy system to me in a district meeting room recently, I was reminded of German work councils—joint worker-manager groups that make and adjust national and local labor agreements. But when I suggested Clovis was German, the teachers laughed. This method of representing teachers, they said, was Clovis’ own home brew, which fit the place and its history.

Among the many advantages of this governance system, teachers said they liked that it forced the district to come to a consensus on issues. Once decisions get made, they stay made. And teachers feel as if they have more control of their own destiny. This method of governance provides crucial flexibility in bad times. During the Great Recession, the district avoided layoffs of full-time employees and cuts to the length of the school year because teachers on the committees decided to impose a 2 percent pay cut and three furlough days on themselves.

For this system to succeed, it requires great openness among administrators; the superintendent has an open door. This breeds closeness to the community. For example, while it’s now routine to find school campuses closed after-hours throughout California, Clovis Unified prides itself on keeping its school campuses open so that neighborhoods can use them on evenings and weekends.

Of course, there are drawbacks. Privately, teachers say some committee meetings can feel endless. Clovis’ method of governing itself is so different that it can be hard for administrators hired from outside the district to adapt. And even staunch believers in the faculty senate approach wonder whether a system that relies on face-to-face meetings and relationships can survive as the district continues to grow. They say it’s already hard to make changes quickly because so many people have to be consulted.

But the system is likely to endure, in part because the district gets results. Clovis Unified performs above average academically and does well in attendance. Teachers shower praise on the district in surveys.

For the rest of us, Clovis Unified suggests that school districts without teachers’ unions won’t be hells—or paradises. They could even be places where teachers have the power to be true partners in running school districts—with all the responsibilities and headaches that come with it.

The post What’s a School District Like Without a Teachers’ Union? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.