California kids, do you follow the news about the culture wars over the boards that oversee your schools?

If you do, you’ll see these wars portrayed as political contests between groups that want to take education in different directions. You’ll see reports about loud conflicts between progressives and right-wingers, and fights between parents’ groups and teachers’ unions.

But you won’t hear much about the role of students in these debates. Because there isn’t one. School boards are meetings of adult politicians; kids are rarely even present (much less heard) in those loud and angry rooms.

You might think not having to listen to grownups yelling is a good thing. It’s not. There’s an old adage in politics: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

That’s cynical, but so are your parents and teachers. For all their performative battles over your schools, the adults in your lives share a unity of purpose in the education wars.

They all want to trample on your already very limited rights as children. And they want to prevent you from having control over your own education.

They just attack from different flanks.

On the right, conservative parents and their political allies seek to take away your right to read what you want. Groups with Orwellian names—like Moms for Liberty—are pursuing bans on books and curricula. (Note to you kids: “Orwellian” refers to George Orwell, the sort of satirical author that grown-ups, right and left, are trying to keep out of your hands.)

Now, you may not care about books, but their censorship influences more than just what you read. Banning books limits what your teachers can teach, and which of your questions they can answer. The right is particularly interested in limiting what teachers can tell you about the most hot-button topics, like race and sex. Maybe you think parents are just trying to protect you, but this sort of paternalism always leads to the erosion of more rights.

The right is also demanding that teachers violate your privacy and make official reports, including to your parents, if you dare deviate from old-fashioned gender norms. I know, it’s crazy. Figuring out your identity is hard enough, in this world of gossipy classmates and social media, without your teachers being required to inform on you. Why can’t these uptight adults live their own lives, and stop inserting themselves into yours?

Now, the political left, to its credit, is fighting back against these intrusions on your privacy. But they have their own ways of trying to limit your freedoms and your educational horizons.

It was groups on the left—especially teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians—who violated your right to an education by closing the schools for more than a year during the pandemic. Those same state and local leaders haven’t done enough to help you recover the learning you lost in the pandemic. Some even maintain that learning loss is a myth, even though most of you are testing below grade level and many of you are chronically absent from school.

And inside your schools, the left is determined to keep you on their prescribed path by limiting your ability to study what you want. Progressive politicians defend outdated traditional school curricula, while adding new requirements that match their political preferences—like labor rights or ethnic studies. Meanwhile, schools rarely provide the technology courses that many of you want. Unbelievably, just 40 percent of high schools in California, home of Silicon Valley, even offer computer science.

Maybe you think this is a budget problem. It isn’t. Spending on schools is way up, even as the number of students declines. It’s just that the new money ends up going to adults—teachers and administrators—and their salaries.

If you still think your teachers, school administrators, and elected officials respect you, let me tell you a story that will disabuse you of that notion.

During the pandemic, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified Schools faced litigation charging that he was violating students’ right to a good education. He responded by saying that students only had the right to a free education. It didn’t have to be good or even useful.

Perhaps even more shockingly, California’s leaders and schools have embraced the superintendent’s position as their own. In fact, the state’s political and educational establishment is opposing a ballot initiative that would give you the right to a “high-quality” education.

Don’t believe it? Here is language from this measure they oppose: “The state and its school districts shall provide all public school students with high-quality public schools that equip them with the tools necessary to participate fully in our economy, our society, and our democracy.”

The establishment says that you, the students, have to accept whatever dismal education, and whatever meager rights, they choose to give you. In arguing against the initiative, they have claimed that a requirement of “high-quality” education will produce a barrage of lawsuits and demands from you.

For your sake, I sure hope they are right.

Now is the time for students to go on the offensive. If adults chastise or punish you for being combative, you can laugh in their faces—and remind them how loud and combative they are being in their own educational wars.

You could try a one-day-a-week student strike, like the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and spend that day trying to find lawyers to sue your school districts. (Lawsuits, and their costs, are what really move school administrators.)

An even better move would be to demand democracy from the Democrats who rule California. Students know more about how education works than most adults. Why shouldn’t you have the right, regardless of age, to vote and run in school board elections?

Indeed, school boards have been so captured—by teachers’ unions and parent groups, and all their conflicts—that there’s a strong case for turning school boards entirely over to students, who could check adult interests.

This may sound radical, but it isn’t. In other countries, teens have parliaments and councils, some with real powers. And even our state has a number of “democratic” schools—like Diablo Valley in Concord, and California Free School in Altadena—where students set schedules and curricula, and vote on how the campus is run.

Also, please remember that grown-ups like to say that you kids need to learn civics, even though no one provides much in the way of civics classes. Turning school boards and school governance over to kids would be the greatest civics lesson possible.

And it’d be far more educational than the current culture wars in our school boards.

The post Let the Kids Rule School Boards appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a dark, chilly evening in November 1839, a woman in Boston, Massachusetts, convened a party at her friend’s house. That might seem an unremarkable event, but this was not a high-society tea party or wine-tippling book club. It was a bold social experiment. The hostess was the 29-year-old journalist Margaret Fuller, and the guest list was composed of the most finely tuned minds she could collect—minds that nevertheless, by virtue of being women, were barred from attending university. Safely concealed from the prying outside world by the guise of innocent domesticity, they were taking their education into their own hands. They were about to have a “Conversation,” with Fuller leading the way in the informal role of instructor.

Maybe more of us should be having such conversations. With fall approaching, thousands of high-school seniors are in the throes of the fraught “college search,” an anxiety-ridden affair that, for many, culminates in years of astronomical debt. Between the rising cost of higher education, the “devaluation” of degrees, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s shakeup of education—not to mention the culture wars over critical race theory and free speech—there is rising interest in finding other ways to prepare oneself for a rewarding professional and intellectual life. The resourcefulness of Margaret Fuller and her acquaintances—and the accomplishments that followed their budget-friendly, self-engineered education—show us that the foundations of a fulfilling life and career can be built on curiosity and willpower rather than loans.

The premise of a Fuller “Conversation” was simple: anything that wasn’t stale tea party table talk was permitted. There would be no petty gossip, no complaints about children or servants, no exchanging of recipes or sewing tips. And unlike the salons of the time, there would be no men to impress. Instead, the curriculum was an in-depth discussion on fine art, literature, science, politics, or mythology—with corresponding homework in between these two-hour weekly meetings. At the sixth conversation, the women discussed wisdom and the mechanics of art; for the seventh, they wrote, shared, and critiqued their own essays on beauty.

By 1839, Fuller had already made a name for herself as a writer, with publications in distinguished journals such as the North American Review and the Western Messenger. She was trained in the classics, talented as a critic, translated German Romantic literature into English, and was so outstandingly bright that regardless of her gender, she was hailed as something of an authority on anything highbrow. Yet she understood that it wasn’t mere writing talent that had afforded her the rare privilege of a professional life. Fuller had benefited from an extensive education and access to the reading materials and intellectual social circles she needed to cultivate her mind for a productive life, and she wanted to share the additional elements of good connections and directed study with others. She’d worked as a teacher already, having served at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston in 1836 and at Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1837, and the role came as naturally to her as the instinct to combine it with that of an author.

Still, the Conversations had their adversaries: privileged, bookish men who felt threatened by this clever female innovation—which made their prestigious and expensive university educations suddenly not so special anymore. Historian Charles Capper writes that they tried to conceal their obvious sexism behind religious objection—they were “scandalized” by the women’s discussion of Transcendental critiques of Christianity.

The Conversations continued until April 1844. Though only a five-year enterprise, they left a lasting mark, including forming the base material for Fuller’s 1845 feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. There, she laid out her stern commentaries on the inequalities between the sexes and what needed to be done to remedy them for society’s benefit. The intrepid  educational reformist Peabody, whose home was the site of the discussions, went on to find the first English-language kindergarten in the U.S., in 1860. Sophia Ripley, a fellow feminist and philosopher, went on to become a primary school teacher at a progressive academy, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan, an ambitious Transcendentalist artist, published poetry and children’s books.

The Conversations have also served as a source of inspiration for factions of frustrated women who came after Fuller. Lara D. Burnett of the University of California claims that Fuller’s Conversations serve as the early model for the current phenomenon of podcasts, a technological platform through which creatives in pairs or groups can explore and discuss their niche interests vocally (an especially useful means of expression for modern-day women who are still being barred and/or systematically discouraged from mounting traditional podiums). It’s an equal, open space, where all women are free to participate as either speakers or listeners and can hope to be taken seriously. “Conversations allowed Fuller to be a kind of professor, and allowed her subscribers to participate in a kind of university course, without vetting by those who were determined to marginalize female intellectual work,” Burnett astutely observes. “Similarly, podcasts can, without any gatekeeping, make available to their producers and their listeners the conversational practices of the seminar room.”

Today, women can and do attend university, but the bittersweet reality is that not everyone can afford to partake. In this modern context, underground education is once again prevailing.  One example is the Dark Academia movement, a clothing and lifestyle culture born on TikTok that embraces the aesthetic of a 19th-century academic with some worldly flair. But it doesn’t end at looks. Dark academia appeals most to teenagers who are dissatisfied with their current education, defeated by higher education’s price tag, and have discovered the joys and benefits of self-directed study.

Though a degree is still necessary for certain jobs, it’s not essential for developing an original, critical, and respectful mind. There are always opportunities for full, rewarding, and meaningful conversations. Getting together to debate Sartre or new developments in gender politics can be done in any time period, in any available setting—tuition-free. And whether you do it on Zoom or at a friend’s place, stop and listen for Fuller’s voice, broadcasting through from a long-gone era.

The post Who Needs Student Debt When You Can Get Together for a ‘Conversation’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But we should keep them open anyway.

That’s because, in California, we are closing schools so routinely that we’re harming children who are already in crisis. We’re also further diminishing trust in public education and reinforcing low expectations and encouraging continuing disinvestment in the state’s future.

The closures aren’t just a hangover from the pandemic, when our communities, backed by state government and unions, kept schools closed far longer than most other American states. The closures reflect deeper problems in the state and our society.

Indeed, school closures began surging before the pandemic. An indispensable CalMatters database of school closures, published in 2019, found big increases in the first two decades of this century. Most of the closures were in response to wildfires or dirty air, and those closures were growing longer with the size of the fires. CalMatters found that dozens of schools lost 15 days or more in a single year to wildfires. (California mandates a 180-day school year.)

Hundreds of closures were the results of threats of violence to schools, with parent fears sometimes forcing closures in response to threats not deemed credible. And CalMatters identified more than 370 closures because of disrepair or campus maintenance failures—often involving plumbing. All told, in recent years as many as one in five California students lost school days to emergency closures.

More recently, school closures have been occasioned by this winter’s wet weather, and by shortages and conflicts involving the pandemic-ravaged ranks of teachers and school staff. The recent three-day closure of Los Angeles Unified schools, occasioned by a strike by the district’s lowest-paid employees, is only one example.

The only thing worse than all the closures is the way we’ve begun to accept these shutdowns. Indeed, media coverage celebrated the L.A. schools strike as a demonstration of worker power. And the resulting closures were mentioned mostly for their impact on families, as if the main role of schools is to provide child care for parents.

But schools are for children and the essential work of education. And our kids badly need schools that are reliably open, with teachers and staff reliably present, every single day.

No matter what.

You may think that’s an extreme position, but it’s less extreme than the problems kids are facing. These include an epidemic of loneliness, a mental health crisis, and substantial declines in student learning.

Twin facts exacerbate all of these crises: Schools are too often closed, and when they are open, too few students are present. Chronic absenteeism—when a student misses at least 10% of school days—has become commonplace in California and around the country, doubling during the pandemic. For the 2021–22 school year, chronic absenteeism hit 30% statewide. For Black students, the rate was 42.5%. A new PACE analysis projects such attendance problems persisting into the future.

The absenteeism has been accompanied by big drops in student enrollment. California public schools lost 110,000 students last school year, and the state Department of Finance has projected the loss of another 500,000-plus students by 2030–1. The drop in enrollments is already forcing the permanent closure of campuses in every region. Those projections make clear that the future of public education itself is in doubt.

And the strongest possible response is to make it the law that, in California, schools will always be open, because they are that important.

That is easier said than done, but setting a clear rule is the crucial first step in driving the investment necessary to make schools so resilient they never have to close.

Keeping schools consistently open will involve far more than just schools themselves, because closures are related to huge problems—climate change that produces bigger fires and crazy weather, digital media that make it easier to convey threats, the violence and omnipresence of guns in our society, and our failure to build and maintain infrastructure.

Right now, and without delay, the state and all its communities need to harden their campuses for this apocalyptic age. And we need not just better pay for school staff—the point of the L.A. Unified strike—but comprehensive support and services (like child and elder care) for the families of teachers and employees, so that they have no reason not to go to work.

Ending school closures is not just the work of school administrators. Californians, especially parents, need to stop pressing for school closures and start getting their children to school every day. And the state needs to increase funding and apply fiscal pressure and oversight to prevent closures. I’d suggest a new two-to-one rule; for every day a local school or district closes, it has to add two additional school days to the calendar, which come out of its own budget.

Most of all, keeping schools open requires a shift in mindset. The fires and storms and threats we think of as emergencies are no longer emergencies—they are the new normal, and they may well be with us for the rest of our lives. Instead, we must recognize that school closures—and the attendant damage to children and education—are the real emergencies.

And they are emergencies we have the power to prevent.

The post California, Keep Your Schools Open. No Matter What appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t squeeze your kids too hard as you send them off to another school year, because the state of California is already squeezing your kids hard enough to hurt their future.

Call it The Great California School Squeeze. The state is stuck in a nasty school funding paradox: Even though our school districts have never had higher funding levels than they do right now, many districts face financial peril.

Why? Because The Squeeze is a torture machine with three ratchets.

First, escalating payments and obligations for retirement benefits are growing so fast (more than 100 percent in this decade in many districts) that they gobble up most of the rising education funding all by themselves. That leaves little for today’s students and teachers.

Second, with California’s birth rate at a record low, the number of students is stagnant in some districts and declining in others. Since school funding is granted on a per-student basis, fewer students means less funding, even at the higher rates.

Third, the state is pressuring schools to take expensive new measures to address major social problems—including shortages of college graduates and systemic inequality that leaves poorer young people lagging. Elaborate new state measurement systems for schools go far beyond test scores to assess everything from equity to school discipline. A new funding formula that gives more money to poorer schools has created pressure to eliminate achievement gaps.

So The Squeeze, in essence, requires producing millions more educated California adults from a smaller student population, even as retirees grab bigger shares of available funds. California’s famously complicated legal barriers to cutting pensions and raising taxes may make breaking free of The Squeeze politically impossible.

But a failure to escape The Squeeze threatens what was once the essence of California: our leadership in knowledge and technology.

For the past half-century, California has been steadily giving away the lead it once held over the rest of the country and the world in education. In 1970, according to a new Chapman University report, Californians were better educated than the average American. The state had a higher percentage of adults with college degrees—and a lower proportion of adults with less than a high school education—than the nation as a whole.

But California now has the second highest percentage of adults with less than a high school education in the country (and had fallen, as of 2012, to 14th in the percentage of adults with college degrees). California was one of only four states to see an increase in the number of people with less than a high school degree between 1970 and 2012. By comparison, the large, diverse states of Texas and New York both have seen declines in their numbers of adults without high school diplomas.

Reversing such trends would be a monumental task for California even in ideal conditions. But in the midst of The Squeeze, it seems impossible. School districts, rather than adding programs, are freezing budgets, laying off teachers, and forcing school closures.

This process may be ugliest in Oakland, where the school board members have publicly declared, “We have too many schools.” What Oakland really has is rising retiree costs and much lower student enrollment, putting the district in danger of returning to state receivership. In Southern California, my hometown of Pasadena has announced plans to close five schools starting next year, including the last two public schools in the neighborhood where I grew up.

The Squeeze also limits California’s instructional hours, despite research showing that more time to learn is essential for making educational gains. We might live in the world’s fifth largest economy, but I’m about to send my youngest child to my local elementary school where he will only have a half-day of kindergarten because that’s all that our state funds.

It’s obvious that California needs to give its schools more. But from where? Today’s kids and teachers are already taking hits from The Squeeze. And even if it were possible to claw back pensions from retired teachers, it wouldn’t be fair. Teachers don’t get Social Security and their pensions are reasonable, averaging just over $50,000. This reflects the Penis Rule of Pension Abuses; scandalously large retirement payouts, like the $1.27 million recently given to L.A.’s police chief, usually come from predominantly male professions like fire and police.

Unfortunately, there is no way to get the money from those most at fault: previous state and local politicians who made retirement promises without properly funding or disclosing them. Much of The Squeeze on California schools today comes from efforts to recover from years of underfunding of pensions by accelerating school districts’ contributions to the two state pension funds that cover school workers and teachers.

What’s most scary about The Squeeze is that it’s likely to get worse. The Squeeze has hit hard even as the stock market has risen and the economy has expanded; a recession and stock market decline would make The Squeeze so bad that school districts could be forced into massive cuts and bankruptcy.

If you’re surprised to be reading all of this, that is by design. School districts often hide the growing size of their retiree obligations deep in budget documents. Many districts ask local voters for additional taxes which delay the reckoning but don’t fix the problem. Diminished local media don’t have resources to cover it. And powerful teachers’ unions have tried to shift blame for The Squeeze to their favorite bogeyman, charter schools, even though they are a small piece of the public school system.

You also aren’t hearing about The Squeeze during the campaign season. The endless state media celebration of Gov. Jerry Brown’s tenure has obscured the crisis. Political candidates have offered few ideas for tackling The Squeeze, because, well, there are few ideas for tackling The Squeeze.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

Addressing The Squeeze starts with clearer disclosure: making it plain the ways in which retiree costs and enrollment declines are hurting today’s kids and teachers. While retired teachers must have their pensions protected, cost of living adjustments should stop. And districts should stop giving retired teachers separate health benefits; they should rely on the same public programs—Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare—that the rest of us do.

The savings from such changes won’t be nearly enough to escape The Squeeze, but they should make it possible to do more for today’s teachers. As David Crane of Govern for California has shown, school districts from San Francisco to Fresno are now devoting less than half of their revenues to compensation for today’s teachers.

But breaking the grip of The Squeeze will require more from California taxpayers—and not just small tax increases on the local level.

The state has two big dysfunctional systems that hurt today’s kids. One is a complex tax system, built around Proposition 13, that protects older homeowners. The other is a complex education funding system, built around Prop 98, that ties education spending to the budget and economy, rather than to students’ needs. It has effectively acted as a cap on education spending since Prop 98 was adopted 30 years ago.

Both systems need replacing. The Prop 98 funding formula should die, and education funding should be tied to educational needs. Doing that would require tens of billions of new dollars each year, which in turn would necessitate a massive tax reform.

Of course, even such difficult and transformational reforms might not be enough for schools, now that state Democrats want to grab new tax dollars for a single-payer universal health care system. That might be a worthy goal. But California first needs to rescue the kids from The Squeeze that’s crushing our single-payer education system.

The post California Sticks Its Schoolkids’ Futures in a Vise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dig deep enough into any of California’s biggest problems, and you’ll eventually hit upon a common villain: our court system.

California’s housing shortage, its poverty, its poor business climate, and its failing infrastructure all are explained in no small part by the failure of our underfunded, delay-prone courts to provide anything resembling timely justice. But in public narratives of what’s wrong with the state, we have mostly let the courts dodge responsibility for their many crimes against California’s future.

This is, in part, because, our courts have been broken for so long that we’ve stopped expecting them ever to work. In the meantime, we have become lazily addicted to blaming our favorite perpetrators—our regulators, our politicians, our media, our unions, our businesses, and, more recently, President Trump—for our collective failure to build a state that meets its population’s needs.

But the biggest reason why we’ve allowed the courts to skate responsibility involves a public lack of understanding of the courts, and a resulting underestimation of their importance. State government has been treating the courts, which account for less than 3 percent of state spending, as a small problem, distinct from the state’s other maladies. But the courts’ impact is far larger than their budget imprint, making them a dangerously faulty foundation for our state’s economy and government.

If you want to block a project in California, your best bet is to get it into the courts, where you can delay for years until the project’s supporters can no longer afford to go forward. This happens regularly in California’s housing battles. But rather than blaming the courts, real estate types routinely blame a law—CEQA, the abbreviation for the California Environmental Quality Act—for the state’s struggles to build sufficient housing and infrastructure.

At a recent conference at Chapman University in Orange County, Emile Haddad, the chairman and CEO of FivePoint, the largest developer of mixed-use communities in coastal California (from the Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine to Candlestick Point in San Francisco), pointed to the courts instead.

“I’m one of those probably odd developers who say they love CEQA,” he said, praising environmental laws that protect communities and add to quality of life and the value of housing.

The real problem, he said, is “the entire legal system.” He recounted a project that got local government approval in 2003, but still hasn’t happened, as his company is now litigating the project’s 30th lawsuit.

With each challenge or problem with permits, he loses even more years, Haddad said, because “I have to go through the same courts that have approved me already … because I cannot go directly back to the Supreme Court or the appellate court and tell them that I’ve done what they needed me to do.”

Such legal delays bear a heavy responsibility for our historic housing shortage and add to housing costs that are more than twice the national average. In turn, costlier housing is a huge factor in California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate and its high incidence of homelessness.

Poverty is now highest in coastal areas with the most development restrictions, which produce more litigation and costlier housing. And the clogged courts make it harder for poor people to challenge evictions from housing, or mistreatment by people and financial institutions that prey on the poor.

The same court-related delays and resulting costs also plague any number of transportation and water projects, and of countless attempts to launch new businesses. The most high-profile example is the state high-speed rail project. While the state authority in charge of the project has drawn withering coverage for its mistakes—construction remains at an early stage, nearly nine years after voters approved the bonds for it—most of the delays involve the courts.

The state itself has a long history of using the courts to delay meeting even its meager funding obligations to schools and health programs. The state courts so utterly failed to resolve California’s prison overcrowding problems that federal receivers and the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in.

Meanwhile, the courts are being asked to do more with less. Newer reforms on criminal justice resources (Governor Brown’s realignment), sentencing (Propositions 47 and 57), and recreational marijuana (Proposition 64) have created new questions and petitions that boost court workloads.

At the same time, the Great Recession and budget crises were particularly tough on the courts. Thousands of court staffers have lost their jobs in the last decade, and more than 50 courthouses and 200 courtrooms have been shuttered. Delays have more than doubled; it now can take more than five years to have your civil complaint heard by a judge or jury. (One prominent lawsuit, by California local governments against lead paint manufacturers, is now 17 years old.)

Flat pay and a heavy workload have led to walkouts by court workers, and sparked bitter infighting among state judges. Court officers in 49 of 58 counties warned in a February letter to Gov. Brown that without more money in this year’s budget, they’ll need to cut existing levels of service.

The pressure on the courts would be even worse if the total number of court filings hadn’t declined by 25 percent over the last decade. But that may be bad news. Almost all the decline has been in small claims, challenges to infractions, and minor civil cases. Regular Californians have simply given up on seeking justice in our courts.

“Inadequate funding and chronic underfunding of the courts is just one way a justice system can become unjust,” warned California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye in a recent speech, noting that since 2011 the state has added 6,408 laws while the judiciary budget lags.

I recently walked three blocks from my office to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the state civil courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Like other central courthouses in California’s increasingly glittery city centers, the court building stands out as an eyesore, its exterior scars clashing with the new park and federal courthouse next to it.

Inside, nothing—from bathrooms to Wi-Fi—works particularly well. Lawyers receive trial dates that are usually more than two years in the future, court reporters are scarce, and overworked clerks scramble to keep things from breaking down. A lawyer acquaintance who took me around quoted Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a 19th-century novel about the delays and injustice of England’s Court of Chancery.

Broken courts, Dickens wrote, promote a crippling fatalism through a society, “a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”

It’s way past time for California to pull itself out of this Dickensian muck. Yes, fixing our court system—making it the fastest and most efficient in the country—would be challenging politically. But it also would be relatively cheap, just a couple billion more dollars a year in a state with a $150 billion budget and a $2.5 trillion economy.

Justice delayed is justice denied. This budget season, let’s return timely justice to the courts, and stop this crime against California’s future.

The post The Verdict Is in—California’s Dickensian Courts Are Failing Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During those hot and humid Northern Virginia summers, I headed each weekday to the summer camp held in my elementary school’s nearly-abandoned cafeteria. It was a low-key affair—ping pong and table hockey on the cafeteria lunch tables, kickball and football on the playground, key chains and macramé in arts and crafts—while mix tapes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in heavy rotation played over the school’s PA system. And in what must have been one of the greatest bargains of the 1970s, camp tuition was $20 for the entire summer.

Today, such an easy-going camp would be trashed on Yelp!, despite its unbeatable price, for failing to deliver any quasi-academic or super-creative purpose. Imagine my camp competing with today’s Computer Camp, Robotics Camp, Animation camp, and (my personal favorite) New York Film Academy Camp, which is in, of all places, Burbank.

Kids’ summer camps in Los Angeles enter parents’ collective consciousness around January 15, just after the three-week-long Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) winter break, which was the dream of the teachers’ union (which also negotiated an entire week off for Thanksgiving) and the owners of, yes, winter camps. The most popular summer camps are said to fill up by mid-February, so the camp arms race begins before one even has a chance to plan a basic family vacation.

Our daughter, now eight, is already enrolled in four camps (with a fifth still possible) so that we, her two professional working parents, can earn a living and thus afford said camps. We’re signed up for a week-long, overnight, all-girls sleepaway camp at Griffith Park, an arts camp at a synagogue three blocks away, a swimming/all-around recreation camp at Valley College, and Beach Camp, which, for our fair-skinned daughter, requires bulk purchases of SPF 50 sunscreen.

There’s also the matter that plenty of LAUSD families simply can’t afford private summer camp at all, since absolutely none of them can be found at the bargain, 1970s price of $20. Half of all LAUSD families qualify for free lunch programs, meaning their household income is just over or below the federal poverty line. Some summer camps offer scholarships on a very limited basis, but that just means families in need must compete for these coveted slots and complete additional administrative paperwork.

Mind you, this is on top of the dizzying registration process that often involves web sites crashing after anxious parents overwhelm the system immediately after the online enrollment period opens.

For lower-income families, the availability of formal and informal municipal resources–public swimming pools, kids’ day camps at city parks, and air-conditioned public libraries–is critical. For tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area kids, poverty doesn’t take a summer vacation.

The LAUSD academic calendar also plays a role in making summer a tough sprint for families. The long winter break is offset by making the summer break short, just over two months long, with school ending June 9 and starting up again August 15. So while the fabled and possibly archaic family summer vacation is possible for those with means, it’s the hottest, priciest, and most crowded time of year for travelling.

It’s taken our family three years of practice to finally figure out how to make this unconventional school schedule work for us. We did this by giving up on a conventional week of summer vacation; we might get a long weekend or two if we’re lucky. Instead, we opt for vacation during the tail end of winter break, after the holidays, when most other school districts are back in session and airfares and hotel prices drop significantly.

But our coping strategy is under fire. The LAUSD Board, in their infinite wisdom, has considered changing the academic calendar as the solution to several of their administrative woes. You see, other school districts start at a far more conventional time: after Labor Day. Not only do some board members observe other school districts with a jealous eye, but they are also under the impression that a later start will result in lower air conditioning usage and, hence, lower energy costs district-wide. This past fall, it looked like a move towards a more traditional start, one week later in 2017 and an additional week later in 2018, was going to pass.

In December, however, forces far greater than Computer Camp took hold, shocking the school board into reversing their position—and reverting (for now) to the calendar with the two-month summer break and the three-week winter break. Why? For two big reasons. First, the teacher’s union likes the status quo. Second, changing to a calendar with a shorter winter break would result in more student absences, since a considerable number of parents would still yank their kids out of school for a few days for holiday-time visits to relatives and winter vacation destinations. These additional absences would result in LAUSD losing some of its funding from the State of California, which allocates resources based on average daily attendance.

But the scheduling issue remains white-hot. The board’s decision on the calendar was so divisive that the board President abstained—yes, abstained—when the academic calendar issue came before them. So while the calendar is set for the school year beginning this coming August, the board has yet to decide on the calendars for the 2018-19 school year and beyond.

I wonder if this lack of leadership, leading to unnecessary uncertainty for parents, would even matter if we had the informal, cheap, carefree, drop-in nature of the summer camp I remember. But I recognize that in our current era of instant access and gratification, kids like our daughter might not know what to do with the unstructured fun I had when I was a kid. None of today’s summer camp options offer any time for being lazy or hazy—there’s only a short break before your next camp activity starts at 10:10 a.m.

What memories will she have? What sport will she remember playing that didn’t come with rules or equipment? And with her day’s activities lined up on a scheduling grid, will she even have the time to reflect on her summer music soundtrack?

As for me, Gerry Rafferty’s sax solo will always remind me of those slow and easy summers, with the click-clack of a table hockey puck adding some percussion. Just don’t tell the Beach Boys.

The post Where’s the Laid-Back Fun in Kids’ Summer Vacations? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I can. Over the years, for the sake of my children’s enrichment, I have ordered gold-standard wrapping paper, reusable polyurethane bags, various types of overpriced produce, several mugs embossed with childhood art of questionable quality, and a decidedly non-miraculous miracle sponge.

Most working parents I know have a love-hate relationship with the PTA, that benevolent oligarchy in yoga pants. PTA parents are cliquish and relentless, but hard-working and sincere. And ultimately, they’re not the ones to blame for all of the needling flyers, fundraising packets, and soul-crushing suggestions that if you don’t buy gourmet grapefruit, the field trip to the petting farm won’t happen, and everyone will be sorry.

No, the real problem is a system that has yanked the parent organization from its roots: an advocacy group, founded in the 19th century by women who couldn’t vote, which has successfully pushed for kindergarten, mandatory immunizations, and child labor laws. There’s still a National PTA, based near Washington, D.C. But over the years, many school-based groups have lost faith in its agenda—or decided the dues weren’t worthwhile—and gone independent.

And without a common purpose or an overarching mission, many PTAs have evolved into school-based fundraising machines, largely divorced from the “teacher” part of the name, and generally turned inward. (By the time the country song “Harper Valley PTA” came out in 1968, its clannish reputation had been sealed.)

In the process, PTAs have replaced true community with something that’s essentially the opposite.

Alexis De Tocqueville gushed, long ago, about Americans’ peculiar version of enlightened self-interest, the way selfish motives still somehow led people to lend their time—and property—to the greater good. “The principle of self-interest rightly understood,” he wrote, “produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.”

Modern parenting culture, though, allows for no denial. For many, the birth of a child is the start of true civic engagement—a stake in the future, a reason to get involved. But that self-interest is channeled to the community that’s exclusively yours.

It starts with the way many American states fund education, with shrinking state aid bolstered by local property tax rolls, so that haves and have-nots are enshrined. Even within smaller towns, school funding is a zero-sum game: Every tax hike becomes a face-off between the needs of kids and the fixed incomes of the elderly, every school board debate a proxy for anxiety about real estate values.

On policy, we’re no better. When it comes to pitched battles over education, where you stand is often a function of what your own child needs. In Massachusetts, a recent ballot question—which would have lifted a legal cap on charter schools—pitted desperate urban parents, eager for good options, against parents who feared erosion of support for public schools. The measure lost, but in the end, nobody won.

And because we don’t fund education as we should, we’re slaves to fundraising drives, easily co-opted by corporate goals. When I was in high school, a local supermarket chain ran a contest: Win an Apple computer for your school by collecting some vast sum in grocery receipts. “Isn’t that unfair to poorer districts?” I asked. My father called me a communist.

This is where the women (yes, it’s still mostly women) of the PTA and independent “PTO” come in—working hard for their kids and no one else’s. It’s not a matter of greed or cold-heartedness, but of structure. In my town outside Boston, the elementary schools in the fanciest neighborhoods hold fundraising galas with silent auctions, and host smoothie bars for the teachers. The ones like mine, filled with dual-working-parent and working-class families, scrape by with bake sales and patched-together carnivals—heartfelt and sweet, but far less lucrative. There is teacher appreciation, for sure, just no smoothies to go with it.

And because so many “extras” deemed important to enrichment are left to the schools to finance, a cottage industry of fundraising schemes has cropped up, purveying products no one really needs. PTAs are deeply susceptible to these ideas.

It all amounts to taxation by guilt, essentially unfair, and inefficient to boot. Once, I spent $25 on a book of coupons to various stores I was unlikely to ever set foot in, on the promise that half of the proceeds—$12!—would go back to the school.

I’ll forever regret that I didn’t put $25 in an unmarked envelope, drop it in the school office, and run in the opposite direction. For the good of the children.

The post PTAs Are the Opposite of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“He has something wrong with each tooth,” the dental student said in amazement. “He has to be in constant pain.” I nodded my agreement, not really surprised by the news.

I’m the principal of Victoria Elementary School in San Bernardino, where the dental student was assessing Eric’s oral wellness as part of the annual fall screening we bring to all 500 children in our student body. In partnership with Loma Linda University’s dental school, which triages the worst cases and then follows up weekly with their mobile clinic, this program treats our students throughout the school year. For many kids, it’s the only dental care they receive.

Eric had a bright, cheerful demeanor and near perfect attendance, making it all the more incredible to learn that he’d been living in pain. Thankfully, the dental school put Eric and his sister at the top of their patient list—after two years of treatment, their dental health is finally approaching normal.

Eric and Madeline’s circumstances are not unique at our school. In our zip code, half of the children live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census. Almost monthly we have students undergoing extractions of abscessed teeth caused by bacterial infections, which, left untreated, can spread to the jaw, neck, and brain causing even more serious medical conditions.

Victoria Elementary School students receive dental check-ups.

To me, Eric’s teeth represent a problem in the way we measure whether we are providing economically disadvantaged students with educational opportunities on par with their wealthier peers. In addition to academic support, we must factor in the many needs of our children beyond the classroom. Are they hungry? Did they sleep? Basic necessities cannot be assumed when dealing with poverty because we know that hungry and tired children do not perform well in class.

In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown shifted state educational funds to allocate more per-pupil to students from low-income families, and to increase local control. This shift will enable Victoria to expand the range of services to support our students. Starting this school year, we now have a person dedicated to following up with students in everything from school work, basic needs, and most importantly, emotional support for the psychological effects of poverty.

I was introduced to Victoria Elementary seven years ago, when a colleague called it a “hidden gem.” Through a fluke of geography, Victoria is located in San Bernardino, but it’s part of the neighboring Redlands school district. The differences are stark. Redlands, a city in the top 100 best places to live in California, is a “destination district.” It’s where teachers want to teach, students want to learn, and parents want their children to go to school. Transfer requests are many and successful transfers are highly coveted. San Bernardino, on the other hand, is third from the bottom on that same list of 240 cities. Poverty is high. Security is uncertain, both in terms of personal safety and food security.

Given the unmet needs in this community—needs as fundamental as food, clothing, and shelter—I consider myself lucky that when I took the principal position at Victoria, I inherited a Family Resource Center (FRC) on my campus. The FRC is our hub for community outreach. Originally funded through California’s Healthy Start Initiative, Redlands Unified has retained four FRCs across the district. Staffing duties are shared by a case manager from a local charity and a school worker.

Working in a community where many lack the basics, I’ve come to learn that poverty doesn’t mean impoverishment. The families that make up the Victoria community are generous with what they have. Neighbors often walk each other’s children to school. It’s also common for them to open their homes to one another so that parents have a place where they can leave their children before starting their early morning commutes to work. Even with this esprit de corps, more is needed.

Addressing hunger is one of the most vital issues we deal with. The school, formerly surrounded by orange groves and strawberry fields, now lies in the middle of a food desert. Many of our families don’t have cars, and public transit is both slow and sporadic, especially on weekends. There’s a liquor store nearby, but the nearest market is a five-mile round-trip walk.

More than 90 percent of Victoria’s students participate in the National School Lunch Program and receive free or reduced meals. Every Wednesday, a local church brings in bread donations from the Panera restaurant chain, which the children are free to take home. On Fridays the kids start the weekend with bags of groceries provided through the United Way’s Backpack Program. Sometimes it isn’t enough, so we run our own food pantry to help families who run into emergencies.

Several years ago we transformed an unused space outside a kindergarten classroom into a vegetable garden. Through local grants and the tireless efforts of several teachers and our after-school coordinator, children helped plant and sow lettuce, chard, and cauliflower. We use the fruits of their labor in our school cafeteria and we send some home with the families who help keep the garden maintained.

 
Some of our families cannot afford to buy their children shoes. Seeing first graders shuffle around in adult-sized shoes is not uncommon. At the start of this school year, Kim, the assistant principal, stopped at a local Payless to buy a fifth- grader and her brother new shoes. The last time they got new shoes was when she and I took them to an Assistance League-sponsored shopping trip last March. I think these are the only times these children have had new shoes.

The emotional effects of poverty are more hidden, but no less insidious. Simply put, poverty hurts—physically and emotionally. With a school full of young children, we see a lot of separation anxiety, which our staff is well equipped to handle. But for deeper emotional trauma we seek outside help. When Nathan’s mother was battling cancer, I would fish him from her car and Kim or I would sit him in the office. Some days we could get him to class; other days we couldn’t. It was only after our case manager from the Building a Generation charity arranged counseling that his anxiety got better.

Families do what they need to survive. Often, this means doubling or even tripling up in a house. This creates a host of scenarios I never encountered as a solidly middle-class kid growing up. At the milder end, it means their children are left in the care of older siblings or roommates with whom families have banded together to pay rent. At the more extreme end, arguing or abuse in the home in one form or another can result. We work with students and parents who themselves are working through their varying levels of anxiety or depression or worse. Some families handle it well and others struggle. Some self-medicate.

I tell our teachers that we can’t control what happens at home, but we can control how we react to it. The first thing we remind each other is: “Don’t confuse issues of poverty with issues of morality.” Simple things like homework completion need to be viewed through that lens. Does the student have someone who can help her with her homework? Does she even have a place where she can work? More than a few teachers let students stay after school to do their homework. Every child needs a champion.

The daily encounters with our parents and students are as important as any academic, medical, or social service at our school. I am often outside at arrival and dismissal times. Not only is this a great way to welcome or say goodbye to students, it gives our parents easy access to the “person in charge.” For every sit-down meeting I’ve had with a parent I’ve had two curbside conferences. The level of familiarity is important. Not only does it relieve parents to know that I watch over their children, but it helps create a sense of community that everyone belongs here.

It’s easy to get lost in the enormity of the conditions in which we operate. Many of the problems, such as affordable housing and jobs with livable wages, are beyond our power to solve. However a sense of belonging is what gives us the tenacity to not only carry on but to help our students be resilient. Poverty makes it harder to succeed, but it is by no means an insurmountable barrier. Parents understand that we are on their side and their gratitude is evident every Teacher Appreciation Day when there is no shortage of flan, pan dulce, or tres leches cake for the staff.

The post A Hungry Child Cannot Learn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is California abandoning its poorest students?

That question would be dismissed as absurd by our state’s education leaders, especially Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Board of Education. For years, they have been building a new educational architecture they say will do more for the poorest kids in the poorest schools.

But as the many elements of this architecture are put in place slowly—and I do mean slowly—they have begun to look like a Winchester Mystery House, so full of complicated rooms that the structure doesn’t fit together coherently. On its current path, the emerging educational architecture of California seems likely to undermine public accountability, resist meaningful parent and community engagement, and make it difficult to figure out whether disadvantaged students and the schools they attend are benefiting.

The new architecture is built on a foundation known as Local Control Funding Formula, a multi-piece formula that is designed to give more money and authority to local school districts, especially those with concentrated poverty. That formula was approved in combination with the establishment of new Local Control and Accountability Plans, intended to give parents and communities more say in how money is spent. The state also adopted Common Core standards for math and English that emphasize critical thinking, and combined the standards with a computer-based testing system to better track individual students.

And last month, the state wrapped all of these elements together in a new accountability system to track the progress of schools and students on new measures that go far beyond test scores.

The governing theory is that all these new educational structures—in concert with social programs to raise the wages, improve the health care, and provide more social services to poor Californians—will make it easier for a greater number of disadvantaged students to prepare for college and careers.

But examining the pieces in detail, the architecture is so hollow and unsteady that it’s hard to understand how students will benefit.

Consider the new accountability system, approved by the State Board of Education in September. The board passed it in a meeting that was heavy on self-congratulation, and light on detail.

The system introduces six indicators for measuring schools (such as college and career readiness, and the progress of English language learners) as well as local factors, like parental engagement and school climate. This was hailed as an improvement on a previous system that the board abandoned three years ago and had not replaced, leaving Californians in the dark about how their schools were doing.

But, at least for now, this new approach to accountability offers more clouds than sunshine. It could be years before data for some of the new measures exists. There are also real questions about how you could reliably measure parental engagement and school climate, or whether the effort would be worthwhile, given all the other demands on California districts.

Even worse, the board resisted urgent calls from many education and child advocacy groups to boil down this new system into something that the public might be able to understand. Instead, the board, defiantly, released a sprawling draft built around a confounding color-coded grid that deserves immediate induction, without the customary five-year waiting period, into the Hall of Fame for Bureaucratic Idiocy. “Making sense of it is practically impossible,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized.

Fixing this accountability system isn’t just a matter of redesign, which the board is saying it will do next year. The trouble is that the accountability system is built upon the other pieces of the new architecture, and those are similarly confusing. The new local control formula encompasses eight priorities, many of them hard to measure, and myriad sub-priorities and different grant formulas under those. And the Local Control and Accountability Plans required by the new formula are like the Holy Roman Empire—they aren’t local, they don’t really provide control or accountability, and they aren’t even plans. They are longwinded, technical answers to longwinded, technical questions required by a state template. School districts, naturally, have struggled to get parents and community members to participate in drafting these documents, which in many cases run to hundreds of pages.

And if all that doesn’t give you a headache, the new system could soon get even more complicated. The federal government is in the process of developing its own plan to help the worst-off schools, under the new Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to No Child Left Behind.

The federal law requires states to identify the bottom 5 percent of schools and figure out ways to improve them. California’s emerging architecture doesn’t provide any easy way to identify those schools. Instead, state leaders are lobbying against the new federal system, and continue to design the state’s system in ways that are at odds with the federal law. Last week, Gov. Brown vetoed a bill, overwhelmingly passed in the legislature, to require the California system to align with the federal one.

In the end, it’s possible there will be not one but two accountability systems for California schools—one answerable to Sacramento, the other to Washington.

In watching this process, I can’t help but wonder if all the confusion isn’t cynically deliberate. Throughout, the state has followed the advice of its powerful teachers union, the California Teachers Association, which has opposed any system that offers coherent ratings, and thus meaningful comparisons, of schools. The union prefers to have as much evaluation as possible done at the local level, where they are most powerful. By enacting a state system that no one can manage or understand, California may effectively leave things in the hands of the locals.

What does that mean for making sure poor kids are actually making progress? It may mean that we never know. Gov. Brown gave the game away in an interview with CALmatters earlier this year when he questioned whether the achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other students can be closed, even with the help of his Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).

“The gap has been pretty persistent,” he said, “so I don’t want to set up what hasn’t been done ever as the test of whether the LCFF is a success or failure. I don’t know why you would go there.” Closing achievement gaps is “pretty hard to do,” he added.

The defenses of the emerging system are equally lame. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has argued that the complexity of the new system is a virtue—since education, and life for that matter, is complex.

The State Board of Education president Michael Kirst, a Stanford scholar whose writing on educational systems is distinguished by its clarity, has in this instance taken to issuing uncharacteristically foggy pleas for patience and delay. We’re still ironing out the kinks and the whole system will evolve continuously, he argues. “Concluding now that the system is too complex,” he wrote for the website EdSource, “would be no different than arguing that people would not be able to use a smart phone based on the engineering specifications when the device is still in development.”

Professor Kirst is right about the need for patience, in a way. It will take at least until 2019, when California finally gets a new governor, before Californians will have any chance to stop construction on this incomprehensible mess, and to focus coherently on our poorest students.

The post California’s New Education Architecture Is Already Failing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.