Published
3 years agoon
Sooner or later, reality rears its ugly head and that seems to be happening with the state’s very expensive — but apparently failing — efforts to close a yawning “achievement gap” among the state’s nearly 6 million elementary and secondary school students.
Early in the decade, as Jerry Brown began his second stint as governor, he persuaded the Legislature to create the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).
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Late last year, State Auditor Elaine Howle, having been directed by the Legislature to look into LCFF, reported,that “the state does not explicitly require districts to spend their supplemental and concentration funds on the intended student groups or to track how they spend those funds; therefore, neither state nor local stakeholders have adequate information to assess the impact of those funds on intended student groups.”
That’s exactly what civil rights and education reform groups, loosely organized as an “equity coalition,” had been saying and pressing in lawsuits directed at specific school districts.
This week, the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabriel Petek, weighed in, having been directed to convene a working group to analyze how LCFF and other efforts to help low-performing students were functioning.
Petek’s report laid out the dimensions of the achievement gap and noted that despite $20-plus billion in state and federal funds per year directed to high needs students, demonstrable successes are scant.
Petek suggested several ways in which accountability could be increased, the most intriguing of which would be state intervention for local school systems that “persist in having long track records of poor performance.”
For many years, the state has had a system to monitor the finances of local school districts and intervene with those that have persistent problems balancing their budgets, including state takeovers of the worst cases. But it hasn’t intervened for educational failures.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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