A nearly year-long fight between the Trump administration and the California state government over school accountability ended with an unexpected twist last week when U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (pictured) explicitly endorsed a state student progress metric that reformers had denounced as intentionally vague and misleading. This clears the way for the Golden State to receive about $2.4 billion in federal education aid in 2018-19.

The dispute was over California’s formal proposal to meet the rules established in December 2015 when Congress created a new federal education framework to replace 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act, which had fallen into disfavor among Republicans and Democrats alike for linking some federal aid to states to progress in standardized testing. GOP governors denounced the law as an infringement on states’ rights. Democratic governors ripped NCLB for an emphasis on test scores that they said was excessive and and undermined learning.

Approved by a landslide bipartisan vote, the NCLB replacement law – the Every Student Succeeds Act – wiped out virtually all federal mandates. But the ESSA law did require states to identify schools which consistently finish in the bottom 5 percent on standardized tests; which have minority subgroups with consistently weak test results; and which graduate fewer than two-thirds of students.

Weakened federal mandates still criticized by state

Even those much-weakened requirements rankled state Board of Education President Michael Kirst. The Stanford emeritus professor – Gov. Jerry Brown’s longtime go-to man on education issues – depicted the rules as inferior to California’s approach to identifying and helping struggling schools. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kirst said requiring an evidence-based system of ranking schools “makes it sound as though, ultimately, states must boil down every factor they’re looking at and give each school a rating. If we’re forced to come up with a number, our [evaluation system] debate is over.”

Kirst said it was not realistic for California to turn down federal aid, so the state would seek to accommodate the federal law. But he said the California School Dashboard education evaluation program was much preferable to assigning schools a single score.

The Dashboard evaluates 10 indicators of educational progress. Some focus specifically on student achievement, including graduation rates, test scores and English learner progress. Several other indicators focus on school district performance with regard to absenteeism, suspensions and “school climate surveys” of students and parents.

Reformers have long blasted the Dashboard as being intended to muddle, not clarify, whether districts and schools are broadly helping students’ academic performance.

“On the one hand, the idea of having a lot of data to give a more holistic view of how schools are doing can be seen as a positive. But if it’s presented in a way that even if you have a Ph.D. you can’t understand, and you can’t compare school performance and things that one cares about,” that’s unhelpful, EdVoice President Bill Lucia told the Monterey Herald last year.

Feds initially unhappy with CA accountability plan

As CalWatchdog reported in December, similar concerns led the U.S. Department of Education to reject the Brown administration’s initial ESSA compliance plan. In a Dec. 21 letter, Jason Botel, principal deputy assistant secretary of education, said California should use more precise measures of student performance. Botel also offered a list of other questions about the state plan.

Since then, Botel’s negotiations with the state yielded progress on some of his concerns. The EdSource website reported that on June 29, Botel sent state officials a letter indicating he would recommend that DeVos approve California’s third version of its plan. Botel was pleased with tougher standards offered by the state in evaluating the progress of English-learner students from poor families and in assessing teacher training.

In a July 12 press release, DeVos announced that ESSA plans for California and Utah had been approved, leaving only Florida without a federally endorsed proposal to receive education aid.

DeVos’ statement lauded the Dashboard approach: “California’s new accountability and continuous improvement system provides information about how local educational agencies and schools are meeting the needs of California’s diverse student population, based on a concise set of measures that are displayed in the California School Dashboard.”

Beyond the state’s promises to better monitor some categories of student progress, it is unclear why the U.S. Department of Education’s view of the Dashboard’s “holistic,” multistandard approach went from specific criticism in December to specific praise eight months later. EdSource, the education website with many insider sources in Sacramento, depicted the evolution of the state’s ESSA compliance proposals over the past 10 months as reflecting relatively minor concessions.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Education’s “Getting to Know the California School Dashboard” explainer website appears unchanged from earlier versions.

Among other points, “The 2015-16 Budget: Rethinking How the State Funds School Facilities” pushes the idea that facilities funding should more closely follow each student. Doing so would change the system from its current dependence on local variations largely based on community wealth and support for more school funding.

The report is claiming that reforms need “to get schools out from under Sacramento-related oversight and redundancy,” Bill Lucia told CalWatchdog.com; he’s the president and CEO of EdVoice, a nonprofit reform group, and served as executive director of the State Board of Education.

Lucia said the report works to address Gov. Jerry Brown’s Local Funding Formula reform from 2013, which shifted overall state funding more to schools from low-income families. However, Lucia added, neither Brown nor the LAO report “addresses head on” Proposition 98, the 1988 initiative that mandates about 40 percent of general-fund spending must go to K-14 education.

The LAO, he said, “has put some interesting ideas on the table,” but ultimately “still doesn’t address where the money comes from.”

LAO details

The LAO report said the existing program:

• “fails to treat school facility costs as an ongoing expense despite the recurring nature of facility needs”;
• “allows disparities based on school district property wealth”;
• “fails to target funding according to greatest need”;
• “results in excessive administrative complexity”;
• “lacks adequate accountability mechanisms.”

It notes “the governor indicates a strong interest in changing how the state funds school facilities, though he has not introduced a specific proposal to date.”

And the LAO makes several recommendations for new legislation:

• “establish an annual per–student facility grant”;
• “base the grant on the replacement value of existing school buildings and an estimate of their average useful life”;
• “adjust the grant to reflect local resources, with larger grants for districts with lower property wealth”;
• “adjust the grant during the transition to account for existing state debt service incurred on the district’s behalf”;
• “provide one-time funds to address the existing backlog of facility projects”;
• “require school districts that receive grant funds to adopt five-year facility accountability plans.”

Charter schools

Lucia said the LAO report is “thin” on dealing with charter schools, which are public schools that mostly work outside the state and local schools bureaucracies. According to the California Charter Schools Association, the state now includes more than 1,063 charter schools, teaching more than 484,000 students.

The LAO report explained that in 2001 the state established the Charter School Facility Grant Program “to provide facility funding for charter schools serving low-income students. Charter schools are eligible if they enroll or are located in the attendance of an elementary school where at least 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.”

But for the 2013-14 school year, the state appropriated only $70 million for the program. The money went to 300 charter schools. So the average was $233,333 for each school receiving the money. The amount was increased to $92 million for the current school year, 2014-15.

Bonds

The LAO also warned the state’s bond authority is almost exhausted. The two core programs, new construction and modernization, have been empty since 2012. But $286 million remains in the four bond measures passed earlier: Mainly the money is in three categories:

• seismic repair, $142 million remaining;
• charter school construction and modernization, $99 million remaining;
• energy-efficient schools, $32 million remaining.

Schools still can pass local bonds.

And according to Ballotpedia, a $9 billion school bond has been submitted to Attorney General Kamala Harris for the Nov. 2016 ballot. It is awaiting her title and summary before being circulated for signatures.

A Dec. 2014 poll by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates found such a bond nabbed 63 percent support to 33 percent opposition, with 4 percent undecided. But that’s before any actual campaigning by anti-tax groups worried the bond would lead to tax increases.

Bucks to buildings

A key issue is local control. Currently, wealthy areas generally are more likely than poor districts to approve local bonds or direct taxes to improve school facilities. That’s a problem Brown’s reform has been addressing.

“I agree with the governor on that point,” Lucia said.

Lucia added that, despite the importance of local control, the California Constitution actually guarantees a decent education for every child in the state. He believes the LAO report can help spur reforms that, in particular “streamline” state funding of schools, “eliminate redundancy and bureaucracy” and ultimately “bring more bucks to buildings.”