New reports show that six years after Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature approved a sweeping overhaul in how school funds were divvied up, the evidence is mixed that the overhaul is accomplishing its main goal: improving the academic performance of the 1.2 million English language learners in California public schools.

Under the law, known as the Local Control Funding Formula, schools with high percentages of English learners, foster children and poor families get additional funding that in 2013 was described as being specifically to help these students achieve proficiency in key subjects. Since then, about $30 billion in LCFF grants have been distributed.

But a 2015 decision by then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson to allow LCFF dollars to go for teacher raises and other general uses has led to critics such as Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, arguing that struggling students aren’t getting the help they were promised in 2013. Earlier this year, Weber persuaded a legislative panel to have state Auditor Elaine Howle review how the grants are being spent and possibly examine their effectiveness.

Reformers see bad faith in how law was implemented

The pending audit is highly anticipated by education reform groups which have for years accused the state government of showing bad faith in implementing LCFF. 

Defenders of the law have some data that back up claims it is working as intended. An EdSource analysis of the state’s Smarter Balanced test scores released earlier this month showed that schools with high numbers of LCFF students had seen a 9 percent increase in student English proficiency over the last five years. But the same analysis showed little change in the “achievement gap” between white and Asian students and those of Latino and African American descent. 

And a Public Policy Institute of California report released in August found that increased funding hadn’t changed a fundamental problem that makes progress difficult in struggling schools: They still had teachers who were considerably less experienced than those in wealthier communities. These schools are also far more likely to have teachers offering instruction in fields in which they had no training. The PPIC suggested there was evidence that these issues had gotten worse in recent years.

Because of strong teacher job-protection laws, veteran teachers have considerable latitude about where they work. Schools in wealthy communities that often get help from parental and community fundraisers have a huge edge over schools in poor communities where teachers often feel they have no choice but to bring in basic supplies for students from destitute families.

Civil rights lawyers again target LAUSD over spending

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, a formal complaint has been filed by the Public Advocates civil rights law firm that alleges that much of the $1 billion-plus in LCFF money the district gets annually is being used in ways that are not properly documented as required by state law. The complaint includes numerous examples from district records of LCFF grants being spent in questionable ways.

In 2016, Public Advocates filed a similar complaint against L.A. Unified, which some district officials strongly disputed. But the next year, the district agreed to provide an additional $151 million to 50 schools with high concentrations of English learners, foster children and students from poor families.

Five years after Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature passed a sweeping new school finance law meant to provide extra help to struggling students in poor, minority communities, new federal test scores raise difficult questions about the effectiveness of the 2013 measure.

Every two years, at the order of the federal government, the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests are administered to check on fourth- and eighth-graders’ progress in math and reading in all 50 states. While eighth-graders showed gains on reading, California’s overall scores for 2017 released earlier this month remained on average among the worst in the nation, as the EdSource website reported.

But a deeper dive into the data showed that California fourth-graders scored worse on math than any state but Alaska. Poor scores by African-American students caught the eye of Ryan Smith, executive director of the Education-Trust West. “At a time when California is claiming to lead on issues of what’s right in our country, we should see black students improve at far greater rates, not sliding back decades,” he told EdSource.

What made the results particularly disappointing were the high expectations that had accompanied the enactment in 2013 of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) – arguably the biggest change in California public education since Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature approved the hiring of thousands of new teachers in 1996 as part of an ambitious effort to reduce the number of students in first-, second- and third-grade classes to no more than 20 per teacher.

Brown led the push for LCFF, calling it a commitment to social justice and education equity. The measure guaranteed additional funding to districts with high concentrations of English-language learners, impoverished families and foster children. The law’s second main component also eliminated most of the top-down funding edicts imposed on school districts.

Brown argued that local districts had a better grasp on what their students’ needs were than state lawmakers and Sacramento bureaucrats, and that LCFF would give local schools extra resources that would allow them to improve education outcomes for struggling students.

Claims that funds were diverted came early and often

But even before this month’s disappointing test scores, the Local Control program had drawn fire. In January 2015, the Legislative Analyst’s Office said none of the 50 school districts it reviewed had set up adequate standards to make sure the funds were used as they were supposed to be. Soon after, Education Trust-West and other groups which advocate for poor and minority students said funds meant to specifically help these students were instead used for overall district spending, starting with teacher raises.

Brown supported state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson after he formally rejected the criticism – with both saying, in effect, that local control meant local control. Efforts in recent years by lawmakers to force a stricter accounting of LCFF dollars have been blocked by teachers union allies in the Legislature, notably Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, the Long Beach Democrat who chairs the Assembly Education Committee. In 2016, the governor vetoed an LCFF accountability measures that managed to win the Legislature’s unanimous approval.

But in January, in presenting his final budget before being termed out, Brown offered an indirect concession to those upset with how LCFF dollars had been used.

“While many districts have seized the opportunities offered under the formula to better serve their students, others have been slower to make changes,” his 2018-19 spending plan noted. “To improve student achievement and transparency, the budget proposes requiring school districts to create a link between their local accountability plans and their budgets to show how increased funding is being spent to support English learners, students from low-income families, and youth in foster care.”

Under the law, each school district was supposed to adopt a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) to ensure English-learners and foster children were getting the extra help that Brown and lawmakers promised. These plans outline district priorities and relate them to funding decisions.

Three years later, California education reform groups increasingly question how the LCFF is working out. They cite little evidence of more resources going to struggling students and many instances of extra dollars going into general school district budgets, with the blessing of Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.

This frustration led to the unusual decision last week of three reform groups — Public Advocates, Education Trust-West and Californians Together — to simultaneously issue studies that question how local LCAPs are being implemented.

Difficult to impossible to determine progress

EdSource has a roundup of their concerns:

Districts are not providing the level of transparency promised in exchange for increased spending flexibility,” wrote Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm that has threatened to sue the West Contra Costa Unified School District for failing to disclose how it planned to spend millions of dollars on high-needs students. “Most districts are missing the opportunity to use the LCAP as a comprehensive planning tool for continuous improvement.”

“The usefulness of the LCAP as a means of accountability is compromised by the difficulty in gleaning a sense of coherence and what the plan actually entails,” Californians Together, a coalition of parent, professional and civil rights organizations focused on the needs of English language learners, wrote in a report, published this month, analyzing LCAP plans to improve services for English learners.

The reports, which follow similar analyses last year, studied several dozen LCAPs for the current school year from large and small, urban and rural districts. Public Advocates’ report, released Wednesday, can be found here. Education Trust-West’s report is here.

All three reports made the same overall criticisms: that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to find out how much some districts are spending on high-needs students; to track the expenditures over time; and to find a justification or rationale for districts’ spending decisions.

Brown won’t second-guess local funding decisions

Part of the reason for the frustration of reform groups isn’t related to problems implementing the Local Control Funding Formula at the district level. It’s with Gov. Brown, whose appointees on the State Board of Education sided with Torlakson on the question of whether the funds could be used for teacher raises and other broad district expenses.

At the 2013 signing ceremony for LCFF, Brown depicted the law as reflecting a historic new commitment to helping English-language learners. But of late, Brown administration officials have emphasized the “local control” aspect of the law — not the promises that more direct help would be given to the 1.4 million students who struggle with English in state public schools.

In a January 2015 telephone interview with editorial writers after unveiling his proposed 2015-16 budget. the governor said he would look into complaints that funds were going to teacher raises, not English-language learners.

But a year later, his aides took a sharply different position. In a January telephone interview with editorial writers after the governor unveiled his proposed 2016-17 budget, state Finance Director Michael Cohen said LCFF was meant to empower officials at local districts to make their own decisions. If they considered teacher raises a priority, the Brown administration had no issues with that, Cohen said.

The reform groups will present their critical findings about the law’s implementation to the State Board of Education at a meeting in May. The board is expected to try to fine-tune LCAP rules to make them easier to comply with and complete.

State Board of Education President Michael Kirst acknowledged local concerns about how unwieldy the process had become as a February state Senate hearing. But that hearing didn’t focus on the larger question of whether the LCFF’s initial goal of directly helping English-language learners and foster children was actually driving decisions at the district level.

The study — prepared by researchers from Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and the Los Angeles Unified School District — found that in seven small- and medium-sized districts it evaluated, two-thirds of English learners receiving special education are classified as having a “specific learning disability.” That’s more than double the rate for other students receiving special education.

This suggests that districts are failing to make a distinction between not being fluent in English and not having the full learning capacity of a normal child. The study says changes are needed “in both the current classification system for students learning English and in the provision of services for these students. Specifically, they indicate that EL classification is too blunt an instrument to capture accurately the diverse learning needs of students learning English, and that reclassification is elusive for many students, sometimes for problematic reasons. Our research also points to weaknesses in the provision of services for English learners, especially in terms of full access to core content and teachers’ level of preparedness to work with students acquiring English.”

For years, Gov. Jerry Brown has called the education of the 1.4 million English-learner students in state public schools the most important issue in California, given the need for these students to end up as productive members of a healthy economy. But the urgency with which Brown framed the issue hasn’t translated into actual efforts by the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education or most school districts to do a better job of evaluating these students and trying to maximize their education outcomes, the new research suggests.

Fixes to system not necessarily costly

Ed Source’s coverage of the study noted one of its most interesting points: Improving evaluations wouldn’t necessarily be all that costly:

The report also said that the initial English learner classification is overly broad and does not reflect home conditions, family education and wealth, which are predictive of how quickly an English learner will likely become proficient. The classification rates vary significantly among districts, the report said. It also noted “troubling achievement gaps among English learners of different linguistic and national origins,” with 90 percent English learners of Chinese origin in one district reclassified by middle school, compared to 65 percent of Hispanic English learners.

 

Citing the need to expand access to core academic instruction, bilingual instruction and better prepared teachers, the report concluded, “Changes along these lines would not necessarily require large new investments, but they could yield substantial benefits for large numbers of California students.”

But it’s unsure if these recommendations will prompt action by the governor, the Legislature or state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. All have faced criticism over the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, a 2013 state law that was supposed to direct additional resources to educate English language learners. The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported in January that it did not find adequate safeguards for the use of the resources in any of the 50 state school districts it surveyed.

The new study’s formal title is “Improving the Opportunities and Outcomes of California’s Students Learning English.” A 16-page policy brief on its findings can be found here.

But education reformers warned that pent-up demand for raises from powerful local teacher unions could lead school boards and superintendents to divert LCFF dollars to compensation.

The LAO report doesn’t come out and say that is what is happening. Instead, it implies many districts appear to be going through the motions and trying to create the appearance of compliance.

The whole point of the law, remember, is to provide direct, tangible, quantifiable additional assistance to English learners and struggling students. That this intent is not being honored is plain in two of the LAO’s key conclusions:

Districts Rarely Differentiate Between New and Ongoing Actions. In most LCAPs, we found that districts are not distinguishing between actions that are a continuation of efforts from the prior year and those that are new for the upcoming school year. Without such differentiation, we could not determine whether districts were using the new funding generated under LCFF to pursue new actions to improve performance or to continue or expand prior activities.

Districts Often Fail To Provide Sufficient Information on EL/LI Student Services. Often, districts’ descriptions of services for EL/LI students consist only of recapping the actions they will pursue on behalf of all students and indicating those actions also will benefit EL/LI students. In addition, few districts provide clear or compelling rationales for using their supplemental and concentration funds on a districtwide and schoolwide basis.

A reform? Or a disguised political favor?

This gets to a point that Cal Watchdog and nearly nobody else in the California media has made since the LCFF moved quickly through the Legislature to enactment two years ago. If this was the biggest change in state education policy in nearly 20 years — since classroom-size reduction agreed to by Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature — it was unlikely to pass without the tacit support of the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, the most powerful special interests both in the Capitol and in most cities around the state.

It is difficult to look at the failure of local school districts to properly account for LCFF dollars and not wonder if what was billed as reform was actually a way to do a disguised favor for the urban and Central Valley chapters of the CTA and CFT — the ones with the most English-language learners.

The LAO said that some of the 50 school districts it surveyed tried harder than others to meet the letter of state law with the funds. But how many of the 50 actually complied with the law’s requirements?

The LAO said not a one.

“Brown, architect of the Local Control Funding Formula which restructured the state-school fiscal relationship, had struggled in recent months over the program’s regulations as two of his own goals within the new system were challenged by key interest groups.

“The governor had sold the program last spring by arguing local officials should be put in charge of more of the spending decisions – but he also wanted more of the money to target disadvantaged students.

“The two came in conflict with civil rights groups, who criticized an initial set of regulations for not ensuring targeted money would actually go to low-income students, English learners and foster youth.”

And where will it go if it doesn’t go to these kids? You guessed it. Teachers’ compensation. Why else would the CTA and CFT back this change?

Plea for changes to strengthen rules

EdTrust-West sent the state board a letter early this week warning how weak the regulations were:

“The regulations guiding districtwide uses of supplemental and concentration funds are overly broad. These provisions risk undermining the significant progress that has been made to ensure these grant dollars will benefit the students who generated them.

“LEAs [Local Education Authorities] with more than 55% unduplicated students may use supplemental and concentration grant funds for any purpose, as long as they can describe how those services must meet the district’s goals for unduplicated students. The current template would allow such goals to be no different than those established by the LEA for all students. Thus, this proposed standard does not treat the use of supplemental and concentration funds for unduplicated pupils any differently than base dollars available to address the standard program.

“We believe this creates a significant potential loophole, as it allows a considerable portion of the dollars generated by unduplicated pupils for their specific “beyond-base-grant” needs to be spent on increasing or improving services for non-unduplicated pupils. A district could, for example, use supplemental and concentration grants to purchase tablet computers for all district students. To justify this, the LEA could argue that these investments will help meet its goals for all students, including unduplicated pupils. While improving the standard program may be an appropriate use of base grant funding, these decisions would be inconsistent with the law’s premise that the additional funds generated by unduplicated pupils should be directed, first and foremost, to improving the educational experience of unduplicated pupils and should not be treated as base funding to expand the core program.”

Make sure funds ‘actually benefit’ high-needs students

How can the reforms be salvaged? EdTrust-West had some ideas:

“We believe that stronger protections around districtwide and schoolwide use of funds may well be necessary to ensure that supplemental and concentration funding are actually used to benefit the students generating them, consistent with the premise of LCFF. These stronger assurances would include:

“1. Higher districtwide and schoolwide thresholds that capture LEAs and schools serving significant concentration of unduplicated students,

“2. Criteria for determining whether a service meets the standards for “most effective” use of funds,

“3. Stronger provisions assuring that supplemental and concentration funds can be used for districtwide and schoolwide services only if the service demonstrably provides a differential benefit to unduplicated pupils in order to address unduplicated pupil goals, and

“4. Criteria for County Offices of Education to oversee and approve LCAPs.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how this is reported — to see if reporters even understand what we’re seeing here is a teacher union power play. I’m not optimistic.