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.

No Child Left Behind, championed by President George W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, was enacted in 2002. It included a long list of mandates that states had to follow to receive federal funding. But it quickly became a lightning rod because of its heavy emphasis on testing. It was also criticized for setting unrealistic goals.

Last year, the House and Senate moved to pass a new federal framework that included far fewer requirements. But accountability advocates did manage to win a provision that they believe will force states to step in and improve poorly functioning schools. It mandates that states must intervene with schools which repeatedly fail to graduate two-thirds of students, fall in the bottom 5 percent of academic achievement or have chronic problems with low scores for ethnic groups.

U.S. Department of Education officials charged with drafting rules for this provision want states to adopt simple metrics based mostly on test scores that provide one number for each school, making it easier to assess academic performance.

California State Superintendent of Public Schools Tom Torlakson

But Gov. Jerry Brown, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson (pictured) and state Board of Education President Michael Kirst have for years disapproved of the single-score rating. This view — and the aggressive lobbying of the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers — led to the scrapping of the Academic Performance Index that had previously provided snapshot looks at school performance.

Instead, the state Board of Education earlier this month unanimously adopted a system that rates schools on several factors, including math and English test scores; graduation, suspension and absenteeism rates; and effectiveness of English-learner courses. Kirst and Torlakson wrote a letter to a U.S. Department of Education officials urging that California’s multi-metric standard be accepted.

State evaluation ripped as confusing, unhelpful

But the proposal has come under fire within California. While it was being finalized, the state evaluation system was blasted in a Los Angeles Times editorial as being confusing and unhelpful. The Legislature was also skeptical. At the behest of Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, the Assembly and Senate passed a bill with almost no dissent that had a similar variety of metrics for schools — but also a bottom-line, single score on academic performance, as the U.S. Department of Education wants.

Last weekend, Gov. Brown vetoed the bill — AB2548 — saying the standards developed by the state Board of Education were superior.

This sets up a confrontation with the Obama administration in the short term and with the administration of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump after Jan. 20, 2017.

Brown, Torlakson and Kirst may be hoping for a more sympathetic ear from Clinton. A high-profile education reformer earlier in her career, in recent years she has echoed teacher unions’ criticism of assigning so much importance to results of standardized tests.

Two separate policy changes fueled the about-face. At the federal level, Congress turned its back on No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era legislation that drew consistent fire from some Republicans and Democrats concerned that assessing student performance was becoming more formulaic and outcome-based than appropriate.

The new law — known as the Every Student Succeeds Act — “aims to take a more holistic approach to evaluating schools, using qualities beyond test scores,” the Los Angeles Times noted. But questions have arisen as to how much wiggle room ESSA can, or should, give state educators when it comes to assessment. “Under ESSA, states have to devise a ‘system of meaningfully differentiating’ schools by looking at academics in addition to at least one other factor, as long as the academics are given ‘much greater weight,'” reported the Times. “ESSA calls for states to intervene in the bottom 5 percent of their schools, in addition to schools where specific groups of students consistently underperform and high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. States can determine what they do to those schools, as long as the interventions are ‘evidence-based.'”

Off the hook

In California, the changes drew initial enthusiasm. The state Board of Education has busied itself replacing its own Academic Performance Index with a new set of guidelines also designed to bring a more holistic and nuanced approach to capturing what schools do well or don’t. But the lapse in federal rigor between the weakening of No Child Left Behind and the passage of ESSA gave California officials an opportunity to loosen standards markedly — one they seized upon, to the dismay of critics. “Since 2002, No Child Left Behind tied schools’ federal grades to students’ proficiency in math and English. But now, under a waiver granted in June, California bases those grades solely on attendance, test participation and graduation rate — which itself has been inflated with the demise of the state high school exit exam,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. “Those are much easier bars to hurdle — and achieved by most California schools.”

“Without the fed’s waiver, more schools would be facing more mandates if the yardstick were still based on proficiency. On standardized tests last spring, only 44 percent of California students tested proficient in English, and 33 percent proficient in math — far short of No Child Left Behind’s unrealistic expectation of 100 percent proficiency. Even though nearly half of California public schools are still designated as Program Improvement, educators no longer see it as threatening.”

In fact, state education officials have helped along the rush toward weak and waived standards. California, wrote Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, “is so happy to be free from the tyranny of testing that it has suspended the California High School Exit Examination and ordered schools to retroactively reward diplomas to students who failed the test during the last decade.”

Brewing conflict

What’s more, the Board’s suspension of the API has triggered a crisis of regulatory interpretation around the standard’s requirement that the Board publish an annual list of the 1,000 worst-performing schools in the state. Citing the API’s suspension, state superintendent Tom Torlakson “is refusing to publish a list of the 1,000 low-achieving schools, thus blocking parents from sending their children to ones with better ratings,” as Dan Walters observed at the Sacramento Bee. Outgoing Republican state Senate leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, has challenged Torlakson’s interpretation. “He has an opinion from the Legislature’s legal counsel that Torlakson, a close ally of unions, is still obligated to calculate an API, based on available indices of achievement, such as the state’s newest academic tests, and therefore issue a list,” wrote Walters.

Children entering charter schools in Los Angeles already outperform peers who attend traditional public schools, then pull ahead even a bit more, especially those attending charter middle schools … .

 

Pupils who enter charter elementary or high schools displayed significantly higher test scores, relative to counterparts entering traditional public schools at the same grade levels, the report said. Elementary students in charter schools benefit from slightly steeper learning curves, relative to peers remaining in conventional schools, researchers said. Charter high schools were no more or less effective than traditional schools in boosting student performance.

 

Charter schools, while publicly funded, operate independently of many state requirements and the administration of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Some 274 charter schools operate in L.A. Unified this fall, more than any school district nationwide.

 

The four-year study of 66,000 students at charter schools in Los Angeles Unified — one of the largest research projects yet on charters — offers generally positive news about their quality of education.

The $490 million ‘Great Public Schools Now Initiative’

The study is sure to be invoked by Broad and others unhappy with the quality of education in the nation’s second-largest district. In September, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of a 44-page report prepared for Broad called “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative” that corroborated earlier stories that Broad hoped to increase from 16 percent to 50 percent the number of L.A. Unified students in charters, which would require the creation of an estimated 260 new schools. A key passage in the executive summary:

The opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion of high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles. Thanks to the strength of its charter leaders and teachers, as well as its widespread civic and philanthropic support, Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.

According to the Times account, the report cited …

… numerous foundations and individuals who could be tapped to raise money, including the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bloomberg, Annenberg and Hewlett organizations. Among the individuals cited as potential targets for fundraising were Eli Broad, Irvine Co. head Donald Bren, former entertainment mogul David Geffen and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

 

It also suggested a strategy of grassroots organizing and civic engagement designed to generate more interest among parents in charter schools.

UTLA, CTA gear up for public-relations war

The California Teachers Association and its largest chapter, United Teachers Los Angeles, are ramping up for the challenge. The UTLA has already launched a picketing campaign against the plan. At a November rally, CTA President Eric Heins said, “We are here to say to Eli Broad and to Walmart that our schools are not for sale. … The 325,000 members of the California Teachers Association stand arm in arm with UTLA and with CFT to say no to Eli Broad, to say no to Walmart, and to help build the schools that all L.A. students deserve.”

The CTA has won support from Diana Ravitch, a high-profile education reformer and author who’s made an odyssey from harsh union critic to someone who agrees with the union claim that there is something unsavory, corporate and ominous about a school reform movement organized by billionaires. That’s how she characterized Broad’s effort on her website.

“Will the [LAUSD] board go along with Eli’s silent coup or will they choose someone to represent the public interest?” Ravitch wrote.

Broad’s defenders describe his school reform ideas as very comparable to President Obama and his push for school and teacher accountability. But the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (which counts the CTA as its biggest affiliate) and the American Federation of Teachers (the California Federation of Teachers is its biggest affiliate), reject that comparison.

Obama’s recent decision to sign the Every Student Succeeds Act, a national education framework replacing 2002’s No Child Left Behind law, would appear to back up the NEA’s and AFT’s view. It pulls back sharply from federal accountability requirements imposed on states and individual school districts.

The new law swept to bipartisan passage because of an unusual coalition of Democrats who joined teacher unions in saying too much class time was being spent on testing and Republicans who said Congress should not be a “national school board,” in the phrase of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former secretary of education.