A scathing audit on school funding that found the state did not meet promises made six years ago to help English language learners, foster children and students from poor families sets up a 2020 test of the clout of the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers – and of the willingness of Gov. Gavin Newsom to take on the unions who were early backers of his successful 2018 candidacy. 

State Auditor Elaine Howle’s review focused on how school districts in San Diego, Oakland and Clovis had implemented the Local Control Funding Formula, which was adopted by the Legislature in 2013 at the behest of then-Gov. Jerry Brown. The governor and then-Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, were among several leaders who said the LCFF would be a game changer by getting additional assets to struggling students.

But Howle found instead that billions in extra funds the formula directed to districts with high percentages of English learners, foster kids and poor families had been used for general needs – including raises for teachers. She concluded there was little or no evidence that the LCFF had boosted these students’ performance.

“In general, we determined that the state’s approach [to Local Control] has not ensured that funding is benefiting students as intended,” Howle wrote.

Howle’s finding confirmed all the major criticisms of the formula that have been raised by education reformers and by civil rights lawyers who have repeatedly sued Los Angeles Unified over its treatment of poor minority students. 

Bill to track school funding couldn’t even get a hearing

But these groups have never gotten far with Local Control changes. Last spring, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the San Diego Democrat who pushed for the audit, couldn’t even get Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, to hold a hearing on her bill to require disclosure of how LCFF dollars are being used.

Howle’s audit gives Weber new evidence to push for tracking such spending, and she has said fixing Local Control is her top priority in 2020. But O’Donnell, a former teacher who is close to the CTA and CFT, is unlikely to drop his opposition to tracking the funding.

A key question is likely to be what the governor does. While Newsom won the early endorsements of the two teacher unions, he spent the 2018 campaign telling editorial boards and the Los Angeles and Silicon Valley billionaires who back education reform that he too wanted to fix Local Control to ensure it helped struggling students and had proper accountability protections.

But any attempt to get school districts to stop spending LCFF dollars on teacher compensation – and on rapidly growing teacher pension costs – will go directly against the CTA and the CFT. They already see available school funding as inadequate and are both pushing for billions of dollars in tax hikes in two measures expected to be on the ballot in November 2020. They also won changes that will make it more difficult for charter schools to be approved or renewed using the argument that charters were diverting funding from regular public schools at a time when those schools are desperately underfunded. They are unlikely to accept the notion that the audit must be acted on.

Meanwhile, Newsom has so far used his political capital to advance an education reform that teachers unions also may question. But the reform – using metrics to track the performance of students throughout their K-12 journey – isn’t nearly as contentious as the state forcing many school districts to reorient their Local Control spending and stop using it for raises and pension bills.

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.”

Passed in 2013, LCFF provided school districts with more discretion in how to spend state funding and tied certain grant revenue streams to a district’s concentration of English language learners and low-income students. The changes also provided a boost to state education spending to the tune of $18 billion by the next fiscal year, according to the study.

“A $1,000 increase in district per-pupil revenue from the state” in grades 10-12 led to a 5.3 percent increase in overall high school graduation rates, according to the study. For poor children and African-American children, the improvement in graduation rates was even more significant: 6.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively. 

“These changes closely track with the staggered timing of LCFF implantation,” according to the study.

LCFF’s effect was also borne out by standardized testing scores, with “average gains in mathematics and, to a smaller extent, in reading for all children.” And again, these improvements were more significant among “children from low-income families.”

And students were not the only beneficiaries of LCFF. Increases in district funding from LCFF resulted in lower student-to-teacher ratios and “significant increases in per-pupil expenditures, average teacher salaries and instructional expenditures.” For example, the study found that a 10 percent increase in “district per-pupil revenue” led to a 2.7 percent increase in average teacher salary, which “may enable the school and district to attract and retain a higher quality teaching workforce.”

Additionally, the study has good news for those worried that LCFF would result in administrative bloat. “We did not see evidence that the increase in district revenue disproportionately increased administration salaries,” wrote the authors. They concluded that “overall levels of spending have increased roughly proportional to their pre-LCFF proportions.”

Nevertheless, some critics of LCFF aren’t sold. Bill Lucia, president and CEO of EdVoice, labeled the study “fake news,” arguing in the Mercury News that the study’s standardized testing data essentially amounted to an invalid apples-and-oranges comparison. He also noted that “the vast majority of poor students are ‘below proficient’ with little or no change over the past several years.”

When Gov. Jerry Brown persuaded the Legislature

The first point has been the subject of contention for years because some school reform and civil rights groups allege LCFF dollars have been diverted to district general funds, in particular to raise pay for teachers. But until this month, the second point – about the gains that would result from local control – hadn’t been the source of significant controversy.

That may change with the release of a report by a high-profile Canadian education expert – Michael Fullan – and colleague Santiago Rincon-Gallardo. Fullan helped the province of Ontario overhaul its curriculum and, like Gov. Brown, is a well-established skeptic about top-down education reform who has been a sounding board for Golden State education officials in recent years, according to the EdSource website.

But the report he co-authored – entitled “California’s Golden Opportunity” – raises profound questions about California’s venture into local control. Its most striking findings focus on the lack of both enthusiasm for and expertise in crafting education reforms at the local level. The reports also notes how powerful a factor inertia is in the school districts that were surveyed. These same problems have been cited by advocates of “top down” education reform for decades.

The researchers were generous with their praise for LCFF’s basic framework and its inclusionary, open approach to figuring out how to improve schools. They also cite superintendents who prefer elements of the landmark 2013 law to previous policies.

“Even though its implementation has been somewhat bumpy and cumbersome, LCFF is viewed positively across California’s education system – from central offices to school districts,” their report noted. “There is a widely shared perception that the new funding strategy is much better than the older one and that the system is moving in the right direction.”

Districts see local reform plans as busywork

But Fullan and Rincon-Gallardo wrote that their interviews showed the most basic LCFF obligation – having each district prepare Local Control Accountability Plans – was often treated more as mandatory paperwork to be filled out in pro forma fashion than the starting point for pursuing reform.

Fullan and Rincon-Gallardo said the state should provide far more help to local districts in crafting local reforms. One reason: County offices of education in the great majority of the state’s 58 counties weren’t up to the task. The California Collaborative for Education Excellence – the state agency set up to help districts with LCAPs – needs far more resources, they wrote.

While the report notes problems with motivating local officials to pursue reform, it also includes a tough view of LCFF implementation from those at the local level. It noted that district officials interviewed “across the board” complained of a disconnect between what county- and state-level educators were doing and actions that would actually yield “improved teaching and learning in the classroom.”

Nonetheless, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst treated the report as more positive than negative in an email sent to EdSource. Kirst wrote that the report amounted to “confirmation that California is on the right track … . We have a lot of work ahead as we complete implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula and appreciate [Fullan’s] thoughtful and pragmatic recommendations.”

But when it comes to Proposition 55, ignorance of its contents is not likely to be a problem for voters. The California Teachers Association and its allies are likely to spend $100 million or more on saturation TV and social media ads depicting the measure as crucial to the future of California public education.

Prop. 55 would extend for 12 years the temporary tax hikes on single people earning more than $263,000 and couples earning more than $526,000 that voters approved in 2012 (then at slightly lower income thresholds) as part of Proposition 30. Instead of sunsetting at the end of 2018, the income tax increase would continue through 2030. The $7 billion or more this is expected to generate annually would be earmarked for education. The temporary sales tax hike that voters also approved in 2012 will lapse at the end of this year.

Revenue recession took toll on teachers

This month, the CTA wrote a $10 million check to the Yes on 55 campaign, which now has a $28 million warchest. The CTA and the smaller but still powerful California Federation of Teachers are likely to write several more checks that size to try to avoid the headaches that public school teachers faced from 2008 to 2012 during California’s long revenue recession.

While the “step” increases in pay that teachers typically receive in 15 of their first 20 years on the job were largely protected, strapped school districts didn’t grant additional across-the-board pay hikes that many provided during recent tech bubbles that pumped up capital gains revenue for the state. They also pushed for teachers to pay more toward their benefits and in some cases accept layoffs that extended beyond the newly hired to those with several years of experience.

As the Legislative Analyst’s Office graphic above shows, education spending has strongly rebounded since 2012, helped by a new boom in Silicon Valley and Proposition 30’s adoption that year. But the CTA and the CFT share Gov. Jerry Brown’s skepticism that the current good times can last. After first insisting that the temporary tax hikes must be allowed to expire because that’s what voters were promised, Brown has been far less vocal on the topic in the wake of new forecasts from his Department of Finance that state deficits are likely in coming years without retention of the income-tax hike.

Since state coffers are the main source of K-12 funding, Prop. 55’s approval is crucial to maintaining teachers’ pay and benefits. In most school districts, compensation eats up more than 80 percent of general fund budgets.

But Prop. 55’s route to passage may be rougher than Prop. 30’s in 2012. The Sacramento Bee editorial page has already said that support for extending the tax hikes should be explicitly linked to reforms in teacher tenure and to teacher unions’ support for state-subsidized childcare for poor families.

Some state lawmakers may also try to leverage their support for Prop. 55. Led by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, they are unhappy with how 2013’s Local Control Funding Formula has been implemented. The measure was supposed to pump billions of dollars in extra funding to districts with large numbers of English-language learners and foster children so they could provide help specifically for such students.

But three years in, education reform groups say that’s not happening, citing the absence of evidence of additional help for either category of student. Last year, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said the local control dollars could be used broadly for general pay raises, overruling a lower-ranking official.

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.

The tension has been on broad display in recent days as law enforcement unions and police chiefs react angrily to a new law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that is driven by the assumption that officers routinely act in racially biased ways:

For civil rights activists, Brown’s action was a big step toward protecting minorities from racial profiling.

 

For many in law enforcement, the measure creates a massive new bureaucratic headache that will do little to illuminate the question of whether police treat minority groups fairly.

 

“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” said Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and the national trustee for the California Fraternal Order of Police.

 

Written by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, in response to fatal police shootings of unarmed black men and other people of color, the legislation will require officers to collect data on anyone they stop, including “perceived” race and ethnicity, the reason for the encounter and whether arrests were made.

That’s from the Los Angeles Times’ account of the uproar over the new law. It is certain to be contentious going forward, especially given the likelihood that some departments will simply ignore it and say they don’t have the resources to spare.

Vergara suit based on claims of poor treatment of minorities

A potential for an even bigger rupture lies with the Vergara v. California lawsuit. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled in 2014 that five state laws protecting veteran teachers’ rights were unconstitutional because they had the net effect of funneling the most troubled teachers to poor minority communities. Treu said this amounted to a de facto segregated school system but stayed his decision pending an appeal.

The deadline for filing “friend of the court” briefs in the appeal was Sept. 16, and the prominence of those who chose to do so reflects the high stakes in the case:

Parties filing in support of the two teacher unions, the California Association of Teachers and California Federation of Teachers, and the state, which are all co-defendants, were Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Equal Justice Society, Education Law Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Advancing Justice-LA, according to a press release from CTA. …

 

Joining a list of education chiefs from around the nation, student groups, business organizations and others who filed briefs supporting the student plaintiffs was [Arnold] Schwarzenegger and [Pete] Wilson, who wrote, “At stake in this case is not only the future of California’s students, but also the future of California,” said the former California governors, both Republicans. “As students who learn from grossly ineffective teachers face lifelong setbacks, by extension, California’s future economic and social success is similarly impacted.”

That’s from L.A. School Report. What’s noteworthy is the absence of Latino groups either supporting or opposing Treu’s ruling, even though its most sweeping findings were largely based on the treatment of Latino students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, has been an outspoken critic of how public education works in California. She has long asserted that Latino state lawmakers are scared of taking on the CTA and the CFT, especially if they hope to end up in leadership positions. Whether that’s true or not, few Latino politicians beyond Romero and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have taken on the unions.

Black lawmaker leading Democratic critic of teachers unions

Instead, the most prominent Democratic critic of teachers unions is the same African American lawmaker who wrote the police profiling bill. Weber introduced a measure this spring that would have required teacher evaluations to include student performance. It was quickly killed in committee, prompting Weber to sharply criticize her fellow Democrats and their union backers.

A Los Angeles Times poll earlier this year showed support for the sort of changes sought by Weber and other reforms, in particular having teacher layoffs be determined by classroom performance, not seniority.

Weber and the California Legislative Black Caucus have also expressed concerns about the implementation of 2013’s Local Control Funding Formula, a state law championed by Gov. Jerry Brown that was supposed to directly help struggling students by providing them with more resources and attention. A January Legislative Analyst’s Office report looked at 50 California school districts, including the 11 largest, and found none had adequate safeguards in place to prevent LCFF dollars from going to teacher compensation or other uses.

The appeals trial in the Vergara case is expected to begin later this year with oral arguments. Plaintiffs have said they expect the appellate ruling by January.

Cohn’s reasoning builds off the premise that the nation’s second-largest school district is so sluggish and unresponsive that it is beyond repair:

LAUSD’s governance structure is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced by smaller units of school governance that are much more capable of delivering educational change that better serves students and their parents. In addition to being nimble and flexible, smaller school districts are physically closer to the parents they serve, and can initiate change strategies in a much more timely fashion.

Breakup would be good for struggling kids

And he also notes the timing is right because of the new education spending rules kicking in. The rules are billed as shifting resources to the neediest students:

The argument for breakup becomes even stronger today when you consider the important equity promise of Gov. Jerry Brown’s remarkable LCFF/LCAP school funding reform initiative, which places even greater authority at the local level to get things right for kids. When Los Angeles Unified screws up, more than half a million California youngsters are denied a critical opportunity to get a decent education during their one shot at using education to alter their life chances.

Cohn, who is the director of the Urban Leadership Program at Claremont Graduate University, made those observations in an essay for EdSource. The piece is unsparing:

Last October, you had students at Jefferson High School still walking the halls and in auditoriums without scheduled classes even though school had started back on Aug. 12. Even worse, you had a superintendent giving a deposition in court (Cruz v. California) that he was powerless to get these students scheduled in the right classes, and that he needed assistance from the State of California to get this basic responsibility done. …

The missteps of the district are legion – everything from expensive attorneys arguing for the district that a middle school student was mature enough to consent to have sex with a teacher to the billion-dollar iPad and MiSiS technology debacles and school board elections where records have been broken for adult special-interest-group spending.

No single event better captures the failure of this system than the recent revelation that 75 percent of the current class of 2017 is not on target to meet the school board’s 2005 adopted policy requirement that all students must meet UC/CSU A-G college entrance requirements in order to receive a high school diploma …

District shows callousness to disabled students

Cohn also offers an anecdote that implies the district is not just poorly run but cruel. He wrote that it resisted providing minimum legally mandated help to disabled students even after a federal decree. This “intransigence” speaks to larger problems of lack of accountability and slowness in implementing change, Cohn suggests.

Cohn’s tenure in San Diego was marked by school board battles, and he faced criticism for the district’s perceived hostility to charter schools. But his run in Long Beach was remarkable, as these details from his bio point out:

During his tenure as Superintendent, the LBUSD achieved record attendance, the lowest rate of suspension in a decade, decreases in student failure and dropout rates, and an increase in the number of students taking college preparatory classes. Through exemplifying this commitment to leadership and improved student achievement, he won the McGraw Prize in 2002, and the district won the Broad Prize in 2003.

Having a distinguished educator from next door knock the Los Angeles Unified is unusual and has caused buzz in education circles — not the general media. Still, Cohn’s criticism is so harsh that he may face a counterattack from the CTA and its largest local branch, United Teachers Los Angeles. They branded former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, as “dangerous” when she began criticizing the union and LAUSD in 2007. When Romero ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2010, she finished third in the primary after facing a brutal series of CTA-funded attacks.