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.”

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, as the tests are formally known, ranked fourth graders in only five states, plus Washington, D.C., at as low a level of math proficiency as California’s.

The latest round of nationwide fourth and eighth grade math and reading tests yielded disappointing results. Stacked up against other states, California hovered at the lower end of the scale. “Across California, scores stagnated since 2013 at all levels — there were some small dips, which were not statistically significant,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Laying blame

Although national and state officials alike cautioned that the trouble was hard to pinpoint, project, or trace back to root causes, some pointed the finger at the changes in testing brought on by this year’s shift toward compliance with the new Common Core Standards. “The NAEP tests aren’t completely aligned with the Common Core State Standards,” however, as state Department of Education spokesman Bill Ainsworth informed the Mercury News via email. “Consequently, we do not believe they are a good measure of California students’ progress.”

But the test results did also reveal significant racial and ethnic divergences. This year, added the Times, “between a quarter and a third of the state’s students performed at or above proficiency on the various tests; in fourth-grade reading, 4 out of 10 students were deemed to be below basic. And, fewer than 1 in 5 students of color or low-income students met or exceeded proficiency on any test.” What’s more, the paper noted, over the past three years, “California’s Latino students’ scores decreased slightly, but were flat in fourth-grade reading.”

For analysts focused on comparative racial test performance, the results turned back the clock. According to Education Week, “performance gaps between black, Hispanic and white students, in reading remained as wide in 2015 as they were in 1998. In math,” however, “the gap between black and white fourth-grade students has narrowed by about 10 points since 2000.”

Some analysts shied away from drawing too strong an inference even along lines of race. Brookings Institution senior fellow Tom Loveless told Education Week that “California’s demographics — including nearly 1.4 million students classified as English language learners — make it difficult to pinpoint the impact of the state’s school system versus other social and economic factors on results. In three of the state’s largest school districts — Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego — achievement gaps between black, Hispanic, and white students have remained largely unchanged or even widened.”

Racial controversy

The intersection of race and education has recently occupied central, contested ground in California. In the wake of the Vergara case, which alleged civil rights violations against minority students as a consequence of protective teachers’ union policies, the political stakes have been raised in the debate over which disparities matter most and how they are to be corrected.

The controversy has magnified the significance of studies plowing similar ground. As Inside Higher Ed reported, a long-term analysis of SAT scores, released by the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, showed that “race and ethnicity have become stronger predictors of SAT scores than family income and parental education levels,” at least “among applicants to the University of California’s campuses.” The study’s author, Saul Geiser, concluded that admissions committees should offset the impact of the SAT by taking affirmative action criteria into account.

This is supposedly reflected in the priorities of Gov. Rick Perry. A phone message I got expressed disbelief that I praised Texas public schools and called them broadly better than California’s. A male voice said something along the lines of … “Have you seen how little they pay for K-12? It’s obscene.”

That is not a good argument. In fact, it’s another argument for Texas.

It’s time to bring in Chuck DeVore, Orange County assemblyman turned Austin think tanker. DeVore suggests the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a good baseline to compare states. It measures fourth- and eighth-graders in math, reading and science and breaks down the results by the performance of white, Latino and African-American students.

So guess what happened in an analysis of the NAEP results for the eight biggest states? According to what Chuck wrote last year for the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s a rout.

“Looking at the most recent NAEP testing data for fourth and eighth graders in math, reading and science as well as looking at race and ethnicity and considering the eight biggest states, there are 24 categories to measure (e.g., eighth-grade science results for African American students, etc.). The 2009 results showed Texas as having the strongest scores in 11 of 24 categories while California was last in 15 of 24 categories. Further, Texas showed no areas of weakness compared to the national average.”

Texas makes case for Gloria Romero’s CA civil-rights argument

So Texas, the hellhole that pays obscenely little for K-12 education, stomps California — including specifically with the Latino and African-American students who are supposed to be oppressed in a Southern state like Texas as opposed to an enlightened state like California.

Gloria Romero is so right: The biggest civil rights issue in California by far is that the needs of the majority Latino students in our public schools are trumped by the needs of the largely white California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers.

In Texas, where teachers unions don’t dominate public education, Latinos do much better. That is not a talking point. As the NAEP scores show, it is the truth.

It should matter in the CA debate over education far more than it does. When you look at California’s actual deeds — not its rhetoric — our state government certainly celebrates ignorance far more than Texas.