“Independently planned by a diverse and growing coalition of individuals, schools, and organizations, National School Choice Week features thousands of unique events and activities across the country. The Week allows participants to advance their own messages of educational opportunity, while uniting with like-minded groups and individuals across the country.”

California is a mixed bag on school choice. It has been a leader in charter schools, which are public schools that operate without most of the red tape of regular schools. According to the California Charter Schools Association, the number has grown from 31 in 1994, the first year they were allowed, to 1,130 in 2014.

Parent Trigger Law

Another development is the Parent Trigger Law, authored by former Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles. It allows a majority of parents in a failing school to “fire” the administration, and start over on a more successful model.

It has succeeded in a couple of cases, including Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto.

But it has faced numerous challenges. It just overcame one. Romero wrote last month in the Orange County Register:

“The California Senate Legislative Counsel issued last week a sweeping opinion, concluding a controversy as to whether a school district – Los Angeles Unified, in this case – can proclaim itself exempt from California’s historic Parent Trigger law….”

She quoted the Leg Counsel:

“[T]he legislative intent in enacting [the law] … was to allow parents or guardians of pupils enrolled in schools that have been underperforming … to request specified interventions. It would be inconsistent with that legislative intent to conclude that … [they] … are deprived of the remedy set forth … on the basis that a school district has received a federal waiver whose purpose is to relieve that district solely from compliance with federal performance requirements. [I]t is our opinion that the … waiver … does not exempt that school district from compliance with the [law].”

And she noted a controversy in Anaheim:

“parents at Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim are mobilizing to turn around their school. Already they have faced obstacles imposed on them by some hostile school board members and school officials, but the parents have surmounted each obstacle and could become the first parents in Orange County to succeed in using the Parent Trigger law on behalf of their children.

“At a time when too many people complain about the lack of parent involvement in their kids’ educations, these parents should be celebrated as everyday heroes.”

No vouchers

However, the school voucher program active in several states has not done well here. It gives each student a voucher, or scholarship, to the school chosen by him and his parents. The school could be public or private.

Facing fierce teacher-union opposition, it twice was heavily defeated at the polls: with Proposition 174 in 1993. And with Proposition 38 in 2000.

That’s probably a lost cause here for school-choice fans.

But overall, parents do have more choices in California for their kids’ schools than 20 years ago. Charters are secure and spreading. And the Parent Trigger Law has survived legal challenges, albeit its progress remains slow.

They’ve gotten nowhere with school vouchers but have a strong record with charters — albeit a record that requires a constant struggle to defend against the hostility of teacher unions. The U.S. Education Department graphic below shows California to be among the better states in the nation when it comes to percentages of students in charters.

Some 519,000 California students are in charters — and support for the idea of charters hasn’t been frayed in CA despite years of ad hominem CTA attacks. California saw plenty of new charters open last school year.

A school choice option the establishment shies from

But there is another front for choice in the education wars. Thanks to a state law that took effect in 1993, California has allowed school districts to declare that they are open to enrollment from students outside their boundaries. It was time-limited to end in 2009, but a new version of the law was adopted that year thanks to support like this L.A. Times editorial for the “District of Choice” option.

The Education Next’s summer 2014 journal points out two school “Districts of Choice” in the L.A. region — Riverside and Walnut Valley — that are drawing significant numbers of students from weaker neighboring school districts. The parents who take advantage of this option sure seem to like it.

But as former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz notes in Education Next, very few parents even have the chance. The state doesn’t track “Districts of Choice” — and the numbers of them are small.

The District of Choice law was meant to encourage districts to compete for students by offering innovative programs and this-school-fits-my-child options that parents want. The law “could open a new era of entrepreneurship in education in which schools improve their programs in order to retain and attract students,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized.

So how many of California’s 1,000-plus school districts have declared themselves Districts of Choice?

Perhaps 31.

Why would that be?

As Kronholz’s essay notes, the logistical headache of constantly having to take a kid from within one school district to another and then back isn’t as acute in many parts of California, where there are so many small districts in densely populated areas.

Sweet inertia, and it feels so good

So if that’s not the main reason, what would be?

How about satisfaction with the status quo?

When it comes being Districts of Choice, Kronholz matter-of-factly notes that “few districts see any advantage in promoting it and threatening their monopolies.”

The CTA, Tom Torlakson and all the other forces that make up the state education establishment might as well have an anthem.

I nominate a 2014 version of the 1978 “Peaches & Herb” hit “Reunited.”

Sweet inertia, and it feels so good.

By Katy Grimes

I attended California public schools, kindergarten through college, starting in the late 1960s through the mid 1980s. While I don’t claim to have received a brilliant education, I did receive a solid liberal arts education. This is especially true when my public education is compared with today’s public education.

School decorum was more formal and professional. Girls in public school in the 1960s were required to wear dresses. Boys were required to wear slacks, corduroys or chinos and were not allowed to wear dungarees. By about 1968, girls were allowed to wear pants to school. A few years later, we were also allowed to wear athletic shoes to school.

Male teachers wore ties every day, and female teachers wore dresses. It made for a naturally more polite, civilized atmosphere, a far cry from today’s students who wear drooping jeans, or short shorts with “Juicy” on the butt. And many of the teachers’ attire is not much better.

Curriculum

Some of today’s kids are well on the way to reading by the time they enter school, largely due to parents who have encouraged this. But math and science in America have been an afterthought until junior high school and high school.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught the usual English, reading and math. But we also learned biology, geography, geology, astronomy, general sciences and even meteorology. We had regular music classes, art and art history classes, theater, choir, daily athletics and calisthenics, and full access to a well-stocked library.

By the time I reached junior high school, we were encouraged to take orchestra or band, auto, wood and metal shop, home economics and foreign languages. The school provided the materials in shop classes, as well as the musical instruments for band and orchestra.

We did not have to carry giant, back-breaking backpacks because we had ample lockers to store our books and supplies.

Every student participated in daily physical education class, and we were issued P.E. clothing by the school. After P.E., we showered, changed back into street clothes and went to our next class.

Today’s junior high schools use the shower areas for storage. In most such schools, there are no school bands or orchestras, no auto, wood or metal shop, no more home economics, and few foreign language classes.

High School

I attended a racially diverse high school in the late 1970s in a tough part of Sacramento. The school was run like a tight ship by the school principal, a retired military man.  There was discipline and order, despite the frequent racial, cultural and social tensions.

We had one school principal and one vice principal, one class counselor for each grade, a school nurse, a librarian and a school secretary. That’s it for the administration.

The dropout rate was close to zero. There was a stigma to being a high-school dropout.

Thirty years later, at the public high school my son attended, C.K. McClatchy High School had one principal, six vice principals — each with an assistant vice principal, many layers of administrative and secretarial workers in the office, many counselors, no nurse and a part-time librarian.

The graduation rate reported by C.K. McClatchy High School is only 57.9 percent, and per-pupil Spending is $10,051. I suspect that these numbers are lower and higher, respectively.

Why has this happened?

According to the Friedman Foundation, “[B]etween fiscal year 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent while the number of full-time equivalent school employees grew 386 percent.

“Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent while administrators and other staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.”

This is particularly difficult to stomach knowing that Gov. Jerry Brown successfully pushed so hard for Proposition 30, which will raise taxes on Californians with incomes of $250,000 or more, and a sales tax increase on everyone. Prop. 30 was sold ostensibly to raise more money for schools.

More ‘educators,’ less education

Even when student populations were dropping, public school systems were increasing staffing between 1992 and 2009. Staffing dramatically increased, but student performance did not. In fact, student performance dropped significantly for many years, the Friedman foundation reported. The percentage earning high school diplomas in recent years was below the percentage receiving diplomas in 1970.

Hiring more non-teaching personnel likely lowers the average quality of that workforce as well, the foundation found. Another concern with hiring more non-teaching staff is that it increases the school and district bureaucracy, and reduces the amount of time and energy teachers can devote to their students.

“Given the public education system’s dismal record and the positive evidence on school choice, decision- making should be decentralized so that individual parents, teachers, and educators can decide how to best organize schools,” the foundation explained.

“Perhaps the even greater accountability that would result from school choice would incent public school leaders to allocate the taxpayer resources in their care in even better ways (e.g., in hiring and retaining only the best teachers) for American students—instead of just adding more and more employees.”

This article first appeared in UnionWatch.org.

MARCH 7, 2012

By LARRY SAND

Last month, Education Week published “What Research Says About School Choice,” in which nine scholars analyze the results of various studies concerning “school choice” — the quaint notion that parents should be able to choose where to send their kids to school. The report boasts no ecstatic claims, nothing about lions and lambs, no Hallelujah moments — just a sober look at the 20 year-old movement to end mandatory zip code school assignments. Some of the findings:

Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact.

Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

A third area of study has been the fiscal impact of school choice. Even under conservative assumptions about such questions as state and local budget sensitivity to enrollment changes, the net impact of school choice on public finances is usually positive and has never been found to be negative.

Charter Movement

Also last week, the California Charter School Association released its second annual “Portrait of the Movement: How Charters are Transforming California Education.” Not a sales pitch or compilation of cherry-picked data data, the CCSA report is an honest look at California’s 900 plus charter schools which educate about 400,000 students. A few of its many findings:

Charters that serve low-income students exceeded their prediction at high rates relative to the traditional system; students at charters serving low-income populations are five times more likely than their non-charter counterparts to be served by a school in the top 5th percentile.

Charter schools are more likely than non-charters to have both above average academic performance and above average growth. They are less likely than non-charters to perform below both state averages of status and growth.

A small number of low-performing charters were closed after the 2010-11 school year.

Earlier this month, the results of a study about school choice and its effects on crime in North Carolina, conducted by David J. Deming, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, were released. This study examined neither vouchers nor charter schools, but rather a district-wide open enrollment policy whereby any student could apply to any school within the district. If a popular school had more enrollees than seats, a lottery was held. The rather stunning findings:

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

Hence, the ability to choose the school that a child attends not only increases chances of a better education, but also greatly decreases the likelihood that the youth will become a criminal. And not only doesn’t it cost anything, lower crime rates have been shown to be a boon to local economies.

Parent Trigger

Another kind of school choice was recently attempted by parents at Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, a Mojave Desert town in eastern California. Tired of low test scores, some parents organized and got more than 50 percent of the parents at the school to sign a “Parent Trigger” petition, which would give them the right to choose a different type of school governance. Their choices included firing the principal, removing some of the faculty, shutting the school down or turning it in to a charter school. Linda Serrato, Deputy Communication Director of Parent Revolution, explains that this particular petition laid out two options: “…negotiate with the parents to give them the autonomy they need to turn around their school, or they will use the Parent Trigger to take their school away from the district and convert it into a community charter school, run by local parents and educators.”

However, the Wall Street Journal reports that the California Teachers Association, a union that will go to great lengths to maintain the status quo and thus its political power, sent out “representatives” to Adelanto to disseminate “information” to the parents there. (“Union speak” alert: “Representatives” and “information” really mean sending unidentified operatives to petition-signers’ homes and feeding them lies about the petition that they just signed.)

The unionistas’ door-to-door rescission campaign managed to scare enough signers into revoking their signatures, thus nullifying the proposed action. CTA pulled the same stunt in Compton, the first time parents rose up and “pulled the Trigger.”  But after a legal challenge, in which the parents were successfully represented pro bono by the firm of Kirkland and Ellis, the Trigger went forward, and produced the opening of a new charter school. Apparently, Kirkland and Ellis are ready for a second go-round and will represent the parents in Adelanto.

Overdue Idea

School choice is an idea whose time is long overdue. Scholars know it. Charter school attendees know it. Crime free youths in North Carolina know it. Parent activists in the Mojave Desert know it.

The nearsighted, the naysayers, and the beneficiaries of the current failing status quo — moribund educrats, reactionary school boards and power-mad teacher unions — realize they could be in trouble and will desperately fight to extinguish the fires of reform whenever and wherever they can. But as parents and taxpayers become enlightened about the advantages of choice and empowered  to take action, their opponents — with their lame assertions, name calling, sophistry and bullying — will see their hegemony wilt and ultimately will be rendered powerless.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

JAN. 30, 2012

By LARRY SAND

January 22 through 28 marked the second annual National School Choice Week. While much of the rest of the country can celebrate some successes since last year, California’s education reformers often spend their days fighting rearguard actions just to preserve hard-won but modest gains. Nationally, the 2010 elections galvanized school reformers and led to such a quick succession of victories that the Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “the Year of School Choice,” while City Journal similarly called it “The Year of the Voucher.” By contrast, in California, the 2010 elections signaled new legislative assaults on charter schools, on open public school enrollment, and on parent empowerment.

It’s an amazing turnabout. As the Journal’s editors noted, no fewer than 13 states enacted school-choice legislation in just the first half of last year—creating new voucher programs in Indiana and expanding existing ones in Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio; eliminating charter school caps in North Carolina and Tennessee; and authorizing new tuition tax credits in Louisiana and Florida. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters noted last autumn how in the previous decade, the expansion of school-voucher programs had “slowed considerably” because of defeats at the ballot box and in state courts. Now, however, “the push toward vouchers is coming from a new breed of reform-minded politicians from both parties. Once a taboo subject, vouchers are now talked about openly on the campaign trail, and politicians are hiring reformers to run high-profile school systems.” Democrats who see school choice as a civil-rights issue have adopted what was once exclusively a Republican concern.

Where’s the Golden State?

Where was California in all of this? With a high school dropout rate hovering around 30 percent and a majority of college-bound graduates requiring remediation in English and math, the Golden State would appear to be a prime candidate for serious reform. But with a calcified state Legislature, an impenetrable state education code, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a powerful state teachers’ union, and a governor who owes his 2010 election to union support, preservation of the status quo is almost a given.

California does have a fairly extensive system of public school choice, but meddlers in the Legislature continually imperil it. California boasts more than 900 charter schools—public schools allowed to operate outside the bounds of typical school district regulations and union contracts—and that’s more than any other state. While most studies have shown charters to be better than traditional public schools, some say there is no difference between them. At worst, charters do the same job as traditional public schools for less money. Only about 15 percent of California’s charter schools are unionized, which is why the California Teachers Association—the top political spender in the state—has made a priority of eviscerating the existing laws rather than expending time and resources trying to organize hundreds of independent schools. Gov. Jerry Brown, in an encouraging display of political fortitude, stood up to the CTA last autumn when he forced legislative leaders to withdraw a series of anti-charter bills and vetoed several other bills that would have undermined charters’ independence.

Homeschooling Survives

Homeschooling similarly survived an onslaught from the state education establishment. About 200,000 homeschoolers reside in California today, though in 2008 it appeared that the number would be reduced to zero. The Second District Court of Appeals ruled that all instructors of children must have a state teaching credential, thus disenfranchising practically every homeschooling parent. A higher appeals court reversed the ruling five months later, claiming that homeschools are, in effect, private schools where no teaching credential is needed. While homeschooling represents the ultimate in parental control, relatively few families can afford to have one parent stay at home and become a full-time teacher.

A novel approach to school choice in California is the Parent Empowerment Act, better known as the parent trigger. The law, passed in 2010 by a single vote in both legislative chambers, lets parents of students in failing schools file petitions to force changes in school governance. The beauty of the law, written by former Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero, is that it bypasses the traditional bureaucratic and union entanglements. If at least half of parents at a qualifying school sign a petition, the local district must undertake one of several prescribed options, including shutting it down or converting it into a charter school. Needless to say, the law—a bête noire for the entrenched education special interests—was attacked and nearly derailed. But buses full of determined parents lobbied heavily last year before the state Board of Education in Sacramento, and the parent trigger survived. Parents have “pulled the trigger” only twice so far—most recently two weeks ago—so it’s difficult to assess its impact. Even if more parents exercise the petition option, the law limits the number of schools eligible to be triggered at 75 (even though 1,300 schools qualify as failing).

‘Opportunity Scholarships’

What California needs most and doesn’t have are vouchers, which most advocates now call “opportunity scholarships.” Under a voucher system, a portion of public money designated to educate a child would follow the student to a school of the parent’s choosing. It could be a traditional public school, a charter school, or a private school. Seventeen such programs exist across the country, and after two decades, we have a good idea of vouchers’ effectiveness. Greg Forster, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Educational Choice in Indiana, reviewed ten empirical studies of voucher programs. According to Forster, “nine find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact.”

Voucher opponents insist that such programs “siphon money away from public schools.” What they’re saying, in effect, is that private schools will perform better at the expense of public schools. True, public schools would lose some money under a universal voucher system, but there’s no evidence that this would make them any less effective. In a separate review, Forster discovered that “[19] empirical studies have examined how vouchers affect outcomes in public schools. Of these studies, 18 find that vouchers improved public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical studies find that vouchers harm public schools.” Even in the world of public education, competition works.

Initiatives

California has twice tried and failed to enact voucher legislation through the initiative process. Voters decisively rejected voucher measures in 1993, and again in 2000. The reasons for these lopsided losses are many. But with more states and the District of Columbia embracing opportunity scholarships, and greater public appreciation that the educational status quo is unacceptable, perhaps Californians would be more receptive to a voucher law now, even a limited one. Of course, should such an initiative make it to the ballot, the teachers’ unions would spend every penny and every ounce of human capital to keep vouchers from becoming a reality.

California would also benefit from a tax-credit scholarship program, which would allow individuals and corporations to receive a state tax credit for making donations to nonprofit organizations, which in turn would use the money to fund private school tuitions. Currently, 16 states offer some form of tax-credit scholarship program. But as with vouchers, tax credits could be a tough sell in a state where legislators are averse to any form of “privatization.”

If California is to afford its citizens a top-flight public education, as it once did, voters and policymakers must come to grips with the fact that education should be first and foremost about children. For far too long, the emphasis in public education in the state has been on the perks given to adults. As long as special interests remain in charge, California’s children won’t get the education that they deserve.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.