By Chris Reed

The news that Gov. Jerry Brown appears to have mostly gotten his way on school funding changes is likely to be presented as a dramatic victory for the people who believe helping struggling English learners is the key challenge facing California education.

But it’s one thing to believe that this is the key challenge, as I do, and another thing entirely to think that what’s being done in response will work or result in significant change. Why the skepticism? Here goes:

Combine unproven theory and confused governor …

1. The proposal builds off the belief that school quality is a function of school spending. If that were true, than schools would have gotten much better in the last 30 years. The 1983 “Nation at Risk” report triggered the modern education reform movement and yielded a big boost in per-pupil, inflation-adjusted spending.  It hasn’t led to the broad gains this simplistic theory would yield, and often hasn’t resulted in any progress at all.

2. Even if school officials come up with promising ways to bring improved instruction to struggling English learners, they could be undercut by Gov. Jerry Brown’s incoherent, ad hoc education policies — policies that are painful in their naiveté about what happens when school boards are “empowered.” As noted here before, the governor believes …

“… more money and ‘subsidiarity’ — essentially, smart and thoughtful local control — are the keys to improving schools. The governor was asked why he thought local control would work better than it did before the reforms triggered by the “Nation at Risk” report in the 1980s and No Child Left Behind in the 2000s, given that a key factor driving those reforms was that local control often led to a focus on adult employees instead of on students.

“Brown responded by ridiculing ‘top down’ policies that presumed people in Washington or Sacramento are wiser than ‘the teacher, the principal, the superintendent and the school board.’

“This is a talking point, not a policy. … When unions run school districts, ‘top down’ education policies are often the only way to protect the interests of students.”

… with intransigent unions and you don’t have a encouraging picture

3. Even if school officials come up with promising ways to bring improved instruction to struggling English learners, they could be undercut by the union power that Jerry Brown either ignores or is oblivious to.

The example of the Stull Act can’t be brought up enough. A 1971 state law requires that student performance be part of teacher evaluations. It doesn’t say it may be. It says it must be. Yet the law was simply ignored in most California districts until 2012, when a successful lawsuit forced Los Angeles Unified to begin, yunno, following state law.

You’ve heard of jury nullification. The is local teacher union nullification. Instead of honoring a clearly written state law, school district after school district has adopted teacher evaluation processes that routinely result in 99 percent of second-year teachers getting tenure and that conclude nearly all teachers are above average or downright great.

So when the state budget is passed on Friday, and the back-slapping begins about the new era in California education, feel free to groan. The success of the new funding formula depends on a simpleminded theory about school quality that has 30 years of history going against it. It depends on the follow-through of a governor who offers incoherent and contradictory comments about education. And it depends on the cooperation of teacher unions who have a history of not giving a damn about struggling students — at least if it means teachers will be judged on how much they actually help those struggling students.

By Chris Reed

On the Fox & Hounds website, veteran Sacramento watcher John Wildermuth has a sharp piece about how Gov. Jerry Brown’s push to give more money to school districts with students with higher numbers of remedial English speakers inevitably is going to lead to pushback from the wealthier districts which stand to lose funding as a result:

“To Brown, it’s not only simple fairness, but also a smart use of state money.

“With two million children living in poverty and three million who don’t speak English at home, ‘equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice,’ the governor said in his state of the state address last month. And if California fails to properly teach the children who are the state’s future, ‘we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify.’

“But that soaring rhetoric doesn’t necessarily reflect the political reality of the zero-sum game that’s state financing: If some schools get more money, than some others will have to get less. And what local legislator is going to volunteer to let the schools in his district take the hit?”

That’s absolutely right. Wealthy liberals in the Bay Area and affluent L.A. suburbs — at least the ones with kids in public schools — may talk a good game about “social justice,” but how will they feel when it means their school districts get less funding?

But here’s another angle: How will the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers react?

Governor offers subtler version of Gloria Romero’s critique

I think former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, is right when she frames school reform in California as a civil rights issue — one in which the interests of veteran teachers too often trump the needs of the state’s increasingly Latino students. The CTA and CFT responded to Romero by depicting her as an extremist and killing her 2010 bid to be state superintendent of public instruction.

However, it would be politically risky to go after the popular Brown, who appears to agree with Romero’s critique but has framed it in a completely different way.

So here is my confident prediction: The CTA and the CFT will never publicly oppose the governor’s plan. But since it displeases the many veteran teachers who would rather teach low-maintenance affluent kids than higher-maintenance kids with relatively poor language skills, the unions will quietly work to sandbag Jerry Brown — and will get their way

At which point, we’ll have two moments of reckoning.

1) Will the 74-year-old governor with a clear path to re-election call out the CTA and CFT? Or will he look the other way and depict the opposition to his plan as reflecting inertia or a lack of appreciation of its merits?

2) Will the mainstream media finally realize the absurdity of teacher unions depicting themselves as agents of “social justice”?

We shall see. This should be fun.

By John Seiler

Gov. Jerry Brown continues to misuse his fine Jesuit education. Explaining why he wants to shift money from middle-class to poor schools, he said:

“Our future depends not on across-the-board funding, but in disproportionately funding those schools that have disproportionate challenges…. Aristotle said treating unequals equally is not justice…. Growing up in Compton or Richmond is not like it is to grow up in Los Gatos or Beverly Hills or Piedmont….

“If you look at a classroom in Piedmont and you look at one in Compton, it’s a lot different. The [Piedmont] families have far more money, far more access to the better things in life. And the extent to which we can offset that by putting more funding into those school districts [like Compton], we’re going to do that.”

Brown’s words are quoted in a column by George Skelton, who should have done some checking.

I typed in Google: << Aristotle treat equals equally >>.

It brought up an explanation on a page on ethics, “Aristotle came up with the suggestion that distributive justice consists of treating equals equally and unequals unequally (Bk. V, Chap. VI)” of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s major work on ethics and a major foundation of Western ethics. The site referenced the translation by J.E.C. Weldon, which is free on the Internet. In Book V, Chapter VI, we read, in the Stagirite’s translated words:

“Also, if the persons are equal, the things will be equal; for as one thing is to the other thing, so is one person to the other person. For if the persons are not equal, they will not have equal shares; in fact the source of battles and complaints is either that people who are equal have unequal shares, or that people who are not equal have equal shares, distributed to them….

“Justice then is a sort of proportion; for proportion is not peculiar to abstract quantity, but belongs to quantity generally….”

Example

The Web site with the ethics page provide an inadequate triage example I will improve upon. Suppose four people are involved in a car accident. Two are bleeding badly.  The other two are shaken up, but are not bleeding. Whom should the medics treat first? The obvious answer is those bleeding. The two who are bleeding are “equal” in needing immediate care to prevent them from bleeding to death. The who who are just shaken up also are “equal” to one another in also needing treatment; but they are “unequal” to the bleeding victims in that their treatment can wait a little longer.

Brown, instead of referencing Aristotle, instead actually is referencing Plato’s “Republic,” which set up a socialist utopia in which there are three classes: the Philosopher-Kings (such as Brown), the Guardians (police and other government workers) and everybody else who is controlled by the other two. Absolute equality is imposed, and government educates the children.

Brown himself said, as quoted by Skelton, “That’s the whole essence of the progressive agenda, to try to compensate for the global inequalities that are growing.”

Although Plato’s pupil, Aristotle early abandoned his teacher’s utopianism for a philosophy of description of what he could see, and moderation between extremes.

He also strongly emphasized that a free society depends on a strong middle class. He wrote in Book IV, Chapter XI of the “Politics”:

“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.  Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme–either out of the most rampant democracy or out of an oligarchy; but it is not so likely to arise out of the middle constitutions and those akin to them…. The mean condition of states is clearly best, for no other is free from faction; and where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissensions.”

The vanishing California middle-class

Unfortunately, as Joel Kotkin wrote Sunday in the Orange County Register, the middle-class increasingly is under assault in California, with no relief from Brown:

“The biggest challenge facing our state is not climate change, or immigration, corporate greed, globalization or even corruption. It’s the demise of upward mobility for the vast majority of Californians, and the rise of an increasingly class-ridden, bifurcated society….

“The growing class chasm also distorts state priorities, creating an inordinate demand for public sector employment — and related jobs in health and education — while inculcating deep-seated resentment among private-sector entrepreneurs and professionals toward a state that asks much of them, but gives increasingly little….

“Essentially, there is only one practical solution to this dilemma: a program that promotes economic growth….

“Instead of delusion, California needs policies that can boost economic growth in precisely those areas – construction, agriculture, manufacturing and energy – with the best prospects for creating good, high-paying jobs for both blue- and white-collar Californians. Yet, right now the Legislature and, even more so, the empowered state apparat, seem determined to do everything they can to strangle an incipient recovery in these industries.”

“Bifurcated” means two dominant classes: the wealthy, made up of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and high-paid government workers on top, with most everyone else in the impoverished bottom. The middle-class is squeezed into insignificance. That obviously is happening.

Aristotle and guns

While we’re on Aristotle, it’s worth looking at what Aristotle thought about citizens being able to defend themselves. In the “Politics,” he wrote in Book III, Chapter VII: “Hence in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens.”

Arms today, of course, would not mean swords, which would be mostly useless; but guns.

And in Book VII, Chapter IX, he wrote, “But on the other hand, since it is an impossible thing that those who are able to use or to resist force should be willing to remain always in subjection, from this point of view the persons are the same; for those who carry arms can always determine the fate of the constitution.”

In conclusion, we can say Aristotle’s position is that a free society depends on a large, well-armed middle class.

Practical problems

Aside from philosophy, Brown’s desire to shift money from the middle-class suburbs to the poor inner city has several practical problems. One is the cities already get adequate funding. As I have reported, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent close to $30,000 per pupil per year in 2007-08. It might be a little less now because of budget cuts — or more because of Prop. 30.

The second practical problem is the money is badly spent in poor schools. LAUSD’s graduation rate was a pathetic 62 percent — for all that money.

What poor kids need is not more money shifted from middle-class schools, but a complete change of a broken system. I would prefer an end to the Plato-like centralized system 91 percent of kids suffer under. But if we’re going to stay in the current system, then such reforms as the “parent trigger” and charter schools should be advanced.

It also wouldn’t hurt to teach Aristotle, the only genius in history to invent two whole new disciplines, logic and biology. Gov. Brown needs a refresher course and could attend.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Deregulation got a bad rap in California ever since it was wrongly blamed as causing the Energy Crisis of 2001 and the San Diego Blackout of 2011.  But a new study by the Rand Corporation, titled “Deregulating School Aid in California: How Districts Responded to Flexibility in Tier 3 Categorical Funds in 2010-11,” reports that deregulation saved public schools in California from 2007 to 2010.

Starting in 2007, the California legislature under Assembly Bill ABX-4-2 deregulated $4.5 billion in school district budget “earmarks” at the same time they cut overall school funding.  It worked!

Most of the formerly politically earmarked money was shifted into the general fund of local school districts to protect core teachers from layoffs and was not used to pad administrative salaries.  Neither did unions or parent groups dominate the decision making over these “flex” funds.  The only exception was the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which tried to protect district administration costs, according to the Rand Corporation report. And deregulation did not disproportionately affect programs for high-need students, despite hysteria that it would.

The Rand Corporation surveyed chief financial officers from 921 school districts across the state.  Rand found that the change in all school revenue sources including earmarks from 2007 to 2010 was a reduction of 7.7 percent, reflecting $846 per student.  This has to be put in context that the K-12 school budget grew by $1,746 per student, or over 20 percent, from 2006 to 2007 during the Housing Bubble.

Tier 3 Categorical Programs: Political Pork Earmarks

What the legislature deregulated was what is called “Tier 3 Categorical Programs.” This is a bureaucratic sugar coated term for low priority political earmarks or restricted funds.  By restricting the funds for special purposes, state legislators bought votes and political patronage from the beneficiaries.  Another term for “categorical” funds might be “political pork.”  Pork is a term deriving from when salt pork was distributed in barrels to slaves prior to the Civil War (Safire’s Political Dictionary).

The California Education Budget includes three tiers of “Categorical Funding” in descending priority as shown below:

CATEGORICAL STATE SCHOOL FUNDING (Source: Rand Corp.)

In other words, in the Tier 3 category, funds were specifically restricted to targeted beneficiaries: building trade workers, school psychologists, art and music teachers, Indian tribes, dentists, physical education instructors, etc.  By restricting the funding to these groups, their salaries became politically protected from being cut back by local school boards.  Interestingly, teacher dismissals were one of the least funded items in the Tier 3 category.

From 2007 to 2009, local school districts widely claimed in the media that core teachers and arts and music teachers would be laid off if categorical funding were cut.  But according to the Rand report, no core teachers were affected by deregulating categorical funding.  And whether art or music teachers were laid off was a decision of local school districts that had to decide between, say, art teachers and staff mentoring or deferred building maintenance.

Deregulation did not cut the total apportioned $4.5 billion from Tier 3 Categorical programs.  It only cut about 20 percent of Tier 3 funding, thus reducing the total funding level to $3.62 billion. And instead of protecting funding levels for “pet” programs that state legislators could buy votes with, it merely made the remaining funding discretionary.  Local school districts, not state legislators, could choose what to do with the funding.  Categorical programs exist so that state legislators can claim that they “brought the bacon home” to their local constituents.

Where Did the Savings Go?

According to the Rand report, most of the cost savings went into shifting funds into the general fund of school districts to remain solvent after the state budget crisis resulted in state funding cutbacks.

Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed expanding deregulation of categorical funding for public schools to $7.1 billion of the state school budget.

Deregulation has gotten a bad rap in California. But it might be a partial alternative to raising taxes, as proposed by Gov. Brown and billionaire Molly Munger in their initiatives for November 2012.