The Ed Source website has details:

The agreement settles [a suit] filed last year by students in high schools in Compton Unified, Los Angeles Unified and Oakland Unified. These students were regularly assigned to multiple classes where they were told to sit idly in classrooms or perform menial tasks, including picking up trash or cleaning erasers. Some students were also sent home as part of the class period.

 

The lawsuit alleged that the state failed to intervene when scheduling problems and inadequate course offerings at schools resulted in some students spending weeks in classes during which they received no instruction.

In a prepared statement, the lawyer leading the legal team representing the students at the schools predicted it would be broadly consequential. “[Our case] was the first in the nation to address the denial of equal learning time to children residing in many of California’s most disadvantaged communities and attending many of the most underperforming public schools,” wrote Mark Rosenbaum.

Washington Post offered scathing coverage

The fact that the Washington Post and other national publications reported on the case seemed to back up Rosenbaum’s assertion of its importance. The Post’s national education reporter, Emma Brown, depicted the lawsuit as an embarrassing reflection on how students were treated in some of California’s urban school districts:

The plaintiffs’ complaint said that schools didn’t have enough resources to offer a full menu of courses, leaving students in some cases without access to the courses they needed to graduate within four years …  [S]cheduling problems left students unassigned to classes for weeks at a time.

 

The problems were so bad at Jefferson High in Los Angeles that an Alameda County judge ordered state officials to intervene last year.

 

One student affected by Jefferson’s chaos was senior Jason Magana, who … took Graphic Design twice and then spent weeks trying to get out of taking it for a third time in order to take economics or government, courses he actually needed for graduation. He also was assigned two “Home” classes during eighth and ninth periods, which meant twice a week, his school day ended at 11:20 a.m. …

 

Under the settlement agreement, state education officials must help the six high schools deal with scheduling problems and get rid of their fake classes, which were called “College Class,” “Adult Class,” “Service,” and “Home.”

 

The state must also publicize the requirements of new legislation that was spurred by the lawsuit: AB1012, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law last month, prohibits high schools from assigning students to “any course period without educational content.”

 

Finally, state officials agreed to pay the plaintiffs $400,000 for their attorneys’ fees.

The students’ representation was handled by the ACLU  Foundation of Southern California and the Public Counsel organization.

Another ACLU suit could have huge impact

The ACLU is also part of a much bigger lawsuit against the Los Angles Unified School District that puts it on a collision course with Gov. Jerry Brown and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and could have a statewide effect.

The Brown administration and Torlakson have said that extra funds going to school districts with higher numbers of impoverished students, English learners and foster children can be used for broad teacher raises, not specifically to help those students. The ACLU says that violates the 2013 law establishing the Local Control Funding Formula. This is from its July 1 statement announcing the lawsuit.

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Unified School District is violating state law by refusing to use state education funds specifically targeted to help low-income students, English language learners and foster youth to increase or improve services for those students, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles and LAUSD parent Reyna Frias.

 

The suit, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court, asserts that the district has used improper accounting practices that subvert both the letter and spirit of the 2013 education finance reform law known as Local Control Funding Formula. If the district proceeds with its current plan, high need students stand to lose more than $2 billion in funding over the next decade.

 

“LAUSD is breaking its promise to provide my children and millions of other students in the future, with the services they need and the law says they should receive,” said Ms. Frias, whose children qualify for the funds targeted by LCFF.

The ACLU is partnering with Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP in bringing the case. A trial in the case is not expected to get underway until next year. Unlike what happened in Cruz v. California, a settlement is unlikely, since Local Control Funding Formula dollars have already been budgeted for employee compensation for years to come in L.A. Unified, the nation’s second largest school district.

But at another powerful state agency, what appears to be an open conflict of interest is playing out without objection from its leaders. A CTA lobbyist who sits on the State Board of Education wants the board’s test-giving contractor to pay the teachers it hires to grade the tests more than the contractor thinks is necessary.

John Fensterwald mentions this in a post on EdSource on the board’s decision to award a three-year, $240 million contract to the Educational Testing Service to administer standardized tests required by state law:

ETS will continue to handle the administration and scoring of the new online tests, including the Smarter Balanced English language arts and math tests in the Common Core State Standards, which debuted this spring, and the yet-to-be developed Next Generation Science Standards. … 

In its revised bid, ETS said it will hold summer institutes and weekend trainings for teachers and would pay California certificated teachers $20 per hour to be trained in and score the tests. Ashley acknowledged that’s less than teachers earn per hour, but the primary benefit, he said, would be the knowledge that teachers would gain in both the end-of-the-year tests and the interim assessments that teachers would give during the year.

However, board member Patricia Rucker, who works as a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, called $20 per hour “insufficient” and predicted that fewer than half of the scorers will end up being teachers. Teachers “carry the greatest burden to see that students are prepared and have the greatest stake” in the test results, and yet still will not be the primary focus of the recruitment strategy for scorers, she said.

Gov. Jerry Brown wouldn’t have appointed Rucker to the state school board without the general expectation that she would take the same positions as the CTA. However, a union official openly using her role as a state board member to push a contractor to help her union members get more money is unusual.

Two state laws spell out conflicts

On city councils, members routinely recuse themselves when contracts come before them in which they have some financial connection. They are heeding Government Code 1090:

Members of the Legislature, state, county, district, judicial district, and city officers or employees shall not be financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity, or by any body or board of which they are members.

Government Code 87100 offers a similar injunction:

No public official at any level of state or local government shall make, participate in making or in any way attempt to use his official position to influence a governmental decision in which he knows or has reason to know he has a financial interest.

In California, union members and officials are often on governing boards, where they participate broadly in setting policies that affect unions.

But that doesn’t usually apply to matters directly involving pay. For example, in Ontario, a police officer and a senior fire department official served on the City Council in the 1990s. They abstained from contract negotiations or other matters involving compensation and the city agencies that provided their full-time jobs.

However, the Legislative Analyst’s Office surveyed 50 school districts around the state, including the 11 largest, and warned in a January report that not one had proper safeguards to prevent diversion of funds. In Los Angeles Unified, among other districts, the local teachers’ union last summer pointed specifically to new, incoming LCFF dollars as a kitty to tap for pay raises.

In coming months, this issue is likely to emerge as a point of contention in Sacramento because of concerns raised by the California Legislative Black Caucus about State Board of Education rules governing how LCFF funds are used. Here are three of the caucus’ main points:

— Any authority for the use of supplemental or concentration grants to schoolwide and districtwide expenditures must clearly link the services to demonstrated effectiveness in increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps, and demonstrate that the expenditures are proven effective for “concentrations” of unduplicated children in schools in the district where concentrations exist.

— The terms “most effective” or “effective” should be defined, and at a minimum be tied to demonstrated effectiveness in meeting the “student achievement” goal and closing any persistent achievement gaps or deficiencies as it relates to the unduplicated students, and not just a generic reference to the state priority areas.

— The proposed regulations also do not provide the Board or county superintendents clear standards by which districts must explicitly demonstrate or explain, at a minimum, how expenditures of supplement and concentration grant funds will support services that will actually improve the academic achievement of unduplicated students or close persistent academic achievement gaps.

These concerns are from Assemblywoman Shirley Weber’s remarks to the State Board of Education at its Jan. 16 meeting on behalf of the Black Caucus.

Dan Walters wrote a Feb. 26 column in the Sacramento Bee noting that a “broad coalition of civil rights and education reform groups” had expressed worry about the LCFF not being implemented according to the goals cited in 2013 upon its passage. But this effort seems likely to be much stronger with the aid of state lawmakers.

The Black Caucus has 12 members — Weber, Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr., Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Cheryl R. Brown, Autumn Burke, Jim Cooper, Mike Gipson, Christopher Holden, Kevin McCarty and Tony Thurmond in the Assembly, and Isadore Hall III and Holly J. Mitchell in the Senate.

“Brown, architect of the Local Control Funding Formula which restructured the state-school fiscal relationship, had struggled in recent months over the program’s regulations as two of his own goals within the new system were challenged by key interest groups.

“The governor had sold the program last spring by arguing local officials should be put in charge of more of the spending decisions – but he also wanted more of the money to target disadvantaged students.

“The two came in conflict with civil rights groups, who criticized an initial set of regulations for not ensuring targeted money would actually go to low-income students, English learners and foster youth.”

And where will it go if it doesn’t go to these kids? You guessed it. Teachers’ compensation. Why else would the CTA and CFT back this change?

Plea for changes to strengthen rules

EdTrust-West sent the state board a letter early this week warning how weak the regulations were:

“The regulations guiding districtwide uses of supplemental and concentration funds are overly broad. These provisions risk undermining the significant progress that has been made to ensure these grant dollars will benefit the students who generated them.

“LEAs [Local Education Authorities] with more than 55% unduplicated students may use supplemental and concentration grant funds for any purpose, as long as they can describe how those services must meet the district’s goals for unduplicated students. The current template would allow such goals to be no different than those established by the LEA for all students. Thus, this proposed standard does not treat the use of supplemental and concentration funds for unduplicated pupils any differently than base dollars available to address the standard program.

“We believe this creates a significant potential loophole, as it allows a considerable portion of the dollars generated by unduplicated pupils for their specific “beyond-base-grant” needs to be spent on increasing or improving services for non-unduplicated pupils. A district could, for example, use supplemental and concentration grants to purchase tablet computers for all district students. To justify this, the LEA could argue that these investments will help meet its goals for all students, including unduplicated pupils. While improving the standard program may be an appropriate use of base grant funding, these decisions would be inconsistent with the law’s premise that the additional funds generated by unduplicated pupils should be directed, first and foremost, to improving the educational experience of unduplicated pupils and should not be treated as base funding to expand the core program.”

Make sure funds ‘actually benefit’ high-needs students

How can the reforms be salvaged? EdTrust-West had some ideas:

“We believe that stronger protections around districtwide and schoolwide use of funds may well be necessary to ensure that supplemental and concentration funding are actually used to benefit the students generating them, consistent with the premise of LCFF. These stronger assurances would include:

“1. Higher districtwide and schoolwide thresholds that capture LEAs and schools serving significant concentration of unduplicated students,

“2. Criteria for determining whether a service meets the standards for “most effective” use of funds,

“3. Stronger provisions assuring that supplemental and concentration funds can be used for districtwide and schoolwide services only if the service demonstrably provides a differential benefit to unduplicated pupils in order to address unduplicated pupil goals, and

“4. Criteria for County Offices of Education to oversee and approve LCAPs.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how this is reported — to see if reporters even understand what we’re seeing here is a teacher union power play. I’m not optimistic.