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 Wayne Lusvardi

The public never really knows what is going on in politics because public policies are described in words that make government sound like it is a church rather than coercive government.   Such is the case with Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2013 State of the State address.

Brown called for the reform of the tax sharing-arrangements with public schools based on the Roman Catholic doctrine of the “principle of subsidiarity.”

As defined by Brown, subsidiarity is:

“[T]he idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level.  In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.” 

Now what does all the above political mumbo jumbo really mean?  Put in less flattering and non-religious sounding terms, Brown wants to decentralize the school jobs patronage system from the state legislature to local school districts.  But you will never hear it expressed that way.  Every act of a governor has to be made to sound as if it was coming from a god.

Categorical jobs programs

What Brown is talking about is better described when he said, “My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level — with school boards.”  But once again, one vague term leads to another vague term.  What does the term “categorical program” mean?

It means the existing system of the state Legislature whereby certain mandated job categories are protected in return for votes.  We’re not talking core teacher jobs or extra layers of school administrators.  What we’re talking about is what Brown calls “supplemental” or makeshift jobs: extra school librarians and assistants, bus drivers, nutritionists, arts and music teachers, school dentists, extra building maintenance workers, jobs in American Indian education centers and American Indian early education programs, staff mentors, school counselors and after school programs.

This is what Brown means by “subsidiarity”: returning funding decisions for whether to hire arts teachers or bus drivers from the Legislature to local school boards by use of block grants.

Block grants and pork

The vehicle for decentralizing the funding decisions is called a “block grant.” A “block grant” is a grant or block of funds for discretionary use. It allows schools to decide how the money should be spent within a broad category of funds.

By contrast, “earmarks” are politically protected categories of funds or protected jobs often meant to buy political patronage and votes.  Earmarks are funding mandates.  The term “earmark” comes from the large ears of a pig.  Pork-barrel politics is spending which is intended to benefit constituents of a politician in return for their political support.

In California, school block grants are discretionary rather than mandated earmarks. In a time of austerity, this means school boards cannot fund all the supplemental jobs programs. They have to prioritize spending! What a revolutionary concept.

Brown didn’t invent “subsidiarity”

What Brown omitted from his new “subsidiarity” policy is that it wasn’t his idea in the first place. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended ending “categorical” jobs programs mandates after the Mortgage Meltdown and Bank Panic of 2008.  In response, in 2009 the Legislature enacted Assembly Bill AB-X-4-2, which ended funding for some, but not all, jobs program earmarks.  This reform saved public school budgets but didn’t hurt poor school children.  Despite all the hysteria, the “sky didn’t fall on public school budgets,” even though that is what we were told would happen.

Brown wants to portray himself as a budget-cutting reformer. But he only cut 1 percent of all the mandated jobs earmarks recommended by the Legislative Analyst.

In 2009, the Legislature recommended that the public school categorical jobs system be replaced with a system of “block grants” under Assembly Bill 18.  This failed to pass in the Legislature. Brown is now trying to get the Legislature to adopt the decentralization of funding decisions for earmarked jobs.

Subsidiarity is re-funding lost political pork jobs

What Brown is doing is paying back some of the $11 billion borrowed from the state education fund since 2008 to patch the state budget deficit.  During that time, there were no core teacher layoffs statewide.   In other words, public schools were overfunded by $11 billion from 2008 to 2012 without any core teacher layoffs.  All the school budget cuts came from cutting back politically earmarked jobs.  Now Brown wants to pay back $3 billion of those borrowed funds, but wants local school boards to make the hard decisions on which earmarked jobs get re-funded. Brown wants to shift the blame from the Legislature and the governor to local school boards for whose earmarked jobs get funded.

Subsidiarity is derived from the Latin subsiduum — the same root for the word subsidy.   Subsidiarity thus means re-funding some political pork jobs subsidies lost due to previous budget cutbacks.  But you would never guess that is what Brown really meant by the term subsidiarity.