While I agree that we must figure out a way to balance our state budget Governor Schwarzenegger is starting to lose it. His latest budget solution includes a suggestion to eliminate one week out of the current school year. Source. Jan 1, 2009 OC Register.
How many years have we acknowledged the high drop out rate of our students, especially in the LAUSD. The unfunded “No Child Left Behind” mandate is not working. As a nation American students are way behind in proficiency when benchmarked against K-12 students in developed countries such as found in Europe and Asia. With major industries outsourcing our students need to be near the top of the class to compete in the fields of engineering and science. Students in the state of CA rank near the bottom of all 50 states in major categories. So to close the education achievement gap Arnold is proposing one less week of school for K-12 students. Am I missing something here?
The following commentary and data on California K-12 students is from www.childrennow.org
“While California students have posted gains in achievement test scores in recent years, the reality is, at the current rate of improvement, it will take 30 years before every group of children reaches state performance goals. Less than half of all students are reaching grade level standards in English and math. Supplemental programs that provide additional support for struggling students show promise, but their reach is limited. Tens of thousands of students leave school each year without a high school diploma and unprepared for work or further schooling, undermining their lifetime prospects and California’s future prosperity.
California’s efforts to improve its education system face many imminent challenges, including a teacher shortage. Thousands of teachers are nearing retirement, and existing pathways to a teaching career will not meet California schools’ staffing needs. The state also has yet to develop and implement a data system capable of providing educators and policy makers with the information necessary to make funding, programmatic and curricular decisions based on needs or effectiveness.
6.3 million children attend public school in California. About 48% are Latino, 29% are white, 11% are Asian American and 8% are African American.
Nearly 1.6 million students are English Learners (ELs) in California, representing one quarter of the state’s public school students and about 40% of the EL students in the nation.
Just 43% of California’s students are reaching grade level standards in English Language Arts. In math, only 41% are reaching grade level standards. Those percentages are essentially unchanged from 2006.
California is projected to spend about $8,500 per student for K-12 education in 2007-08, a 4% increase from 2006-07. California’s per pupil spending has been among the lowest in the nation for more than two decades. In 2005-06, it ranked 34th of the 50 states.
Just 65% of California’s high school students graduate on time with a regular diploma. California ranks 38th in the nation on this measure.
As many as 22% of teachers leave the profession within their first four years.
California’s student data system has just four of the 10 national standard elements in place to adequately measure student achievement over time, which prevents educators from tracking individual students’ long-term academic progress.”
You know if this was an option we should have used it long ago. Lets see, the school year is 180 days give or take and if we calculate the per student funding to the rate it would need to be to fund CA Schools at the 75th percentile nationally and calculate how many days worth of that education you have available now. You would also be able to deduct the number of days that can’t be funded due to Federal and State Mandates that remain unfunded or underfunded. I wonder how many days the schools would be open if we began using this option.
It would certainly make the funding options clearer. Maybe we wouldn’t wonder why our kids can’t compete internationally when we realize you get what you pay for. Which is exactly what will happen when the focus changes from a free and equal public education to the available publicly funded education needing to be supplemented by private funded or employment funded education.
Whatever we do, we need to stop stretching public education to the breaking point and making those who care about educating children the sacrificial lambs in the state budget battles. It really comes down to putting money where our mouths are. Do we believe in public education or not?
If we look at how well we are doing with it the answer has to be we don’t care. Then DTMFA! Quit stringing the public along with promises of a free and equal public education when we are year after year strangling the system and choking off needed resources guaranteeing there will not be the needed resources the following year either. We need to pick a side and stick with it.
“Maybe we wouldn’t wonder why our kids can’t compete internationally when we realize you get what you pay for.”
Indeed. Funding for schools has been lackluster for years, to a large extend due to misguided propositions like Prop. 13. As I have said before, Prop. 13 had good intentions, but the opposite of good is having good intentions.
Of course, Larry doesn’t like to hear it, since he is big-time into Prop. 13. But unless he and other Prop. 13 proponents actually get the courage to face reality, things are not going to change, and education will continue to suffer.
I don’t know how effective shortening the school year would be. Certainly the state could send less money to schools, because it must pay schools using an “average daily attendance” formula. However, over half the districts budget is teacher salaries. I’m paid an annual salary by contract; I’m not an hourly wage earner. The gov’ can’t cancel my contract.
A one-week reduction in the school year is nothing compared to the extravagant number of school hours wasted on extra-curricular, non-academic activities. At the high school level, the state could add a full month of effective academic time at no additional cost by two pieces of legislation: 1) a maximum number of hours per year a student could be released from his/her core academic courses and a requirement to record these hours; 2) moving the state exams for NCLB to the last week of the school year.
Joe, you’re right. Prop 13 is the agreed upon date of the decline in ed funding. Lets peg the funding immediately prior to Prop 13 adjust it for inflation and see how many days we’re actually paying for now.
The concept of supplemental funding for ed programs coming from parents is common in CA and many districts have a separate private non-profit foundation that supplements public resources with private donations or require parents to forward fund programs like P.E.
I cannot think of many problems in California that are either not caused by illegal immigration or worsened by it, and political correctness is preventing timely solutions.
The decline of education is complicated additionally by things like poor-quality teacher training and too much money spent on administrators and other nonessential personnel and programs. The notion that excellent teaching is costly has been perpetuated to the point that poor scores are automatically blamed on a “lack of money.”
Discussing a shorter school year demonstrates that those in charge are not capable of finding solutions.
Joe. As you constantly beat the drum to throw more money at education perhaps we need to revisit the entire approach to our curriculum.
However, before I do let me use a major league baseball illustration to make a point.
The NY Yankees finished 3rd in the American League in 2008 with a record of 89-73. Their payroll last year was $207 million dollars.
Needless to say they did not make the playoff’s.
Now let’s look at the Philadelphia Phillies who finished with a record of 92 wins and 70 losses.
They ended up winning the 2008 World Series. Oh, I almost left out the bottom line. Their payroll was $95 million dollars, less than half of the George Steinbrenner’s Yankee losers. Money is not always the answer to fixing problems.
Now its back to school.
In reading an Internet report I feel that it offers some food for thought regarding the 2008 word of the year. CHANGE!
“Changes, however are on the way. Curriculum in particular, has received renewed attention. “What we can learn from other high-achieving countries is that a coherent curriculum is very important.”
A stronger, more focused curriculum would also make it easier for poorer districts to teach science and math effectively. The Japanese, after all do not divide students into high-and low-ability groups until high school. This suggests that a more focused curriculum would improve the performance of poorer as well as middle-class students.
Developing more coherent and focused curricula wil require choices. Educators will have to decide which core skills students need and eliminate other topics so students have enough time to truly master them. It means creating textbooks and lesson plans that link math and science topics with one another, so students see how skills and concepts fit together into an elegant and powerful structure.”
Later in this report it states “there’s some basic knowledge we want students to have, but what we really want to do is train their problem solving and thinking skills.”
“Instead of using a single number as a bludgeon to hammer home a point or butress a point of view, it is better to peek behind the numbers and see what they tell us about our teaching practices. Otherwise we may end up valuing what we measure, rather than measuring what we value.”
That picture is too much lol.
The problem is we want the schools to do everything with whoever crosses their boundaries but we don’t want to pay for it. The question remains Larry, do you support a free and equal public education or not?
Cut back the curriculum, cut back the length of the school year, cut back the hours in the day, increase the number of students per teacher, whatever you want. Just tell me that its a free and equal education.
“I cannot think of many problems in California that are either not caused by illegal immigration or worsened by it”
That of course shows a lack of understanding of the immigration issue.
The problems caused by illegal immigration are overstated. For example, the hospital crisis. Unlike what anti-immigrants claim, that has nothing to do with illegal immigration. Illegals largely avoid going to hospitals, because they fear reporting to the authorities and deportation. It has everything to do with Americans without health insurance.
Latinos in the schools (which is obviously what you really mean) also has not much to do with illegal immigration. Most of the kids are born here, and are therefore citizens (even if their parents are here illegally.)
The one thing I agree with in your post is that there is too much money spent on administrators.
But, good teaching requires money. You can’t get good teachers unless you actually give them an incentive to continue teaching. Right now, the good teachers leave because they need can make a better living elsewhere.
“Money is not always the answer to fixing problems.”
Larry, of course money is not always the answer. But a certain amount of it is a necessity. You can’t keep good teachers if you don’t pay them according to their quality. With the lack of funding, you obviously end up with crappy teachers who can’t get a job somewhere else.
anonymous.
Are we now charging parents who send their children to K-12 public schools? Of course we offer “free” public education.
As to providing “equal” education I recall a time when we began busing children from the SF Valley into the inner cities and form south central into the “valley” so that the school districts would provide equal education opportunities.
Perhaps the following Internet text will answer your question about providing “equal education” as it related to integration.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today.
However, since the 1980s desegregation busing has been in decline. Even though school districts provided free bus transportation to and from students’ assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students’ homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away.”
Joe.
I agree that we should reward good teachers where it does the most good, in their paychecks. However, we should be able to teminate those tenured teachers who are not performing to a reasonable standard. Now the CTA school teachers union readers will get on my case but that’s what this forum is about. Civil debate.
By the way. My daughter was a special ed teacher so I have heard many of the stories as it relates to the caliber of our CA teachers.
Larry, glad to see once again you lay the blame on Tenure (which only requires an evidentiary hearing before removal)and not on the reduction in funding when compared to all other states. If problem employees aren’t being dealt with its a management problem. Blaming the funding problem on a few administrators that are unable to deal with problem teachers is a red herring. Sure its a problem but its not THE problem.
THE problem is people don’t want to pay more in taxes. So lets decide how much quality education taxpayers want to pay for and do that instead of constantly squeezing the education establishment by requiring they do more and then giving them less money to do it with.
Of course if we stopped requiring the school districts to provide all the special education services which costs alot more than regular education but which doesn’t get funded at the level of its cost so it takes money away from regular education.
How about problem students? Why should we pay more to educate those kids and allow them to disrupt the regular ed classrooms for months and months before we separate them.
The other expense we don’t fund for is health benefits. These benefit costs keep going up at rates unexplained by inflation. Single digit increases during Democratic Presidential administrations and double digit during the Republican administration all the way back to Reagan.
So lets quit squeezing resources for the year of education and start cutting the length of the publicly financed year of education and allow people to pay for the rest of the year on their own or through their employer. Simply structure the two or three months of free public education to teach English and math. Then turn them loose and let the cities and counties figure out what to do with the former students during the nine month summer recess.
Larry,
no objection from me.
I don’t really know what the answer is to providing equal education, there are far too many obstacles. You can’t tell the parents in Irvine and other more wealthy cities not to fund raise for their schools, yet it’s not an option here in Santa Ana and so they get things that we don’t. You can’t tell me that I have to send my child to my neighborhood school which is 99% low income Hispanic, yet those kids don’t have any language models and the school has absolutely no diversity, so I don’t think that is equal either. Busing created more problems then it was worth and obviously the state and the districts don’t have money for it anyway.
No. 4 – The Legislature’s reaction to Prop. 13 was to control education funding from Sacramento, allocate it to school districts in categories that require/limit uses (categorical funding), dictate policies and priorities from Sacramento. My belief is that the Prop. 13 property tax limit was not the culprit that led to declining school performance in California, it was the loss of local control and priority setting by School Boards to the one size fits all mandates and priorities of Sacramento. Mix in a dramatic shift in demographics, and the world is much different than before Prop 13. (An example of the limiting control from Sacramento is, that per a local Assistant Superintendent who told me this, the State limits the percentage of funding a school district can spend on maintenance – does not matter if that district has a bunch of old run down buildings and grounds needing a lot of maintenance or brand new facilities needing very little, the limit from Sacramento applies and usurps the abilitiy of the local School Board to set local priorities)
Ah! The effect of steroids!