California failing its poor students

California failing its poor students

Joe Mathews
October 6, 2016, 3:50 PM

Is California abandoning its poorest students?

That question would be dismissed as absurd by our state’s education leaders, especially Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Board of Education. For years, they have been building a new educational architecture they say will do more for the poorest kids in the poorest schools.

But as the many elements of this architecture are put in place, they have grown so complicated that the entire structure seems incoherent. It’s possible that this new architecture could undermine public accountability, resist public engagement and obscure how disadvantaged students are really doing. The new architecture is built on a foundation known as the Local Control Funding Formula, a multi-piece formula designed to give more money and authority to school districts, especially those with concentrated poverty. That formula is accompanied by the new Local Control and Accountability Plans, intended to give parents and communities more say in how money is spent. The state also adopted Common Core standards for math and English along with a computer-based testing system to better track individual students.

Last month, the State Board of Education wrapped all these elements together in a new accountability system to track their progress.

But the way that system was approved exposes the complexity, and shoddiness, of the new architecture. The system introduces six statewide indicators for measuring schools that go beyond test scores and local factors, like parental school climate. But it could be years before such measurements are a reality, since much of the required data does not currently exist.

Even worse, the board resisted urgent calls from child advocacy groups to boil down this new system into a rating that the public could understand. Instead, the board, defiantly, released a sprawling draft built around a confounding color-coded grid. “Making sense of it is practically impossible,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized.

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