School Beat: 2008-2009 in Review

by Lisa Schiff, 2009-06-04

Note: School Beat will be on summer vacation until August 27th.

Summer vacation arrives next Tuesday, but it may not bring much rest for public education supporters. Though schools and classrooms will be closed, there will be plenty of open seats on the public education roller coaster ride. As of Monday’s education budget hearings in Sacramento, San Francisco families and educators along with the rest of California’s public education community are still attempting to stare down the tenacious budgetary and political challenges that have become all too familiar. The year ends then as it always does, with fiscal uncertainty, albeit significantly ratcheted up this time around.

The 2008-2009 school year did not begin with such grave tones though. New members of the Board of Education (BOE) were elected, increasing the number of parents of currently enrolled students on the BOE. Such representation can only be good (especially as new student assignment and program placement decisions are reviewed), but that doesn’t mean that all decisions those school board members make are good. A most frustrating example was the reinstatement of JROTC, a program which had been eliminated, but for which insufficient work had gone into creating a replacement. A vacuum was left that JROTC supporters successfully refilled with essentially the same program.

So we are now where we originally started, but with a loss of much significant time, energy and attention. Larger failures of our district such as the unacceptably wide achievement gap pose a far greater risk to a far greater number of students, but this difficult and complex issue has failed to inspire to action anywhere near the numbers of individuals either for or against JROTC. Senator Fiona Ma’s outrageous effort to breach the lines of authority by requiring the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to reinstate JROTC is an example of how skewed the priorities have become. A community goal for the upcoming school year must be to embrace the elimination of the achievement gap with just as much, if not more, fervor as was devoted to all sides of the JROTC debate.

Student assignment, while not as disastrous as last year’s process, had its share of bumps. With another increase in the number of families applying to the SFUSD, the system was stretched to capacity in terms of ability to handle the application load and in terms of filling up requests at more and more schools. A related and protracted task has been the crafting of a new student assignment policy, which now will be in place not for this coming assignment year, but for the 2011-2012 school year. In addition to other goals of fairness and reliability, hopefully that policy will also address some of the severe assignment inequities for students requiring special education services. Those interested in where this is at can attend a June 8th special school board meeting and one September 14th that will review simulations of different assignment boundaries.

More local news was the troubled Balanced Scorecard planning process and the related “Beyond the Talk” strategic planning initiative, which have resulted in more confusion as opposed to the promised sharing of effective programs. A major champion of this effort was Tony Smith, who has just recently accepted a position at the Superintendent of Oakland Unified. Hopefully he will take a more concrete approach with our East Bay neighbors than we experienced.

The school year calendar has also been undergoing review, with a set of proposed changes to begin in the 2010-2011 year being voted on June 9th. One goal among others is to make semester breaks within the academic year map more closely to vacations.

Most uplifting this year was the election of President Barak Obama, a victory that is at times still marvelously hard to believe. This change in leadership deserves much celebration, and while that certainly has occurred, for those who see public education as a priority those celebratory notes have been somewhat quieted by both the choice of Arne Duncan from Chicago as the Secretary of Education and by the relatively low profile education has within the President’s field of vision.

Secretary Duncan was in San Francisco just a little while ago and much of what he said was quite counter to what he energetically deployed in Chicago. He seemed to speak seriously about the wholly unacceptable achievement gap faced in our state and in other areas of the country. He seemed to also — finally — reject some of the natural, destructive outcomes of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that he himself imposed on Chicago students and families, such as the “Taylorization” of education and the simplistic assessment of students by standardized test scores. These very recent acts in Duncan’s home town make it difficult to trust his new rhetoric too readily. As Secretary, his plans regarding NCLB are disappointingly vague, with nothing more concrete than the call for a name change.

Some would argue that the tremendous amounts of stimulus monies being funneled to public schools through the Department of Education (DOE) are a sign of change and leadership. This is a true and welcome departure from the last administration and resources on this scale will likely never flow through the economy again. But there are so many significant challenges to the distribution and use of these monies, as seen by the fact that it’s still unclear how that money will be used at the district level, including in the SFSUD. We are still asking when and where will this money show up? How will it directly help school site decision makers? How can it ameliorate the terrible state budget situation when that situation is still a moving target?

The simplest and most cost efficient strategy would be to have school districts everywhere use the money to fund existing programs, staff and capital improvement projects, eliminating layoffs and thereby stabilizing not only schools, but local economies. But like all funders, the DOE wants to support programs that will somehow transform education, aspirations that are difficult, if not impossible, to meet with one-time influxes of cash. Such changes take steady, reliable and increased funding and are not the result of “Race to the Top” grants that states will be competing for.

During his tour of California, Secretary Duncan commented to his audience that the state had lost its way (a very tired truism for California residents) and that we, along with the rest of the country, should see this economic crisis as a grand opportunity for change. But change like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As we are witnessing so clearly in California, this crisis presents an opening for those who wish to decimate our civic infrastructure as much as it does those who wish to refashion and strengthen it. Rhetoric spoken outside the context of political reality is an insultingly poor substitute for the programmatic, fiscal, and political leadership that our state sorely needs and that Washington could provide.

California is in a budget free-for-all resulting from the confluence of: the still traumatic tax restructuring from Proposition 13; a legislative stranglehold in the form of the 2/3 supermajority threshold required to pass a budget or taxes; the Republican cadre in Sacramento who have sworn a no-tax oath, which they break at their own peril but which they maintain at the cost of everyone else outside the ranks of the rich; a Governor who is intent on raiding education funds and eliminating public services; and an historical paucity of leadership among the Democrats, especially at the very highest levels.

We are now reaping the rewards of paying scant attention to this broken political infrastructure. The only benefit may be that the root causes of this situation are now quite clearly illuminated. In California, our immediate goal must be to eliminate the 2/3 super-majority, otherwise there will be no possible way to support any of the social services, from education to health care for low-income families, that are so essential.

One opportunity to make this case will be at the June 23rd California Children’s Rally, championed by Los Angeles public school activist Sandra Tsing Loh. This rally will be a chance to celebrate the many wonderful aspects of our schools, qualities and successes that occur because of the solid commitment of educations and families. But it will also be an opportunity to focus on some basic goals and strategies with parents from across the state and to begin to talk with elected officials about how to achieve some progress on them in Sacramento.

In San Francisco our important local objectives — reduction of the achievement gap; a fair, reliable and, transparent assignment system; an equitable distribution of financial resources, educational staff and program placement — will need to be addressed in parallel with efforts to change the fundamental decision making constraints in our state. Although there will be no historic presidential election, the 2009-2010 school year is poised to be a significant one for education in California.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.