Here are some highlights of education spending in the budget, including increases for additional preschool seats, efforts to address the teacher shortage and programs to prepare students for college.

1. Overall numbers

The $171 billion state budget includes total funding of $88.3 billion for all K-12 education programs.

This money supports about 6 million students who attend kindergarten through 12^th grade in more than 10,000 schools throughout the state. There are more than 1,000 local school districts, 58 county offices of education and more than 1,000 charter schools.

This year’s budget is a 4 percent overall increase in revenue from last year for K-12 funding.

Per pupil spending increased to $10,643, which is $3,600 more than in 2011-12.

2. College readiness

$200 million in one-time funding for College Readiness Block grants to school districts and charter schools serving high school students to provide additional services to help students transition to higher education. Funding will be based on the number of high school students who are English learners, low-income or foster youth.

3. Teacher shortage

An increase of $35 million to fund several programs aimed at recruiting additional teachers. This includes: $10 million for the Integrated Teacher Preparation Grant Program to provide grants to colleges and universities to develop or improve programs so that students can earn a teaching credential and a bachelor’s degree in four years; $20 million to establish the California Classified School Employees Credentialing Program to recruit non-certificated school employees to become certificated classroom teachers; and $5 million for a local educational agency to establish and operate the California Center on Teaching Careers to recruit teachers.

4. Charter school startup grants

An increase of $20 million for operational startup costs for new charter schools in 2016 and 2017, which will help offset the loss of federal funding.

5. Restorative justice grants

An increase of $18 million for truancy and dropout prevention grants.

6. Full-day state preschool

An increase of $7.8 million to provide access to full-day state preschool for an additional 2,959 children from low-income working families starting March 1, 2017. Over a period of four years, a total of 8,877 new full-day state preschool slots will be added costing $100 million.

7. A-G initiative

$4 million to expand University of California’s existing Scout program and provide free online classes and curriculum to meet the A-G subject requirements with the goal of making college preparatory courses more accessible for students.

8. Unfunded liabilities 

$2.4 billion for state contributions to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). It is estimated this unfunded liability will be eliminated in about 30 years.

State retirement liabilities for health care benefits total $74 billion, and $72.6 billion for teacher pensions. The state portion of the unfunded liability for teacher pensions is $13.9 billion.

Source: California State Budget 2016-17

This is the last in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part One surveyed how the state’s skepticism of test-based accountability starts at the top with Gov. Jerry Brown, who successfully took on the federal government; Part Two explored how the elimination of certain data systems has limited educational research in one of the country’s most consequential states.

California is hoping to redefine school accountability in the “California Way.”

While state officials are hard at work designing a system in line with the oversights demanded by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the new federal K-12 education law, they also want to remain true to the state’s ethos of de-emphasizing test scores and focusing on helping — rather than “punishing” — struggling schools.

“We have had now basically three years without a functioning accountability system and we’re approaching the moment when we actually have to put something in place,” said David Plank, a Stanford professor and executive director of the research group Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).

A report released in May by a task force convened by the state superintendent lays out a series of metrics — beyond standardized test scores — for judging schools, but says little about what happens to the ones that persistently score poorly.

The system will also be crucial to the future of the state’s public schools, which grapple with limited funding and poor data systems that make it difficult to track areas where improvement is needed. California students post some of the lowest test scores in the country on federal exams and while, fairly wealthy, the state spends among the least on K-12 education.

As other states face similar tensions, California’s approach may point to the future of accountability across the country as one of ESSA’s pillars is devolving power from the federal government. The state appears on the verge of designing a system that moves beyond a narrow focus on math and reading test scores while including measures of equity, such as suspensions and expulsions, which fall disproportionately on special education students and those of color.

At the same time, it’s not clear that there’s the political will to give accountability any teeth — to intervene, and even, in some cases, sanction schools that are low-performing year after year by, for instance, labeling them as failing or dismissing staff.

Accountability but then what

The state must balance an array of competing interests in creating a new system for evaluating schools. California has to meet still-to-be-finalized federal guidelines under ESSA, while creating coherence between those new rules and its already-planned system for district-focused accountability.

Many want the state to continue to avoid a focus on test scores and accountability that imposes strict fixes; yet a number of advocates say California needs to intervene in schools that flounder year after year.

The plan is for school-based accountability to be underway in the 2017-18 school year — but many details need to be worked out before then.

Last month, the “accountability and continuous improvement” advisory task force, convened by state Superintendent Tom Torlakson, put out a list of metrics for judging schools, many of which were backed by the state Board of Education. The group was co-chaired by Eric Heins, head of the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and Wes Smith, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.

In interviews, several task force members praised the group’s recommendations and collaborative approach.

Samantha Tran, of the nonprofit Children Now, was one of them. She described the task force’s two main camps: the “traditional education community” and a “number of equity advocates.” In the former, she included administrators groups, teachers unions and school board associations, among others, and in the latter, she included herself and others concerned with ensuring measures of equality were included.

“We really pushed on each other in terms of (our) bottom line — what were key things that people wanted to make sure were reflected in the report, so at the end of the day, we could all sign on to it,” Tran said.

The task force agreed that schools should be judged on a variety of measures, including tests scores, rates of suspension/expulsion, chronic absenteeism, college and career readiness, and high school graduation rates.

But the report was much less clear on what interventions look like when schools are deemed low-performing. The task force’s explanatory graphic speaks to the complex nature of the undertaking and in some cases a lack of clarity.

“The idea that large proportions of schools would be held accountable was taken off the table pretty quickly,” said University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff, also a task force member. Polikoff said the focus was largely based on what measures to use, “not what would happen based on those measures.”

“In the first meeting…I said, ‘There’s a quite robust (research) literature that suggests that consequential accountability improves outcomes for kids,’ and that comment was not well received,” Polikoff said, referring to studies showing that No Child Left Behind and state accountability systems have had positive impacts on student achievement.

There is little discussion about what, if anything, will happen to struggling schools in the state report. It promises to “ensure significant, sustained, evidence-based interventions in priority … schools” through “mandatory … (technical assistance) and supports that build (local educational agency)/school capacity to sustain improvement over time” for schools “that need more comprehensive and intensive supports to make major improvements in performance and/or growth.”

What, precisely, a “significant, sustained, and evidence-based intervention” is remains unstated. There has been much talk of reducing “punitive” sanctions against schools — but one person’s interventions may be another’s punishment.

“The ‘what happens’ question has not been answered,” said Peter Birdsall, task force member and the executive director of the California County Superintendents.

ESSA requires intervention in certain schools — those in the bottom 5 percent statewide; high schools where fewer than two-in-three students graduate — and specifically that those steps be “evidence-based.” But it largely leaves it up to the states, like California, to decide what the steps are.

But in echoes of recent history, California’s vision of accountability may in some cases run headlong into Washington, D.C.’s approach. Proposed federal guidelines for ESSA say that schools must be assigned a single, summative performance rating. California’s task force recommendations — released prior to the federal rules — suggests a “dashboard” approach that gives schools scores across multiple dimensions but avoids assigning them an aggregate rating.

California’s lack of robust state data systems may also make implementing the accountability system challenging since it will rely on a variety of new measures that must be accurately collected and reported.

“That came up repeatedly in conversations, where folks were in essence saying, ‘We don’t really have the capacity or systems to do this now,’” said Polikoff, who hopes that putting multiple measures into the rating system will force the state to create the necessary data infrastructure.

Accountability applied with nuance

Even those pushing for state oversight and accountability with consequences say they don’t want to return to what some see as an overemphasis on test scores, which led to inflexible sanctions imposed on poorly performing schools.

“There’s a desire … to think about a continuum that really does start with support,” said Tran of Children Now. “Education is a human endeavor. The construct of we’re going to fire the principal and half the teachers — that may make sense in a certain school, but what if you just hired this phenomenal principal and things are starting to turn around, but there’s another dynamic that’s at play?

“You almost need a little bit more judgment to go in and still apply that pressure because that pressure is important,” she added, “but have a more nuanced response based on the context of the school and the district.”

John Affeldt, of the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates, has been critical of accountability aspects that are too focused on test scores and said the measures being discussed now in California move in the right direction. However, he said, “I’m not supportive of no accountability and no consequences. … If we’re going to do support and assistance, then let’s make sure it’s working.”

Putting in place any sort of sanctions for struggling schools may still face an uphill political battle, considering the long-standing opposition of Gov. Jerry Brown and politically powerful state teachers unions.

“I’m concerned. We are seeing progress in the conversation around creating a more meaningful accountability system. However, we need to know clearly what supports and interventions our students are going to receive,” said Ryan Smith of Education Trust – West, which advocates for the achievement of students of color and those living in poverty.

Others argue that sanctions for low-performing schools do more harm than good.

“I do think that schools that are so-called ‘low performing’ should get the carrot rather than stick approach,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two statewide teachers unions. “I taught at an inner-city high school in Los Angeles for many, many years … and people at that school worked their tails off. … We needed additional resources; we didn’t need to be sanctioned.”

A California Teachers Association spokesperson said in an email that the union was “providing input” on accountability but declined to comment beyond that.

“It’s more important to get it right, than to do it fast,” Heins, the CTA president and task force co-chair, wrote in a letter to the state Board of Education.

Brown’s spokesperson directed a request for comment to the state school board, whose spokesperson then pointed back to Brown’s budget message this year, which said the state plans “to establish an accountability system that provides a more accurate picture of school performance and progress than the past system.”

Meanwhile, a bill laying out metrics for accountability recently passed the state Assembly and is now in the Senate. Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the bill’s sponsor, said her proposal shares significant overlap with the task force recommendations, which Weber said relied partially on her bill. But both are needed, she said, suggesting that task force recommendations don’t always translate into real action.

“We feel very strongly that our bill still needs to exist, because we know how task forces go,” she said.

Even Weber’s bill though does not specify interventions for struggling schools.

Rewards vs. sanctions

Many in California believe that past accountability and intervention systems have not worked. Research on California school interventions is limited — perhaps because the data needed to study the state’s education system is hard to come by — but there is some evidence from which to draw.

It shows that intervention and accountability systems can make a difference — often for good, but sometimes for ill.

A specific assistance and intervention program for certain low-performing districts — led by California and mandated by No Child Left Behind — showed positive results as measured by math test scores; so did a 2009 federal school turnaround grant that awarded up to $2 million each to some of California’s lowest-performing schools. The initiative was particularly successful in schools that dismissed their principal and half the teaching staff.

A 2013 paper, though, found that achievement decreased in California schools that were sanctioned for not hitting targets for certain disadvantaged groups, such as students of color or low-income students.

But a national study found that racial achievement gaps shrunk in states like Mississippi and Oklahoma when more stringent accountability pressure was based on the performance of vulnerable student groups. In general, No Child Left Behind — and its state-level precursors — produced gains in student achievement but also led to unintended consequences, like cheating and teaching to the test.

One of the most thorough studies of accountability examined the impact of Texas’ approach, which sanctioned persistently struggling schools while rewarding high-performing ones. The research found students in schools facing pressure to avoid a low rating scored higher on standardized tests, and, most importantly, graduated college more frequently and earned more money as adults. However, in high-performing schools eligible for extra recognition, struggling students were less likely to graduate college and made less money at age 25.

Despite questions of its effectiveness, California’s task force recommendations seem to place a greater emphasis on rewarding and recognizing high-achieving schools rather than putting pressure on low-performing ones to improve.

“Every single draft (of the recommendations) that came out … I kept copying and pasting the same thing, which was, ‘I don’t know why we’re spending so much space on awards; I know of virtually no evidence that those help kids,’” said Polikoff.

A leap of faith

California is known for a lot of things: vibrant and beautiful cities, an innovative economy and a top-notch state university system.

But when it comes to its K-12 public schools, California has far less to brag about. Its students score among the worst in the country on federal fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading tests. Across states, California ranked 46th, only slightly better than Alabama and a bit worse than Mississippi, according to one careful analysis that adjusted for demographic differences, like student poverty and English proficiency.

The reasons are complex and difficult to pin down, but a 2007 report by some of the state’s top researchers identified three major issues: a complex, inequitable and inadequate school funding system; the difficulty in firing ineffective teachers, and a lack of infrastructure to collect and use data. A 2012 follow-up report said that many of these problems remained.

Since then, there has been significant progress on school funding equity: Gov. Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula is designed to drive more money to schools serving disadvantaged students, while also enhancing local flexibility to use that money. The amount of money though remains an issue, and there are numerous concerns that the new funding is not reaching the students it’s meant to help.

By all estimates, California had for years spent among the least per pupil of any state in the country: $7,348 in 2013 vs. New York’s $16,726, according to the most recent comparable data. Voters passed a tax increase raising billions to better fund education in 2012, which appears to have helped significantly but still has not completely closed the gap between California and other states. In April, a state appeals court rejected a lawsuit backed by the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates arguing the state was inadequately funding schools; an appeal was filed to the state Supreme Court earlier this month.

In other respects, the state has seemingly made less progress. The weak data infrastructure remains, though a renewed push to improve it has cropped up. The well-known Vergara lawsuit claiming it’s all but impossible to fire an ineffective tenured teacher has been appealed to the state Supreme Court, after being thrown out by the Court of Appeal in April.

Political transitions also loom. By 2019, term limits guarantee that a new governor and state superintendent will take office — considering how fundamentally Brown’s philosophy of local control and distaste for data has shaped California’s education policy, the next governor may make a big difference.

This comes amid the backdrop of the state’s efforts to redesign the accountability system, which still has numerous unanswered questions. What will happen to struggling schools? How will the state merge its district-focused accountability system with ESSA’s school-focused one? How aggressive a role will the federal government play? Will the state legislature step in?

For now, at least, California continues to tread its own path — one other states, newly empowered by the end of No Child Left Behind and the dawning of ESSA, may follow.

“There’s a quite radical move away from ‘test-and-punish’ to creating a culture of ‘continuous improvement’ and that is a leap of faith,” said Plank of the research group PACE. “We have no idea whether we can make this work or not.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

This is the second in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part One looks at how the state’s skepticism of test-based accountability starts at the top with Gov. Jerry Brown, who successfully took on the federal government. Part Three will consider what the next era of accountability in California might look like under the new federal K-12 education law.

Everyone in California education policy circles knows it.

“Our governor has not been a fan of data,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of Education Trust-West, a civil rights and education group that generally backs tough school accountability standards.

Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California professor, echoed this sentiment, “California has an embarrassing relationship with educational data. … The governor has affirmatively stated that he doesn’t want to spend money on improving educational data systems.”

Indeed, it’s well understood in the education policy realm that California has bucked national trends by pausing school accountability and not requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.

But what’s less discussed is how the removal of data systems in the state has made it hard for researchers to study California schools or for policymakers to understand and address educational challenges. Although it’s data for high-stakes accountability like teacher evaluation and school performance metrics that draws headlines, even data for low-stakes purposes, like academic research, is hard to come by in California.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s philosophy can be best summed up by a line in a 2011 message after vetoing a school accountability system: “Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a high-performance machine. … The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational ‘good’ from the education ‘bad.’”

He’s also criticized the federal government’s $300 million Race to the Top program as having “a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

California hasn’t done away with data altogether — school level test scores are publicly reported and several large districts together known as CORE have worked to create more robust data systems — but several researchers and advocates say they can’t fully judge the education policies of the most populous state in the country because of a lack of accessible data.

• Read more: Anatomy of school success and failure: Inside CORE’s accountability system

It’s a strange position for a state synonymous with being in the vanguard.

“California is really behind compared to the rest of the nation when you think about data systems and the ability to use data to improve practice,” said Samantha Tran, of the nonprofit advocacy group Children Now.

Data becomes a four-letter word

The hostility to data runs deep. Since Brown became governor for the second time in 2011, an array of education data systems has met the death knell of his veto pen.

In his first year back in office, Brown blocked a years-in-the-making teacher data system, forcing California to return $6 million in federal money. The extensive database would have given the state the ability to link individual teachers to student growth, as well as monitor trends in the teacher workforce. Brown said thanks, but no thanks to the free federal money, and the system is now defunct.

“I see education as a local responsibility. The data is there and the superintendents and the teachers and the principals and the school boards should make use of it,” Brown said at the time, apparently ignoring the state school boards association, which said otherwise.

Now, five years after Brown’s veto, the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office says such a database is crucial as the state faces a potential teacher shortage. The lack of a statewide system means on this issue, “Many questions legislators have cannot, in turn, be answered well or at all,” the office found.

“When we are facing a massive teacher shortage, which has been reported in California, you would think we would want the data on teachers, longitudinally over time, available to researchers to help California understand what might be good policy options,” said USC professor Katharine Strunk.

Also disappearing was the California Postsecondary Education Commission, an independent agency for higher education policy planning, research and analysis that had existed since 1973. Brown line-item vetoed funding for the program in 2011, saying he wanted to reduce costs and consolidate systems; the move saved $1.9 million from a $129 billion budget.

In 2015, Brown also stopped a bill to create a similar agency, with supporters saying there was a lack of data about and coordination within California’s sprawling higher education system that educates more than 238,000 students and employs more than 190,000 faculty and staff.

Brown has fought efforts to track chronic absenteeism in the state’s public schools prompted by multiple reports from the state Attorney General Kamala Harris finding that truancy was a widespread problem. In 2014, Brown vetoed two bills to require additional tracking of absenteeism by local schools and the state.

“These are missed opportunities to help keep California’s youngest and most vulnerable students on track,” said Harris at the time. (State monitoring of chronic absenteeism finally started earlier this year after federal law began requiring it.)

One system that survived the governor’s cull is the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System — or CALPADS — though not for lack of trying on Brown’s part. Still, many say the database, which tracks a variety of student-level data including demographics and test scores, could be better.

“By statute, [CALPADs] comprises only the data that the federal government requires [California] to collect, so it’s not a comprehensive data system [and there are] a lot of weaknesses in it,” said David Plank, head of the research group Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE.

In what might be the oddest instance of data skepticism, the California Department of Education, led by state Superintendent Tom Torlakson, deleted fifteen years’ worth of old test scores from an easily accessible part of its website just before the release of new Common Core-aligned assessment scores in August 2015.

A department spokesperson explained at the time that it was done “to avoid confusion because the two tests cannot be compared.” After a public uproar, the data was restored to the state website a few weeks later.

A request for comment from Brown’s office was directed to the state Board of Education. Julie White, the board’s director of the communications, wrote in an email, “Governor Brown’s comments about education data collection have been consistent over the years,” pointing to two veto messages from the governor.

“While well intentioned, the collection of data for the interests of faraway authorities would not get to the root of the issue — keeping kids in school and on track,” Brown wrote in 2014 when rejecting the bill to track truancy.

California: a data desert for researchers

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the state’s data purge is how difficult it has been for quantitative education researchers — those who use numbers to dissect the impacts of certain policies — to study the state.

In regards to Brown’s elimination of the teacher tracking database, Plank, of the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), said, “PACE works with a lot of academics, many of whom would love to have such a system.”

Speaking of the research community, Plank said, “We think we’ve got a lot to contribute here, but we don’t have the data. What we’ve found is that our academic colleagues are doing research in North Carolina or Florida or New York because they have data systems that work and we don’t.”

Plank said that a group of districts including Los Angeles and San Francisco with their own tracking systems have shared student-level test score data with researchers.

A 2012 report from the D.C.-based Data Quality Campaign found that California only met four of its 10 suggested “actions to ensure effective data use.”  Since 2012, California has refused to respond to the Campaign’s survey on how different states use data.

Strunk of USC said the state’s decision to go a year without publicly reported state tests made it difficult to examine the state’s education policies. “I had a lot of studies looking at interventions in different districts, especially L.A., and we wanted to see longer-term outcomes and we’re cut [off] at two or three years because we just don’t have [2013-14] data,” she said.

She said even getting the most recent data — the first year of the new Common Core-aligned tests from the 2014-15 school year — has proved challenging. “Many researchers have not been able to access those data from different districts and from the state.”

Robert Oakes, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education, (CDE), originally said in an email, “CDE doesn’t release student-level data for privacy reasons.” However, Plank said that it is common practice to share data with researchers while protecting student privacy and that many states do so.

Oakes later said the department did, in fact, share student-level data with certain researchers.

“The CDE has selectively entered into data-sharing agreements for Smarter Balanced results with highly qualified researchers from different institutions over the past two years. … The CDE is not funded to review research proposals and data requests and therefore only accommodates these requests as time permits or does so as part of an already established work assignment or project.”

When asked how CDE could provide the student-level data to some in light of the privacy concerns mentioned earlier, Oakes said, “Specific situations vary, of course, but in general CDE removes any personally identifiable data that could violate privacy protections.”

Oakes said the department does make efforts to support the use of data: “We have a pretty sophisticated bank of data available through DataQuest, and researchers can fill out specific applications if they want it mined at different levels. … We’re really big on data; we have a lot available.”

Strunk agreed the state has great information accessible at the school level but that the key for researchers is to be able to track individual students and teachers over time.

“To get the best estimates of the impact of an intervention on student achievement, you’d like to have as fine-grained data as possible,” she said.

For instance, Strunk described how she once attempted to estimate the rate of teacher turnover at different schools — but she wasn’t able to do so because the available data wasn’t detailed enough.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the state education department, since some of the systems necessary were defunded. Strunk says that she’s worked with many state CDE staff members who are eager to help researchers but, on balance, “I’ve never found CDE to be particularly transparent or helpful in providing access to student-level data,” she said.

Like Plank, Strunk pointed out that those handful of states, such as North Carolina and New York, with strong data systems dominate the research scene.

“There is no [statewide] student-level data set available to researchers in California, at all,” she said.

It’s not just an academic point when dealing with a state as large, diverse and significant as California.

“There’s no reason to think that we can be able to apply what we learn from North Carolina to California,” said Strunk. “You can’t do much research on California.”

Polikoff of USC, said, “If you look at how many [research] publications there are that use student-level longitudinal data from California, there’s almost none.”

Michal Kurlaender, a professor at University of California, Davis, said she had been able to access some data by building strong working relationships with staff at the California Department of Education.

But, she said, “There is a lot of work being done and important research questions being explored in states that have rich, more easily accessible data systems … There hasn’t been enough [California] support to build rich data systems and to make them more publicly available for research purposes. … As a general rule, I do believe California is a tougher state for researchers to do work in because of the data accessibility issues.”

With growing calls for improved state data systems, but a popular governor who philosophically objects to quantifying education still in office, it’s unclear how long California’s data blackout will last. Regardless, it’s unlikely that the voice of researchers — and their desire for data — will be heard that loudly in Sacramento.

“The research community has no political clout,” Plank said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

This is the first in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part Two explores how the elimination of certain data systems has limited educational research in one of the country’s most consequential states. Part Three will consider what the next era of accountability in California might look like under the new federal K–12 education law.

“Write your impression of a green leaf.”

This appeared on an exam that California Gov. Jerry Brown took as a student and it’s stuck with him ever since, he said in an interview with The Atlantic: “This is a very powerful question that has haunted me for 50 years, but you can’t put that on a standardized test.”

His point is that efforts to quantify education are doomed to fall short because of the inherent complexity, necessity of human judgment, and subjectivity of “correct” answers.

It’s a view that seems to have deeply shaped Brown’s ideology, and by extension California’s public schools, which serve over six million students in grades K-12. During his tenure, Brown has been one of the foremost critics of federally driven efforts to use data to improve education — and one of the most effective.

If Washington, D.C., went to one extreme, in focusing on test-driven accountability policies, as some argue, California has gone to the other: placing a lengthy pause on school accountability, devolving control to local districts, eliminating certain data systems, and declining to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Challenging the wisdom of Washington, D.C.

Jerry Brown, a Democrat and son of a former California governor, was first elected to that office himself in 1974, serving two terms, but later failing in three runs for president and a campaign for U.S. Senate. By 1999, setting his ambitions lower, Brown had become Oakland’s mayor, and then in 2007, the state’s attorney general.

In 2010, he was elected governor once again and easily won re-election in 2014. Entering office in the wake of the economic downturn, Brown defied clear political labels, both cutting social spending and raising taxes to balance the budget, while maintaining solid approval ratings.  (Brown will not be able to run again in 2018 due to term limits.)

In 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was solidifying his own agenda, one that encouraged states to expand data systems, connect student test scores to teacher evaluation, and turnaround long-struggling schools. But Brown, then attorney general, had other ideas. In a remarkable letter — notable for the sharp tone directed at a powerful federal official from his own party — he criticized Duncan’s proposed Race to the Top program:

“The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. … You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

Brown vs. Duncan; Duncan blinks

While the federal government, under Duncan and his boss, President Obama, has been a strong backer of using test scores to judge teachers and schools, California, under Brown, has moved sharply in the opposite direction.

In 2013, as California was implementing the Common Core, Brown signed a law suspending the state’s testing and school-rating system; the bill was backed by the state teachers unions and Tom Torlakson, the state schools superintendent. The new policy meant students would take field tests not designed to track their individual growth; in fact, data from the tests would not be shared publicly whatsoever. Duncan said this was a violation of federal law, and threatened to withhold funding, in a dispute that would last months.

Eventually Brown would win the game of chicken with Duncan, whose department caved, promising not to pull federal money, which would have meant cutting off over a billion dollars, largely to districts serving poor students, and from a state that carried huge weight in the Democratic party.

California extended the school rating moratorium in 2015 — meaning the Golden State has not had a comprehensive school rating or consequential accountability system for three years.

The state is now working to design a new system that will comply with the federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), adopted last year. This new procedure will not be ready until the 2017–18 school year, a California State Board of Education spokesperson said.

The state has also bucked national trends on teacher evaluations. Spurred by federal incentives, the vast majority of states require student test scores to be a part of teacher evaluations, as of last year¹. California was one of just five states that put no such condition on teacher performance ratings².

Meanwhile, a rogue group of several large districts in California promised to evaluate teachers based in part on student achievement and build more robust data systems. This led the federal government to award those California outliers a waiver from No Child Left Behind, a move opposed by Torlakson and the state teachers unions.

The state teachers unions have generally backed Brown’s approach on testing and accountability.

“We have a good relationship with the governor,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two statewide teachers unions. “I think the governor is in step with us in terms of his view on the overuse of testing.”

The larger, 325,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) has supported Brown’s gubernatorial campaigns, endorsing him in 2010 and 2014, and backing him with over $6 million in independent contributions in his 2010 election. A CTA spokesperson declined to comment.

But Brown is not easily categorized. Like Duncan, he has generally embraced charter schools, which in some ways epitomize his view of expanding local autonomy and innovation, but are viewed negatively by many teachers unions.

Brown started two of his own charter schools in Oakland, as mayor, even writing a commentary about them for the journal Education Next. As governor he vetoed a union-backed bill that would have been banned for-profit charter operators.

More equitable funding but absent transparency

While opposing Washington’s data-driven reforms, Brown also set about pushing his own proactive education agenda: reworking school funding so that districts had more flexibility over how money is spent, with extra resources going to higher-needs students.

That was the goal behind his Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, passed in 2013, which based school finance on students’ level of need and reduced restrictions on how state resources can be used. Brown also led the push for a successful state ballot initiative to raise education funding. (California has long lagged behind other states in spending per student, but has made progress in recent years under Brown.)

This was lauded by many, including some who have been critical of Brown’s approach to data.

“[LCFF] represented a massive equity investment — we were talking about actually making sure that the resources were generated [for] high-needs kids,” said Samantha Tran of Children Now, a nonprofit advocacy group in California.

But ensuring state money reaches and genuinely helps its intended target has proved challenging. A series of reports by groups that backed LCFF say it’s unclear how districts are spending state dollars and that the fiscal data hasn’t been transparent.

After complaints from advocates, the state recently ruled that the Los Angeles Unified School District had defied spending rules and would need to redirect hundreds of millions of dollars to its most disadvantaged students. It then granted the district a one-year reprieve.

“Districts are not fulfilling the transparency requirements of how they are increasing and improving services to high-needs students,” said John Affeldt, of the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates, which produced one of the studies.

(Read The 74’s Conor Williams on how California districts used money meant for needy kids on across-the-board teacher pay hikes and hiring assistant principals)

And the documents for spending, called Local Control and Accountability Plan or LCAPs, often run hundreds of pages, morphing into the very same bureaucratic, compliance-driven exercises that Brown said plagued top-down accountability systems.

“The plans just became really cumbersome, so it’s hard for anybody to understand; it’s not a transparent plan,” said Peter Birdsall, executive director of the California County Superintendents, whose members review districts’ LCAPs.

A request for comment from Brown’s office was directed to the state Board of Education. Julie White, the board’s director of the communications, wrote in an email that efforts are underway to revise the LCAP template in order to “maximize transparency and ease of use for stakeholders; simplify structure and language; provide clear instructions; and support efficient and effective local planning, reporting, and implementation processes.”

Birdsall said the challenges don’t overshadow the benefits of the new funding system: “Given the amount of time we’ve had to implement [LCFF]… I think it’s gone very well.”

Still others worry that the new system is too light on accountability “To me, the ‘A’ in ‘LCAP’ … is more or less fictitious,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor and member of a recent state accountability task force.

The system is still in flux, as the state is developing the rubrics for judging whether districts have met their performance goals, while also designing a school-level accountability system to comply with ESSA, and trying to ensure the system as a whole is coherent.

Under current law, there is a mechanism for California to intervene in districts that fail to meet performance goals for certain student groups in three out of four consecutive years.

Such interventions would be at the discretion of the state superintendent and Board of Education and could not supersede union-negotiated contracts. The state rubrics for judging district-level progress will be finalized later this year, so it will still be several years before a district could face mandated state intervention.

California has also created a new agency called the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to continuously “provide advice and assistance” to districts.

Brown says “busybodies”; other say “accountability”

In Brown’s telling, teachers and schools have been descended upon by an army of “little busybodies to run down the halls and chide the teachers,” he told CALmatters, dispatched from Sacramento or, worse, D.C.

Larry Ferlazzo, a high school teacher in Sacramento and popular education blogger, said “without a doubt” he agreed with that perspective.

“For too long and in too many places, decisions about education policy have been made without teachers being key players in that, and under Gov. Brown and Superintendent Torlakson, they’ve really changed that,” he said.

California has avoided the fierce backlash to the Common Core standards that many states faced. While New York, for instance, has seen opposition from teachers and high testing opt-out rates, California has experienced virtually no opt-out movement and solid support from teachers for Common Core. Hitting pause on school and teacher accountability likely had something to do with that.

As Louis Freedberg, executive director for the California news site EdSource, put it, “California can focus its energies and resources on trying to make sure the Common Core standards deliver on their promises, rather than trying to defend them against attacks from unhappy parents, teachers and lawmakers.”

But some say that the state has gone too long without a system for evaluating schools.

Marshall Tuck, who narrowly lost a 2014 race for state schools superintendent, said he agreed with the initial break on accountability during the transition to Common Core, but that moment had passed.

“This will be our third year where we’ll have no accountability system on the Common Core test … I think it’s too long a period of time,” said Tuck, who said he’ll “most likely” run for superintendent again in 2018.

Shirley Weber, a state assemblywoman from San Diego, said, “Every system needs to have ongoing accountability — there should never be a pause in accountability.”

Ryan Smith, head of Education Trust – West, a California-based education and civil rights group, said the state can’t wait much longer for a meaningful way to hold schools accountable.

“I understand that these things take time, but I think we have a hard time telling parents and community members that … there’s no accountability for three to five years. That is the span of a student going into middle school and graduating high school.”

LaRae Cantley, of Los Angeles, wants the State Board of Education to include school climate measures in the state’s new accountability system. (Photo credit: Steve Yeater for CALmatters)

By Judy Lin

More than 50 civil rights and education reform groups are using Jerry Brown to remind Jerry Brown of his pledge to help black and Latino students following an interview with CALmatters in which he suggested that disparities will persist despite government intervention.

In a letter dated May 3, dozens of advocacy groups asked Brown to recommit to closing the academic achievement gap for high-need students as he considers an opening on the State Board of Education and a new plan for measuring school performance later this year.

“California’s continued prosperity hinges on how well we educate our students,” the letter reads. “As you’ve clearly stated, the risks of not doing so are far too great.”

During his interview, Brown had said he hopes his signature education policy, the Local Control Funding Formula, will help some students improve by sending more money to schools with students who don’t speak English or come from low-income families. But he said, “the gap has been pretty persistent. So I don’t want to set up what hasn’t been done ever as the test of whether LCFF is a success or failure.”

That left many worried that the governor and the people he appointed to the state school board aren’t prioritizing low-income and English-learner students because some are destined to be waiters and window washers.

Click here for the full story.

Antonio Villaraigosa

By Judy Lin | CALmatters

As he eyes a run for governor, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is spotlighting the lagging academic performance of Latino and African American students and saying the state should do more to hold schools accountable.

The 63-year-old Democrat says parents have a right to know how their schools are doing, and he doesn’t see a contradiction between supporting teachers and holding schools to higher standards.

Villaraigosa, who got into politics as a union organizer for teachers in Los Angeles, did not want to criticize the governor, but his comments differed sharply from Gov. Jerry Brown’s view that the academic performance gap between African Americans and Latinos to other student groups is likely to persist despite government interventions. Brown told CALmatters recently that he doesn’t want his key education policy, the Local Control Funding Formula, to be judged on whether it closes that gap.

“I hear all the time, ‘Well, that’s just the way it is and that’s the way it’s always been,’” said Villaraigosa, who was kicked out of a Catholic high school and credits public schools for a second chance.

Click here for the full CALmatters story.

Read LA School Report‘s interview with Villaraigosa here.

While pundits are describing it as another conservative budget from Brown, K-12 education funding looks to get a boost, with an increase to $51.2 billion from $49.8 billion in the last fiscal year.

The budget will need to be negotiated with state lawmakers and approved by the legislature and readjusted in the spring as updated state revenue numbers roll in. The new fiscal year begins July 1.

The budget increases school spending per student to $10,591 in 2016-17 — a boost of nearly $3,600 compared with 2011-12 levels, according a post on Brown’s website: “The budget provides a fourth-year investment of more than $2.8 billion in the Local Control Funding Formula, which focuses on students with the greatest challenges to success, bringing the formula to 95 percent implementation. The budget also proposes a $1.6 billion early education block grant that combines three existing programs to promote local flexibility, focusing on disadvantaged students and improved accountability.”

The increase for education won praise from around the state. Among the reactions:

• “It is safe to say this will be the second best year for schools in a decade,” said Kevin Gordon, an education lobbyist, according to the Los Angeles Times.
• “We are glad to see that the continued economic recovery once again allows the California state budget to make noteworthy investments in our children and schools,” said James P. Steyer, founder & CEO of Common Sense Media.
• “We commend Governor Brown for continuing a strong legacy of ensuring California’s students and education system have the resources they need and rightfully deserve. By increasing funding for our schools, Governor Brown is once again demonstrating that an investment in our students is an investment in the future of our state,” said a statement from Students Matter.
•  “This is a good news budget for our students, teachers, parents, communities and businesses. The Governor is continuing to devote more revenues to high-quality learning that prepares children for 21st century careers and college, including an additional investment of $300 million in career technical education that emphasizes hands on learning,” said State Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson.

The dark cloud hanging over the flush educational budgets of the last few years is Prop 30, a tax increase that has flooded the state with additional billions for schools but is due to begin sunsetting this year unless voters approve an extension that may be on the ballot this November.

The California Federation of Teachers called the need to extend Prop 30 “the elephant in the room,” adding in a statement. “The CFT is working with a coalition of unions and community organizations to place a renewal of Prop 30 on the November ballot. The governor’s budget proposal, and his state of the state message, represents the right moment for the governor to acknowledge that without a Prop 30 extension, the progress we have made over the past few years will be in jeopardy.”

Gov. Jerry Brown

The California state Senate voted 37 to 0 yesterday to approve SB-725, which exempts 2015 seniors from passing the California High School Exit Exam, allowing them to receive their diplomas immediately.

The state Assembly passed the bill last week, 77 to 1.

The bill now goes to Governor Jerry Brown to sign into law. Because it carries an urgency measure, it would take effect immediately should the governor sign it.

The law corrects a problem created in May when the California Department of Education suspended the exam to save money, because the test itself was being phased out.

However, that left more than 5,000 seniors statewide who had planned to take the test in July unable to graduate. Of those, 492 were in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The exam was introduced in 2006 to assess whether students had grade-level competency in the state content standards for reading, writing and math. Students first took the exam in their sophomore year of high school. To graduate, they were required to pass the test by the end of their senior year.

In 2013, 95.5 percent of California passed the test by the end of their senior year.

Gov. Jerry Brown reveals his revised budget

Gov. Jerry Brown‘s revised May budget has already received plenty of praise from school districts for showering California’s public education institutions with billions in additional funds.

But the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) yesterday delivered additional sunny news estimating that revenues would be $3.2 billion more than Brown’s budget predicts.

“Overall, we think the administration’s current estimates of 2014 taxable income are too low,” the LAO’s analysis report said. The office provides non-partisan budget advice and guidance to the state government.

From the additional funds, at least $660 million would be automatically guided toward public schools and community colleges, according to the Los Angeles Times. Due to LA Unified’s size as the state’s largest school district, it is expected to receive roughly 10-to-11 percent of the additional revenue, totaling around $72 million, which would be on top of the additional $638 million the revised budget is already setting aside for the district.

From the $3.2 billion, another $1.5 billion would be set aside for debt payments and a deposit in the state’s rainy-day fund, and $1.1 billion would be freed up to be spent however Brown and state Legislature like, according to the Times.

Some lawmakers are expected to want part or all of the additional $1.1 billion to go toward education programs.

“There is still a huge need for child care, for early care and education, for other aspects of our social safety net,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) told the Times.

Brown released his revised state budget last week that directed an additional $6.1 billion toward K-through-12 education, which was the result of higher than expected revenues that have come into the state since he revealed his proposed budget in January.

Gov. Jerry Brown reveals his revised budget

* UPDATED

Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget, which directs billions more toward schools over the next few years, has brought smiles to the faces of educational leaders around the state.

The overall amount includes an additional $3.1 billion for the current academic year and $2.7 billion extra for next year and could mean as much as $400 million for LA United this school year, according to the district.

Applause and cheers has been rolling in, but as the district said, “Half of these funds are ongoing and half are one-time only. This money has already been allocated for programs and personnel. The additional state funds resolve the deficit for the next school year.  However, even with the new revenue assumptions, the District continues to face deficits in the following years.”

Here are some statements from local and state leaders:

• LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines: “The governor’s commitments to education and career preparation are strategic investments in California’s future. Today’s announcement of increased financial support for schools will help improve the lives of students in the Los Angeles area. We will prioritize these new resources to make our students college and career-ready.”
• LAUSD board member Bennett Kayser: “More is better. The State never should have treated public education like a piggy-bank to be raided when times got tough. We have set high standards for our students and our staff at LAUSD but 49th in the nation in per-pupil-funding does not provide us with the means to achieve those goals. We must continue the fight in California to raise the level of investment in our children through public education.”
• LAUSD board member Mónica García: “Welcome news from Gov. Brown!  Our communities seek greater investment from the state and encourage the Legislators to join Gov Brown in beginning the road for accelerated ongoing investments in our learning environments.”
• State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson: “Governor Brown’s May Revision continues the great progress we have been making to better fund California’s public schools and better prepare students for careers and college in the 21st century. I applaud the Governor for his leadership on education.”

• Education Trust West: “We thank Governor Brown for increasing the investment in the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and applaud his overall commitment to increased education funding in his proposed 2015-16 state budget. The additional LCFF funding is critical to meeting the needs of California’s neediest students by fully implementing the new funding formula that Governor Brown championed. However, we are disappointed by the Governor’s decision on funding for the implementation of new state standards. The May Revision proposes one allocation of funds that school districts could use for two purposes: either implementation of new standards, or payment for previous unreimbursed mandates.”
• California Federation of Teachers President Joshua Pechthalt: “More than $6 billion in revenues beyond projections present an opportunity to build on the progress we have made in public education since the passage of Prop 30,” said , “and the Governor makes a good start with the May Revision. However, we have a long way to go before we restore the programs in education and social services we lost to a decade of budget cuts. Whatever basic stability we have achieved is due to Prop 30, and that needs to be recognized by making its revenues permanent and seeking fair, new sources to fund California’s future.”
• Students Matter: “At Students Matter, we agree that schools need more resources and praise the Governor for his leadership on this important topic. In fact, our lawsuit, Vergara v. California, is based in part on the case law established by the Serrano cases, which addressed the state’s public education financing system and established precedent recognizing that California’s students have a fundamental right to equal educational opportunity under the law. But we also know that funding alone won’t address the multifaceted challenges faced by our students. We must also solve for the systemic educational quality issues that are propagated and reinforced by California’s current Education Code.”
• CTA President Dean E. Vogel: “The governor’s revised state budget plan keeps the promise to California’s students and the promise of Proposition 30 as approved by voters. His continued commitment and repayment of the debt owed to California’s students, schools and colleges keeps us on the road to recovery. After years of more than $20 billion in devastating budget cuts and thousands of educator layoffs, that recovery is still in the beginning stages. Critical student programs are beginning to be restored, but our class sizes remain the largest in the country, we rank 46th in per-student funding, and dead last in the number of school counselors and librarians. The May revised budget, which includes the repayment of all school deferrals is another important step in the right direction.”
  

  ---

  *Clarifies amount of money expected for LA Unified, according to the district.

LAUSD CFO Megan Reilly

It turns out LA Unified’s money woes aren’t so bad — for now, anyway.

Shortly before the end of the calendar year, Superintendent Ramon Cortines and other district officials were forecasting a deficit of $320 million, sometimes closer to $350 million. But that was before Governor Jerry Brown proposed his new budget.

Now, the district’s revised estimated shortfall is a quarter of the original — about $88 million.

Megan Reilly, Chief Financial Officer for the district, told school board members yesterday much of the difference is being made up by an increase of $240 million in Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) revenue, which aims to return district funding to 2007-08 levels.

“LCFF makes up 76 percent of our total general fund,” she said.

That means per pupil funding next year will go up to $9,322 from $8,403 this year. Still, that falls far below the goal of just over $11,000 per student. And it leaves the district 18 percent shy of the overall budget target.

“And remember, having a target or meeting the target is not the same thing as having adequacy,” Reilly said.

Another windfall for the district next year is a one-time mandated cost reimbursement of $93.4 million. Reilly described it as a debt from the state for ”things that the governor or the legislature mandates the district to do but did not provide funding.”

The bad news for the district, however, is declining enrollment and attendance.

On average the LA Unified enrollment goes down by 3 percent each year due to a lower birth rate and attrition to charter schools. And every 3 percent loss of students, Reilly said, costs the district $100 million in funding.

But making matters worse this year is MISIS. The glitchy student data tracking system did not have the capacity to track attendance for several months early in the school year, forcing teachers to take attendance by hand, then go back and re-enter the information into the system. Unfortunately, the data often vanished from the program.

The implications of the district’s software problems could be disastrous when it comes time to report attendance data to the state because the state relies on self-reported data to calculate average daily attendance funding. The loss of information could cost the district several hundred million dollars.

“We’re trying to recapture as much of that data as possible,” Cortines said, attempting to soothe the board.

But board members took little comfort after hearing from Reilly on the subject.

“I will have to say right now we’re looking at variances of 3 percent up to 16 percent in these numbers,” she said. “We are talking about a drop in revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

That lead to an audible gasp in the board room auditorium.

Alex Caputo Pearl, president of the teachers union, UTLA, chose to seize on the positive state budget news to encourage the board to support a long-awaited salary increase for teachers. The union and the district have been negotiating a new contract for months, with little progress reported.

“We see a lot of opportunity to get down to business to talk about salary that will actually recruit and retain educators in LAUSD and some of our hardest hit schools in the nations,” he told the board.

The boon is also an opportunity to implement lower class size throughout the district, he added.

By UTLA’s calculations Reilly is low-balling how much LA Unified is likely to receive in state funding. “We’ve seen an 8.7 percent increase in K-12 funding. That could be up to 12 percent increase, from what we understand, for LAUSD,” Caputo-Pearl said.

Furthermore, he added, “those percentages are likely to be floors rather than ceilings given that we’ve got a democratically controlled legislature.”

The Coalition for Adequate School Housing (C.A.S.H.), an alliance of school districts and construction groups that was formed in 1978 and has supported or sponsored a number of statewide school construction bonds, announced yesterday that its new Californians for Quality Schools committee has filed ballot initiative language with the state.

The last statewide bond initiative was in 2006, and funds raised through statewide bonds are used as matching dollars for money raised by local cities and districts. But a press release from the group pointed out that the state’s matching funds have been exhausted, and school construction needs over the next decade are estimated to be $20 billion.

“Every child deserves access to safe, secure, modern learning environments,” Joe Dixon, C.A.S.H. Chair and Assistant Superintendent, Facilities and Governmental Relations at Santa Ana Unified School District, said in a statement. “A statewide school bond will continue the existing and highly successful public private partnership to fund badly needed upgrades to classroom technology, career education programs, and ensure new, well-resourced schools are built as needed. This is an investment in the development of our state’s future workforce, and will help ensure our children are prepared to compete in a 21st Century global economy.”

Supporters of the ballot face an uphill battle in getting it passed, including likely opposition from Brown, a popular governor recently elected to a fourth term in a landslide victory.

As the Fresno Bee pointed out, Brown’s new budget calls for overhauling the state’s 17-year-old facilities funding program, and he is generally unsupportive of the state taking on debt to pay for school construction, saying that “the locals can do it more efficiently.” Brown’s budget calls for the state to provide funds only to districts with the most need while possibly raising developer fees and making it easier for local districts to pass construction bonds.

According to the Bee, voters have approved about $45 billion in school and higher education bonds since 1998, but all of them were put on the ballot by the legislature. Organizers will need to gather 365,880 signatures, which will cost an estimated $1 million, then spend additional sums for advertising and promoting the ballot to voters.

Figure from Gov. Brown’s proposed 2015-16 budget

* UPDATED

Gov. Jerry Brown‘s proposed state budget for 2015-2016, released today, includes $52 million more in K-12 funding than last year’s budget.

The increase, which would bring the state’s K-12 education spending to $47.12 billion, a one-tenth of 1 percent increase over last year, includes more money for Common Core implementation, Internet infrastructure, special education, emergency repairs and charter schools. It also proposes more state oversight of teacher preparation programs and changes that Brown says will help the state better fund local school infrastructure needs.

Spending on K-12 education represents 41.6 percent of the budget, by far the largest category of state spending.

The budget “proposes investments for 2015‐16 that will substantially increase funding distributed under the Local Control Funding Formula, providing additional funding to school districts and students most in need of these resources. These funds will allow schools and colleges to restore and expand base programs and services, implement major new policy initiatives, and support other key local investments and priorities.”

Superintendent Ramon Cortines of LA Unified, the largest school district in the state, said, “We appreciate Gov. Jerry Brown’s call for real prudence in facing the 2015-16 budget. At the same time, we are grateful that the governor acknowledges with this budget proposal the value of public education in California.”

He added that the additional money “offers an opportunity to close the more than $300 million deficit that we anticipate in 2015-16. This will get us closer to our goal of limiting the number of Reduction-in-Force notices that will need to be sent to employees.”

Among the key items in the governor’s budget on K-12 education:

• Total per‐pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to increase to $13,462 in 2015‐16 from $13,223 in 2014‐15.
• Additional growth of approximately $4 billion for school districts and charter schools in 2015‐16, an increase of 8.7 percent.
• $100 million in one‐time funding to support additional investments in internet connectivity and infrastructure. This builds on $26.7 million funding that was provided in the last budget.
• $1.1 billion in discretionary one‐time funding for school districts, charter schools and county offices of education to further their investments in the implementation of Common Core.
• An increase of $59.5 million to support projected charter school ADA (average daily attendance) growth.
• An increase of $15.3 million to reflect a projected increase in Special Education ADA.
• An increase of $273.4 million in one‐time resources for the Emergency Repair Program.
• An increase of almost $900 million in one‐time spending to eliminate all remaining outstanding deferral debt for K‐12.

On the issue of teacher preparation programs, the budget stated that “oversight of the educator preparation system is currently not robust enough to verify that programs are meeting preparation standards and producing fully prepared teachers.”

The budget proposes $5 million to convene an Accreditation Advisory Panel to provide recommendations to the Commission on streamlining preparation standards, develop better data systems and surveys and “increase transparency and access to information about the quality and effectiveness of educator preparation programs.”

The budget also proposes an additional $5 million over a two-year period to update the Teacher Performance Assessment and develop an Administrator Performance Assessment to “verify educator quality and to assist with determining the effectiveness and quality of preparation programs.”

Brown’s budget pointed out despite $35 billion in voter-approved bonds since 1998 to construct or renovate public school classrooms, there remain “significant shortcomings” in the current School Facilities Program.

The budget proposes changes in the program that will help the state focus on “districts with the greatest need, while providing substantial new flexibility for local districts to raise the necessary resources for school facilities needs.”

The California Federation of Teachers praised the proposed budget for contributing “to better achievement levels for our student” and for helping “to restore school programs we need for a quality public education system.’

But the union pointed out that the state still ranks “near the bottom of the nation in per pupil funding and class size average.”

“The governor is a prudent steward of the state’s budget, but we also need his leadership in ensuring that California’s students and our most at-risk communities have the resources they desperately need in the coming years,” said CFT president Josh Pechthalt. “The governor should go beyond simply acknowledging that the source of California’s success is Proposition 30; we need to make this progressive tax and its success permanent, build on it, and the governor should lead the way.”

Dean E. Vogel, president of the California Teachers Association, said:  “The governor’s budget proposal gives us hope after learning yesterday that California ranks 46th in the nation in per-pupil funding. Even with the fruits of Prop. 30 and unprecedented revenue increases, we’re still at the bottom nationally on how much we invest in our students. We see the governor’s continued commitment to a brighter future for our state by allocating funds to repay the billions of dollars that had been cut from students, schools and colleges.”

*Adds response from LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines, CTA and CFT.

Gov. Jerry Brown had a few words to say about public education in his State of the State address today.

In effect, he saluted his effort to return more control over spending to the state’s school districts. Here’s what he had to say:

“Last year, I spoke of the principle of subsidiarity, a rather clunky word that nevertheless points to a profoundly important principle, namely that in our federal system there are separate layers of government, each with its own distinct responsibilities. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a “central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”

“No better example of this can be found than in your enactment last year of the Local Control Funding Formula. This was a major breakthrough in the way funds are allocated to California’s schools so that our laws explicitly recognize the difficult problems faced by low-income families and those whose first language is other than English. As a result, those with less are going to receive more and that is good for all of us.

“But something else is at work in this Local Control Funding Formula. Instead of prescriptive commands issued from headquarters here in Sacramento, more general goals have been established for each local school to attain, each in its own way. This puts the responsibility where it has to be: In the classroom and at the local district. With six million students, there is no way the state can micromanage teaching and learning in all the schools from El Centro to Eureka – and we should not even try!

“Last week, 324 people from across the state traveled to Sacramento to speak to the State Board of Education about the merits of this new law and the regulations which should be adopted under it. Principals, teachers, students, parents, religious groups and lawyers, all came forward to express their views. Now that shows interest and real commitment! But their work is just beginning. Each local district now has to put into practice what the Local Control Funding Formula has made possible. That, together with new Common Core standards for math and English, will be a major challenge for teachers and local administrators. But they are the ones who can make it work and I have every confidence they will.”

Gov. Jerry Brown

With the signing of AB 420, Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday made California the first state in the nation to limit suspensions and expulsions for the reason of “willful defiance,” a term critics call a catch-all phrase that can be hard to define but includes such categories as talking back, refusing assignments or violating the dress code.

The bill eliminates “willful defiance” suspensions and expulsions for the next 3 1/2 years for children in grades K-3 for disruptive behavior and eliminates expulsions for all students. The bill will have limited impact on LA Unified, which in 2013 became the first school district in the state to ban “willful defiance” as grounds for suspension, a groundbreaking move that paved the way for AB 420.

“This is the first step to restorative justice for all youth. We expect more from California and will keep fighting for more,” LA Unified Board Member Monica Garcia said in a statement. “Thank you to all of the community leaders, parents and students in Los Angeles and throughout the state who continue to fight to ensure that all youth stay in school and on track.”

The bill comes after new federal guidelines were issued this year aimed at helping schools in “administering discipline in a nondiscriminatory way and to provide alternatives to overly punitive school discipline practices.”

AB 420 was co-sponsored by Public Counsel, Children Now, Fight Crime Invest in Kids, and the ACLU of California.

Willful defiance “disproportionately affects students of color, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities,” according to the ACLU’s website, which also noted that about 600 K-3 students are expelled and 10,000 are suspended each year in California under “willful defiance,” which could include something as minor as missing a homework assignment.

Willful defiance accounts for 43 percent of suspensions of California students and is the suspension offense category with the most significant racial disparities, according to Public Counsel.

“In just a few short years, school discipline reform has become an important education policy priority in California because the stakes are very high – research has shown that even one suspension can make it five times more likely that a child will drop out of school and significantly increase the odds they will get in trouble and head into our juvenile delinquency system,” Roger Dickinson, an Assembly member from Sacramento and author of AB 420, said in a statement.

The safe money, so to speak, in California politics for years has been that voters are usually happy to approve long-term government borrowing. In some ways, it has seemed like free money.

But in the post-recession era, where debt has become a political hot potato and the incumbent governor has made debt reduction his mantra, a statewide bond measure is a bit more of a dicey proposition.

That helps explain what could soon be a real dilemma under the Capitol dome in Sacramento: Can two multibillion-dollar bond plans, one for water and one for schools, both succeed on Nov. 4? Might voters see it as a choice of one or the other? Or, angry over the idea of big debt, reject both?

Read the full story here.

Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen, vice chair of the Education Committee

After years of trying, with students’ safety hanging in the balance, the state legislature has finally passed a measure that expedites the process for dismissing teachers accused egregious behavior.

Unanimous votes of support for AB 215 in both the Senate and Assembly was not only encouraging news for children and their parents, it underscored the power of collaboration among education groups that seldom work together.

AB 215 creates a streamlined process for action against teachers accused of committing immoral acts and felonies. Last year, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a forerunner of the bill, AB 375, to the chagrin of teacher unions. Brown said it made it harder, not easier, to remove the teachers in question.

AB 215, sponsored by Joan Buchanan, a San Ramon Democrat, now awaits his signature.

Education reform advocacy group Edvoice, which opposed AB 375, and the California Teachers Association (CTA), which supported it, are two groups that often disagree on key issues, including teacher tenure, charter schools and the use of teacher evaluations. But they came together this time to draft language that everyone was able to support.

“It is rare for a bill with this much attention and historic controversy to receive unanimous support; that is unique,” Assemblywoman Kristen Olsen, a Modesto Republican and vice chair of the Assembly Education Committee, told LA School Report.

“They really negotiated the compromise that I believe became a win-win for students, parents, for teachers, for schools,” she said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a balanced proposal that will greatly improve the process, saving districts time and money and protecting kids.”

Olsen said that this kind of agreement highlights how long overdue a solution has been to protect kids in the classroom.

“The fact that we finally came to a proposal that had a variety of groups in support of it gave the legislature the comfort for everybody to support it unanimously and with enthusiasm,” she said.

Unlike AB 375, which presented a single process for all teacher dismissal cases, AB 215 focuses largely on cases of egregious misconduct. It also offers a faster dismissal process that involves a single judge as opposed to a three-person administrative panel.

“Naturally, we would want to make sure that any teachers who have committed child abuse or sexual abuse, really egregious offenses, are dismissed as quickly as possible,” Olsen said.

AB 375 was opposed by many advocacy and reform groups like Edvoice, which claimed that it made it more difficult to enforce immediate suspensions for misconduct and to amend charges if new information was uncovered during investigations.

It also limited the number of depositions and created lengthy timelines for new processes and limited the authority of the administrative law judge hearing a case to speed up the process.

“If a person has performed an egregious act, we don’t have to deal with these layers that are cumbersome when it’s clear on issues of egregiousness alone, that they should be immediately dealt with in a way that still provides an opportunity for appeal,” Bill Lucia, President and CEO of Edvoice, told LA School Report. “It clarifies that you can actually suspend someone immediately with egregious misconduct without pay.”

AB 215 also improves a school’s ability to remove ineffective teachers by streamlining the dismissal appeal process on performance issues.

“[This is] an important first step toward the goals that the Vergara v. California decision described as imperative to ensuring equal access to a quality education for all of California’s students,” Olsen said.

Under the measure, appeals that now can take up two years to be heard, will be heard in six months and in cases of egregious misconduct, the hearings would go before an administrative law judge within 60 days.

But this time frame doesn’t sit well with the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), which opposed AB 215.

“The bill does nothing to streamline the discovery process for egregious conduct dismissals, the timeline to commence an egregious conduct hearing is completely unworkable,” Naj Alikhan, the group’s spokesman, told LA School Report.

Alikhan said the group also believes the definition of “egregious conduct” is too narrow, saying, “the definition should include allegations related to certain serious and violent felonies including moral turpitude.”

However, the group believes AB 215 is a good starting point in the effort to protect students statewide.

Gov. Jerry Brown and the the California legislature reached a deal on a $108 billion budget for the 2014-2015 fiscal year.

Here, as examined by John Fensterwald of EdSource, are some of the major education components:

Proposition 98: $60.8 billion for K-12 schools and community colleges in 2014-15 through Proposition 98, the voter-approved school funding guarantee; $53.6 billion of that will go to K-12 districts. This will be $3.6 billion more than appropriated for them in 2013-14.

Local Control Funding Formula: $4.75 billion more than districts received this year. Gov. Jerry Brown had projected it would take seven years to fully fund the formula. The additional money for 2014-15, the third year implementing the formula, will bring districts more than halfway there.

Common Core: $450 million that the Legislature said is intended to help implement the new standards in math and English language arts, although districts would be able to use the money however they want. This differs from the $1.25 billion for Common Core this year, which had to be spent on materials, technology and teacher training related to the standards.

Career Technical Education: An additional $250 million in competitive one-time grants for individual and multiple districts that build partnerships with community colleges and businesses.

Early Childhood Education: Transitional Kindergarten will remain as is, but early education programs will get $264 million more, with $155 million to enable 11,500 additional low-income children to attend preschool. Parent fees for part-time preschool programs will be eliminated.

CalSTRS: Brown proposed and lawmakers agreed to a 32-year plan to eliminate the $74 billion unfunded liability for teachers’ and administrators’ pensions. Districts eventually will pay about 70 percent of the $5.35 billion in extra annual costs, with the state contributing 20 percent and teachers about 10 percent. Districts’ increases will ramp up over seven years; next year’s first installment will be $175 million.

Late payments: Late payments of state money, known as deferrals, created a hardship for many districts and grew to $9 billion during the recession. Brown has made wiping out this obligation a priority. Only $500 million in deferrals will remain after next year, and Brown has made eliminating what’s left the top priority if state revenues run higher than projected.

Read the full story here.

Gov Jerry Brown

Just when members of the Los Angeles teachers union, UTLA, thought brighter economic times for California would translate to higher salaries after seven years without a contract, the state threw them a curveball.

In recent weeks, Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature have begun debating over how to pay down teacher pension debt, which has reached $74 billion.

They have devised a formula that calls on the state and school districts — as well as teachers — to increase their contributions.

It’s a double whammy for classroom teachers because teachers will be required to increase their pension contributions, eroding whatever raise the union negotiates with the district, and the additional dollars districts spend on pension debt are dollars that can’t be spent elsewhere.

In LA Unified, the state’s largest school district, the pension funding would cost the district about $35 million in the first year, rising to over $300 million after the seven-year phase in period, according to an LA Unified analysis.

“By far,” said Edgar Zazueta, LA Unified’s chief lobbyist, “the Governor proposes that employers carry the lion share of this additional burden.

The analysis by the district finds that school districts around the state would bear the biggest burden of covering the shortfall, contributing $47 billion, or 63 percent of the total, through increased contributions over 32 years.

Over an initial seven-year period, the employer rate would increase to 19.1 percent of payroll from 8.25 percent, which includes a contribution rate increase of 1.25 percent in 2014-15.

The state share would be $20 billion, or 27 percent of the cost, over 32 years. The state would increase its contribution to 6.3 percent as a percentage of payroll over a 3-year period, from the current 3 percent, starting with a .16 percent increase in pension funding in 2014-15.

The final share, $8 billion, or 10 percent of the cost, would fall to teachers in increased contributions over 32 years. Over a three-year period, certificated employee contributions would increase to 10.25 percent of payroll from 8 percent, starting with a .15 percent increase in 2014-15.

The increase for any teacher depends upon salary, but one making, say, $75,000, would contribute an additional $1,875 over the first three years.

Gov. Jerry Brown

In his State of the State address today, Gov. Jerry Brown spent a few minutes talking about public education in California. Here’s what he had to say:

“Last year, I spoke of the principle of subsidiarity, a rather clunky word that nevertheless points to a profoundly important principle, namely that in our federal system there are separate layers of government, each with its own distinct responsibilities. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a “central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.”

 No better example of this can be found than in your enactment last year of the Local Control Funding Formula. This was a major breakthrough in the way funds are allocated to California’s schools so that our laws explicitly recognize the difficult problems faced by low-income families and those whose first language is other than English. As a result, those with less are going to receive more and that is good for all of us.

But something else is at work in this Local Control Funding Formula. Instead of prescriptive commands issued from headquarters here in Sacramento, more general goals have been established for each local school to attain, each in its own way. This puts the responsibility where it has to be: In the classroom and at the local district. With six million students, there is no way the state can micromanage teaching and learning in all the schools from El Centro to Eureka – and we should not even try!

 Last week, 324 people from across the state traveled to Sacramento to speak to the State Board of Education about the merits of this new law and the regulations which should be adopted under it.

Principals, teachers, students, parents, religious groups and lawyers, all came forward to express their views. Now that shows interest and real commitment! But their work is just beginning. Each local district now has to put into practice what the Local Control Funding Formula has made possible. That, together with new Common Core standards for math and English, will be a major challenge for teachers and local administrators. But they are the ones who can make it work and I have every confidence they will.”