San Pedro High School foster student Skye Carbajal speaks before the L.A. Unified school board in April about the Foster Youth Achievement Program. (L.A. Unified)

*Updated July 29

The Foster Youth Achievement Program has changed Skye Carbajal’s life. So the foster student left school early one day in late April to tell the L.A. Unified school board just that.

Standing at the podium during an April 23 meeting, Carbajal recounted her accomplishments since she’d joined the program two years ago: She’s attended a foster youth summit in Sacramento. Honed networking skills. Won a $20,000 scholarship for college.

“Without [my counselor], I would be without guidance,” Carbajal, who is heading into her senior year at San Pedro High School, told the board. “Without [my counselor], a year ago I would not have been able to talk to you today. I wouldn’t have the confidence to.”

Now, the five-year-old program, which focuses on foster youth school attendance, educational achievement and social-emotional well-being, is being restructured, despite vigorous opposition from foster youth advocates. The district is combining five specialized student programs together — including the Foster Youth Achievement Program and the Homeless Education Program — which officials say will streamline counseling services for L.A. Unified’s highest-need pupils by placing counselors at specific school sites, cutting down on travel time typically spent driving to schools across the district.

While district officials say intensive care for L.A. Unified’s nearly 8,700 foster youth is “not changing,” the program will no longer have its own designated counselors come August. It also remains unclear how many foster youth will stay with their previous counselor.

There are “no savings” from making these changes, district spokeswoman Barbara Jones wrote in an email on July 16. She confirmed that none of the 154 counselors across the five programs have been laid off.

The planned consolidation has sparked concerns among several advocacy groups, whose leaders have told school board members in at least three public meetings since April that the new model would bloat counselor caseloads, “dilute” services and upend current relationships between foster youth and their counselors. Such dilution was cited in a formal parent complaint filed July 11 that claims L.A. Unified and its county overseers are not ensuring that more than $1 billion a year in targeted state funding is going to high-needs students — including foster youth.

• Read more: In new legal complaint, parents say LAUSD is failing to ensure high-needs students are getting the funding they deserve

Foster youth are considered one of the most vulnerable student populations. In California, they post some of the lowest academic scores, attendance and high school graduation rates of any student group attending public schools — though those numbers have been rising at L.A. Unified. Foster youth can face challenges such as emotional trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, frequent school moves and an absence of healthy, trusting relationships.

“We’ve shared [with the district]… how impactful it has been to have this dedicated team to focus all of their expertise and all of their work for the success” of those students, Ruth Cusick, an education rights lawyer for Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that’s advocating against the change, told LA School Report. “We’re very concerned about the level of support students who are foster youth will experience under the new model.”

• Read more: The State of America’s Foster Care Students: How the Every Student Succeeds Act Is Designed to Better Understand and Support These 430,000 Kids

Explaining the new model

The district is blending five separate programs — the Foster Youth Achievement Program, Homeless Education Program, Group Home Scholars Program, Juvenile Hall/Camp Returnee Program and Attendance Improvement Program — into a single “specialized” program, Pia Escudero, executive director of L.A. Unified’s Student Health and Human Services, told LA School Report.

That means counselors across those district-wide programs will now be pooled together and placed into local school networks, where they’ll serve the cumulative needs of foster youth, homeless students and students who have gone through the juvenile justice system.

There will be 150 masters-level counselors “out in the field” serving 29,056 students as of July 25, according to district counts. There are 8,668 students in the Foster Youth Achievement Program, 19,526 in the Homeless Education Program, 811 in the Group Home Scholars Program and 1,048 in the Juvenile Hall/Camp Returnee Program, which serves students who have been released from juvenile detention centers and are on probation.

(Some students are double counted in the data if they’re enrolled in more than one of the programs. The 29,056 students is the unduplicated count. The numbers “fluctuate and are based on the current enrollment,” Jones said.)

Last year, comparatively, the Foster Youth Achievement Program had about 80 counselors assigned to schools, according to the district. The Homeless Education Program, which Escudero said serves students in various housing scenarios who don’t all require intensive levels of care, had 19 counselors with no specific student caseloads in 2018-19.

A few goals of the restructuring, Escudero said, are to “reduce duplication of services” — which can happen when a student is enrolled in various programs that all have different counselors — and to “maximize the staff relationship with students in schools.”

Previously, counselors “spent a lot of time in their cars, finding parking, traveling from school to school,” she said. “We’re going away from a model where a principal may have four or five counselors coming on campus to work with specific children, to really having this one person” attending to their needs. This streamlining, she added, will include placing one counselor with students from the same family.

These counselors will also track their assigned students’ attendance using a new data integration system. L.A. Unified continues to identify attendance as an area where improvement is critically needed. Chronic absenteeism rates have inched up in recent years, with 15.1 percent of district students missing 16 or more days of school in 2017-18. The district loses about $62 million in funding annually from chronic absenteeism, Jones said.

• Read More: With Nearly 8 Million Students Chronically Absent From School Each Year, 36 States Set Out to Tackle the Problem in New Federal Education Plans. Will It Make a Difference?

Although the programs are being combined, funding for each remains the same, Jones said. The Foster Youth Achievement Program is budgeted at about $15 million for the 2019-20 year.

Some staff, such as those working with “high-end homeless populations for emergency services,” will remain in their roles separately, Escudero said. There wasn’t a staff count available.

Advocates’ take: ‘A pretty untenable plan’

Advocates have sounded the alarm about the size of counselor caseloads under the new model.

As the Foster Youth Achievement Program merges into this larger program, the number of counselors serving foster youth at the school level is growing by 88 percent, from about 80 to 150 counselors. But the number of students being served is simultaneously swelling more than 230 percent, from nearly 8,700 foster youth to some 29,000 students across all of the programs.

The highest counselor caseload assigned as of July was 147 students, Escudero said. Estimates of the Foster Youth Achievement Program’s average caseload before the restructuring vary; advocates cited a roughly 70-student caseload in 2018-19, while a May report in The Chronicle of Social Change, citing L.A. Unified staff, put the number at 60 foster students per counselor at the high school level and 100 at the middle school level.

For advocates like Jessenia Reyes, the manager for educational equity at Advancement Project California, a central concern is a dilution of services for foster youth as counselors juggle more students and their individualized needs. “Whole child care does not happen when we reduce quality time” for students, she told the board at a June 11 meeting.

Public Counsel’s Cusick agrees. “We think it’s a pretty untenable plan to ask our counselors to serve all of these different [group] needs,” she told LA School Report.

• Read More: 200 Students, Parents & Educators Spent Two Years Thinking About How to Support the Whole Child. Here Are 6 Things They Found 

When asked about advocates’ concerns with caseloads, Escudero said it’s more complex than an average ratio. Counselors’ caseloads will reflect the level of student need within a school network, she said; a larger caseload, for example, would include many non-foster students who don’t require extensive attention. While all foster youth will continue to receive the highest-level of care available, there will be triage for the other student groups to identify the scope of their needs, she said.

Many district-identified homeless students “are doubled up with family members, some of them are living in garages and other types of housing” and don’t meet the federal definition of homeless, Escudero said. “Many of them do not need intensive services … [We’re focusing on]: Who is not coming to school? Who has had a report of not being on track to graduate?”

Still, many advocates are questioning why the district is fixing a system they don’t see as broken.

Foster youth attendance at L.A. Unified has been improving while the graduation rate is rising. Between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years alone, the percentage of foster students with 96 percent or better attendance rose from 49.3 percent to 55 percent. The graduation rate also rose, from 47.2 percent to 52.1 percent — the largest jump of any student subgroup that year.

• Read more: ESSA Says State Report Cards Must Track How Many Students in Foster Care Are Passing Their Reading & Math Tests and Graduating High School. Only 16 Do
  

Foster achievement reporting is now mandated under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015. L.A. Unified will also start producing reports that include the number of district students in foster care, how often they change schools and how they are doing academically, socially and emotionally after the 2019-20 year, thanks to a May resolution from board member Kelly Gonez.

Advocates have touted the role of “consistent” adult support in foster youth’s successes. Some pleaded at meetings this year to keep students with their current counselors.

Counselor Traci Williams addresses the board on April 23, standing next to one of her foster student’s caregivers. (L.A. Unified)

“The value in this program has to do really with connections built between counselor and student and caregiver,” Traci Williams, a Foster Youth Achievement Program counselor, told the board in April. “And without us remaining in the structure that we are currently, that relationship will likely dissolve.” Williams declined to provide further comment to LA School Report with the realignment “already in progress.”

Carbajal, who is one of Williams’ students, also spoke to the importance of these connections. “I have built a relationship with her that has helped me through so many difficult times,” she said — dealing with social workers, going to court. “Foster youth like me and so many others deserve the consistency and support that the [Foster Youth Achievement Program] offers.”

Escudero said the district is in the process of doing assignments now, and “if there’s a specific counselor that has a relationship with a specific school for a long time, we’re trying to honor those assignments.” She added that there “absolutely” will be professional development for counselors. “My hope is once [counselors] get their assignment we can dig into … providing very thorough support to children,” she said.

In an email to LA School Report, board member Gonez said her team is monitoring the restructuring — and encouraging conversations between the district and the community.

“We can and should have collaborative conversations with community stakeholders about how to best ensure our programs are responsive to the needs of students and our schools,” she said. “My office has been working closely with our District staff, as well as partner organizations, to monitor the progress of those conversations.”

*This article was updated to correct the percentage increase in counselor caseloads.

California State University, Fullerton students move in on August 23, 2018. (Mark Rightmire/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

The California State University system this week is considering a new admissions requirement for incoming freshmen — a development that’s sparked opposition from L.A. Unified, where less than half of the prospective graduates are eligible to apply under current standards.

CSU’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday will review an informal proposal to add a fourth year of “quantitative reasoning” to admissions requirements across the system’s 23 campuses. A quantitative reasoning course largely centers on problem-solving using math-based skills; a high-level math class, certain science courses or an elective with “a quantitative reasoning foundation,” such as statistics and personal finance, could all qualify, according to the proposal. Three high school math courses— Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II — are already a must for CSU admissions.

System advocates say the extra prerequisite, which wouldn’t be implemented until 2026, would ensure more students build a strong learning foundation before college and have a wider array of career opportunities. Some other public university systems, such as Arizona State and Texas State, have adopted a similar requirement.

CSU is “the people’s university, and we want to provide as many options as possible,” said Susan Holl, a mechanical engineering professor at the Sacramento campus and chair of the CSU Academic Senate committee that has proposed the change. “We’re trying to fling the doors wide, bring everyone in and say, ‘You can do this.’”

There would be exemptions in certain scenarios, the proposal states. The University of California system, which is already more selective, is not a part of the proposal.

L.A. Unified and various advocates, however, view the move as a threat to equity rather than a vehicle for opportunity. The district school board rejected the idea outright in a June 18 resolution, stating that L.A Unified does not have the teaching capacity to meet the requirement. Officials said they also fear adding another prerequisite would further restrict college access for minority students, who already face pervasive equity gaps in school.

As a state, “we haven’t made the investment [in students, schools]. And to move the goal post is something that we object to,” board member Mónica García, who authored the resolution, told board members.

In-state schools like the CSU — the state’s largest public university system — are a popular option for California students. About 1 in 6 L.A. Unified graduates enrolled there in 2018, according to third-party data provided by the district. But access isn’t universal.

● Read More: Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

Less than half of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 cohort — a projected 46 percent of more than 34,000 students— are eligible for the current CSU system, according to a district spending plan updated on June 28. A cohort refers to the number of students who entered as freshmen four years ago and should be on-track to graduate, though not all are.

The latest projection marks a drop from the 50 percent estimated in June 18 board meeting materials. If the percentage estimate holds, it would drag L.A. Unified’s progress back to 2016-17 levels. LAUSD is still above the statewide average, with about 43 percent of the Class of 2018 cohort eligible for CSU system schools.

The district declined to explain the percentage drop. It cited a pending legal complaint filed with the state education department July 11 on behalf of two parents demanding more district transparency on how more than $1 billion in state funding allocated annually for high-needs students is being spent.

● Read More: In new legal complaint, parents say LAUSD is failing to ensure high-needs students are getting the funding they deserve

Tuesday’s CSU trustees’ meeting, which will be live-streamed here starting at 10 a.m., is for discussion only. A public hearing is scheduled for Aug. 29, with a vote on the measure not expected until November. Advocacy organizations like The Education Trust-West said they’re going to keep a close watch to make sure the proposed change is fully vetted.

“What they’re proposing would be a serious and pretty substantial addition,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, Ed Trust-West’s executive director. “It’s really important to be sure the details of the proposal, and the impact it would have, are publicly discussed.”

‘I don’t know that we are necessarily prepared’

At the June 18 board meeting, then-Chief Academic Officer Frances Gibson raised doubts about the district’s capacity to respond when asked about the proposed CSU requirement.

While L.A. Unified does offer an optional fourth year of math/quantitative reasoning at all traditional high schools, “I don’t know that we are necessarily prepared” to teach a fourth year to all students, said Gibson, who stepped down from her position last month. She cited “the staffing requirements, the partnership requirements” that would be needed to “move forward elegantly.”

The district was unable to provide data before publication on how many of its 92 traditional high schools have the staffing and resources to teach all students a fourth year of math/quantitative reasoning. About 71 percent of L.A. Unified’s 56 alternative and continuation high schools do not have any students enrolled in a fourth year, according to district data.

Board member Jackie Goldberg told LA School Report a large concern for her is the acute shortage of STEM teachers statewide. “I don’t know if we have enough math teachers,” Goldberg said. “I know we’d make every effort, but that’s been a struggle for us, period, having nothing to do with a fourth year [requirement].”

L.A. Unified has “No resources identified to fund any additional costs” associated with the CSU proposal, according to a budget impact document. The district is struggling financially, losing a recent bid for a $500 million annual parcel tax and finalizing a controversial last-minute budget that sidestepped a potential county takeover.

CSU Reso Operational Impact (Text)

Considering these limitations, the proposal “seems a bit tone deaf,” now-former student board member Tyler Okeke told board members. “I think that ideally [the bar should be raised for students] … but we don’t have the resources to support that at this moment.”

Holl emphasized the six-year transition period should the proposal pass.

“What we’ve done is try to put on notice all the school districts, that we are there to help them,” she said. “We have a really long lead time.”

Holl said CSU would bear responsibility for ensuring districts were ready to meet the new standard. The system would help districts craft their curriculum and provide professional development assistance, for example. CSU “is also working to meet the ongoing need for additional teachers in STEM fields,” according to the proposal.

Even then, there would be an exemption “for any student who could not fulfill the requirement because of a lack of resources at their high school,” the proposal states. Some Career and Technical Education courses or appropriate dual enrollment courses at a local community college could also be used to meet the requirement.

Advocates like Ed Trust-West’s Arrillaga are leery of waivers, however, because it’s “an acknowledgment that there are inequities in the system” that have yet to be addressed.

“For us, it’s a really problematic and troubling response,” Arrillaga said.

Holl sees a new requirement as “180 degrees from limiting access” for students.

Part of closing the equity gap, she said, is increasing students’ access to coursework that could spark and nurture career interests. There are disparities in access as is: 65 percent of African-American students and 76 percent of Latino students coming into the CSU system have taken four or more years of math, for example, compared with 80 percent of white peers and 84 percent of Asian peers.

Credit: California State University system

“Honest and truly, I think the state of California needs more engineers. More physicians. More nurses. More math and science teachers,” said Holl, who’s taught in the CSU system since 1980. “This is something I have been pushing because I want more students to be aware of these fabulous opportunities — and the way they become aware is by taking more interesting and exciting courses.“

It’s also about preparedness for college-level courses. Nearly 70 percent of first-year CSU students who’d completed four or more years of high school math passed a quantitative reasoning course in 2017-18, compared to fewer than half of students who’d completed only three years, according to meeting materials.

There is proof of success in at least one California district: Long Beach Unified. The district implemented a mandated fourth year of quantitative reasoning six years ago, and has seen a hike in student eligibility for the CSU and UC systems from 39 percent to 56 percent.

“It was like [the saying], ‘The rising tide lifts all boats,’” Holl said. “When you raise expectations, these students are amazing.”

‘There are too many barriers’

Advocates agree that students are tenacious and rise to the challenge. But many, like Linda Vasquez of the Campaign for College Opportunity, worry that a new requirement would “erode” the gains made so far in expanding college access.

“Every time [students] meet [universities’] standards, our universities raise the bar on them,” Vasquez, the campaign’s senior public affairs director, told the board last month.

Starting with the Class of 2016, L.A. Unified’s curriculum is fully aligned with CSU and UC system admissions requirements. This means all students have to take 15 “A-G” college preparation courses — English, math, science, foreign language and other core electives — to graduate. About 51 percent of California districts similarly mandated A-G completion as of 2017, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The needle has moved incrementally as a result. In 2011, before the realignment, only 26 percent of L.A. Unified students were on track to meet CSU and UC eligibility standards. By 2016-17, 46 percent of students who entered that graduating class as freshmen and 60 percent of those who actually did graduate qualified. In 2017-18, it inched up to 47.9 percent and 61.9 percent, respectively.

It remains unclear whether progress backslid in 2018-19. District spokeswoman Shannon Haber confirmed that the 46 percent for the Class of 2019 cohort is the latest and most accurate estimate.

L.A. Unified enrollment in CSU schools has increased overall, too. About 16 percent of district graduates in 2018 went to CSU system schools, up from about 12.5 percent in 2014, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that collects data from colleges and universities. 

But it’s still far from where the district wants to be.

The district remains well below its goal of 100 percent of graduates being eligible for the CSU and UC systems by 2023. And there are still gaping disparities in college readiness across student groups, especially among foster youth, English learners and students with disabilities.

There is also a nearly 30-percentage-point difference between students who are eligible to graduate from L.A. Unified and those who are eligible for CSU and UC schools. Students must get a C or better in each course to satisfy CSU/UC system eligibility requirements — but a D is accepted to graduate from L.A. Unified.

“Most students think that they’re able to graduate from high school, and think, ‘If I’m graduating high school, I should be able to go to college,’” said Desiree Martinez, a former L.A. Unified student and associate director of organizing for Students For Education Reform LA. “Then, senior year, it’s devastating to find out that’s not the case.”

That reality is reason enough to hit pause, said Jennifer Cano, director of education programs and policy at United Way of Greater Los Angeles. United Way is a district partner in college-readiness initiatives.

“There are enough barriers to having kids emerge college and career ready, A-G ready, as is,” she said. “So until we see improvements there and a steadier pipeline in, it wouldn’t be wise.”

For Holl, it seems to boil down to people having the same end goal, but different paths for getting there.

“Change is hard for people,” she said. “It makes people fearful because what we’re proposing is a different way of creating access, I think.”

LAUSD parent Ana Carrion speaks to a reporter after the complaint was filed. (Photo: Nicole Ochi/Public Advocates)

*Updated July 23:

The California Department of Education on Monday declined to directly intervene, and sent the legal complaint to L.A. Unified and the L.A. County Office of Education to “promptly investigate.” The district and the county have until Sept. 20 to respond. See the CDE letter here.

A June 28 version of L.A. Unified’s LCAP, which included changes made without public input, is also no longer on the district’s website. A district spokesperson could not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Public Advocates spokeswoman said in an email Tuesday that the June 18 LCAP is the one that is now in effect.

Initial post:

L.A. Unified and its county overseers have failed to ensure that high-needs students are receiving the more than $1 billion annually they are due in state funding, a new legal complaint claims.

So the complaint, filed Thursday on behalf of two L.A. Unified parents, is asking the state to force the district to be more transparent in its budget and spending plans.

The Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP law firms filed the complaint with the California Department of Education. The two firms, along with ACLU of Southern California, last sued the district in 2015 for allegedly misallocating $450 million annually in funds designated for high-needs students. They won, with the resulting 2017 settlement prompting a $150 million payout over three years to 50 of the district’s highest-needs schools.

It’s unclear what impact the new complaint could have, as the state has yet to respond.

The complaint cites “fundamental” transparency concerns in particular with L.A. Unified’s 2018-19 and 2019-20 Local Control and Accountability plans.

California districts are required to submit “LCAP” plans annually that outline their goals and actions for boosting student outcomes and provide evidence that state funding is generating increased or improved services for pupils. L.A. Unified receives more than $5 billion from the state’s education funding formula each year, about $1.1 billion of which is earmarked for increasing or improving services for low-income students, English learners and foster youth.

However, the complaint claims L.A. Unified’s LCAPs are so “opaque” and “rife with fundamental errors” that they not only fail to identify how high-needs students are benefiting from this designated funding, but also “undermine basic notions of transparency and equity and thwart meaningful efforts at local engagement and accountability.”

● Read more: LAUSD approves $7.8 billion budget for next year: Here’s what it means for high-needs students, lowest-performing schools and district finances

L.A. Unified’s LCAPs “seem to be getting worse over time,” said John Affeldt, lead counsel for Public Advocates, which he called one of the most active groups in California helping districts implement the state’s funding formula. “Most districts, we see them getting better” the longer the state’s funding formula has been in effect. But in L.A., “Now we can’t even see what you’re doing. So we need you to come to the table’” and explain.

Among the accusations listed in the complaint:

● That the district submitted a revised, updated LCAP to the county on or around June 28 — 10 days after the school board approved it in tandem with the 2019-20 budget — without required public notice and dialogue. (See Exhibit 6 of the complaint filing for highlighted changes between the June 18 and June 28 versions).

● That the district’s LCAPs “bundle” information on services being provided into broad categories, “which prevent the public from seeing what specific actions the district is undertaking, how much is spent on each and whether the actions can be legally justified.”

● That the district reported $340 million in expenditures designated for high-needs students in 2017-18 that the complaint states was not explained or accounted for, and therefore might have been misappropriated.

LAUSDcomplaint (Text)

The complaint is asking the state department to declare the June 28 LCAP “invalid,” deem the June 18 LCAP “fundamentally deficient” and order L.A. Unified to “wholly revise” the LCAP as soon as possible so that it clearly identifies each service and action, their respective costs and their justifications for “properly serving high need students.”

It’s further asking the department to “order [the L.A. County Office of Education] to approve that LCAP only if it satisfies” legal standards. The county is co-cited in the complaint because it’s tasked with reviewing and approving the district’s LCAP each year.

When asked if one of the complaint’s goals was financial reparations from the district, Affeldt said that, “First and foremost, we need clarity.”

“There may be some questionable practices going on,” he said, “but we won’t know for sure until we have clarity.”

Ana Carrion, one of the parents behind the complaint (the other is Elvira Velasco), told LA School Report through a Spanish translator she and other parents were inspired to take legal action after they struggled to understand the LCAP’s contents and felt the district was failing to engage them in the process. It was especially personal because her 12-year-old son qualifies as a low-income student who receives extra funding under the state’s formula.

“We were seeing this lack of accountability, lots of money at stake, and [we] didn’t understand how the whole thing worked exactly,” said Carrion, whose son attends a school in District 1. “What I would really like to see from this complaint is equity for kids, for the kids who are of high [need] in the district. And a real transformation in the schools for them.”

● Read more: ‘Voters are tired of you’: A week after parcel tax defeat, LAUSD parents rail at district leaders during 2019-20 budget hearing

The complaint comes weeks after parent outrage with the 2019-20 LCAP and new budget boiled over at two school board meetings in June. The district’s bid for its first parcel tax also floundered last month, with many opponents citing waning public trust.

With the complaint filed, the next step will be getting the state department’s response of whether it will intervene. Affeldt said that’s normally within 10 business days of the complaint’s filing.

While a complaint like this would typically be filed first with the district and county, doing so, the complaint stated, would “be futile,” as the county failed to act on concerns expressed last year. If the state declines to step in, though, Affeldt said they would file directly with the district and county, which would then have 60 days to investigate and provide a response.

An L.A. Unified spokesperson wrote in an email Thursday that the district “received the complaint this morning, and we are currently reviewing it.” The county similarly confirmed Friday morning that it “has received the complaint and it is currently under review.”

Affeldt can’t predict the state’s actions, he said. But he’s hopeful.

“I’m confident we have a strong complaint,” he said.

Motivated by this reality, the federal government for the first time this year is requiring transparency about spending at the school level, including actual —not average — teacher salaries, in state report cards.

Specifically, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires that states include on their report cards:

The per-pupil expenditures of Federal, State and local funds, including actual personnel expenditures and actual nonpersonnel expenditures of Federal, State and local funds, disaggregated by source of funds, for each local educational agency and each school in the State for the preceding fiscal year.

This school-level spending data, from the 2017-18 school year, is required on states’ next report cards, which — based on when states published this year’s — could come out anywhere between August and January. But including this information leads to more questions than answers: So what? What happens now? If states build it, will they come? And who is “they,” anyway, when it comes to school spending data? I know I am not alone in grappling with this question over the past four years since Congress enacted ESSA and included this new school spending transparency provision. But, based on what we know about data use and report cards in general, I’ve got some ideas.

State leaders need to create a vision for why this information matters.

School spending transparency is required by federal law — but that doesn’t automatically mean it will matter to the public when it is published. Certainly members of Congress saw the value when they included the requirement, but states, along with a broad range of education stakeholders, still need to tell the public why this information is important. State leaders need to set the vision about the value of this information and the story it tells about school quality and student success. Without that context, school spending data have far too much potential to live as a compliance-driven box-checking exercise that provides little context for meaningful decision-making. Given the investments that states and districts are making to collect, report and improve the quality of the data, that would be a waste.

The information won’t be useful unless people can find it.

The spirit of the ESSA requirement is that multiple stakeholders need and deserve transparency about how school dollars are being used to support student success — and whether resources are getting to the students that need them most. By that measure, this new transparency about school-level spending is a win. But as the Data Quality Campaign’s research shows, “put information on a report card” isn’t always the same thing as transparency. It will take effort by state leaders to make sure the data are findable and easy to understand, and they should make it possible to view school spending data side by side with student outcomes.

States must figure out who their target audience is, without shutting out other stakeholders.

Who will be most interested in digging into this information is an open question. While the conversation about designing report cards has been focused on parents, there’s not as much agreement that families are the audience for the new spending data.

Maybe parents are not the primary audience for this information — I’ve heard much more discussion, and concern, about reporters and advocates. But that assumes that parents won’t care or be able to understand the information. As with any complicated data point, whether it be student growth or school spending, context, clear language and the ability to dig deeper are critical. That’s true no matter who your audience is.

Audiences need help making sense of the data.

The amount of context that states include with their school spending numbers will vary. All that federal law requires is reporting of actual, building-level teacher salaries and a breakdown of federal versus state and local dollars. States may not explain what types of expenditures (e.g., buses, districtwide counselors, textbooks) are attributed to the district rather than the school. There will also likely be flexibility in how districts make those decisions and report their expenditures to the state — so schools within one district may look slightly different than those in the next district without much actual difference in how dollars are used. Guided by the vision they developed, states will need to help people understand the “so what” of the data. That includes providing some context, for instance, questions to consider, or a little information on how to interpret the data.

State leaders, advocates and communities should take action informed by the data.

This school-level spending information is needed and has the potential to be useful, but we don’t know yet what actions will be taken once it’s out there. Much of the value of the information is understanding how spending plays out at different schools within and across districts. Right now, 19 states offer the ability to compare between schools on their report cards. But it has yet to be seen where school spending data will live among the many other student performance measures and school characteristics on these report cards. More states should consider building comparisons into their report cards; every state should find ways to make sure spending data and student data live side by side.

School spending data are incredibly valuable for informing conversations about school quality. These are conversations we should all be having because it’s important that school-level spending data, and the ability to meaningfully compare how schools are allocating resources, land with a well-deserved splash. By doing this work, state leaders are ensuring that they — and others, like advocates, parents and community members — can have much-needed conversations about equity and what students need to succeed.

Brennan McMahon Parton is director of policy and advocacy at the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit policy and advocacy organization leading the effort to ensure that educators, families and policymakers are empowered with quality information to make decisions that ensure students excel.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.  

L.A. Unified board members Jackie Goldberg and Richard Vladovic speak at the June 18 meeting. (Photo: L.A. Unified)

*Updated June 25

L.A. Unified board members passed the 2019-20 budget and accountability plan on Tuesday — but not before acknowledging that they are “unintelligible” documents that provide little insight into specific program and funding changes as the district looks to the next school year.

“None of the documents add up to anything you can count on,” board member Jackie Goldberg said, noting that she’d read “virtually every page” on three different occasions. “We need a new budget document that is useful, not only for us, but all of the public.”

The $7.8 billion operating budget and Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) —a three-year plan updated annually that outlines the district’s goals and actions for improving student outcomes — have to be adopted by July 1, per state law. Because of the looming deadline, board members said they’d approve both documents now and spend this year exploring ways to improve them. The board’s approval came one week after parents blasted district leaders for the documents’ lack of transparency.

Board member Scott Schmerelson cast the sole “no” vote on the budget.

L.A. Unified struggled to get its fiscal house in order this year, receiving threats of a possible fiscal takeover by the county because of its shaky finances. The approved budget now shows L.A. Unified operating in the black for three years — a sharp departure from a March budget update that estimated the district’s ending balance in 2021-22 would fall $749 million short of required reserve levels if new revenues, such as a hoped-for parcel tax, didn’t materialize. Voters resoundingly defeated the tax earlier this month.

‘Voters are tired of you’: A week after parcel tax defeat, LAUSD parents rail at district leaders during 2019-20 budget hearing

Before casting those votes during the marathon eight-hour session, the board also voted 4-3 to sunset the district’s contentious random student search policy by July 2020, following more than an hour of passionate testimony from parents, students and the community. Members approved a resolution as well opposing the California State University system’s recent proposal to add a fourth year of math or quantitative learning to admissions requirements. Speakers backing the resolution said CSU’s proposals would further limit college access to high-needs students.

● Read more: Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

Board member Richard Vladovic said moving forward, there should be multiple sessions scheduled during the year to parse the upcoming year’s budget. L.A. Unified should “look at the outcomes we want in the district, and then we plan backwards,” he said.

LA School Report reviewed the budget, LCAP and other sources to try and discern what’s changing or staying the same from 2018-19 to 2019-20. Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about what to expect next year for high-needs students, teacher contract promises, lowest-performing schools and parent engagement efforts.

Funding and programs for high-needs students

Some key highlights:

1. Student Equity Needs Index (SENI) 2.0.

The district budget has set aside $262 million in 2019-20 to distribute funding to schools based on their rank in L.A. Unified’s revised Student Equity Needs Index, or “SENI 2.0.” The index considers school type — elementary, middle or high school — and factors such as asthma rates and injuries from gun violence, rather than just academic performance or income levels, when deciding where to channel the most money.

Next year’s SENI 2.0 allotment marks a sizable jump from the $25 million that was appropriated using the updated index in 2018-19. It’s not necessarily new money, however: the district told KPCC last year that it was distributing more than $240 million to schools using its old equity index.

How different factors are weighted in the SENI 2.0 index. (L.A. Unified)

All district schools except early education centers and those for adult education will get funding through SENI, with schools ranking higher on the index receiving more. For example, an elementary school determined to be in the “lowest” SENI rank category could receive up to $386 extra per pupil, while a “highest” rank school could get $725 per pupil.

Breakdown of SENI funding based on school level and rank. (L.A. Unified)

The district’s LCAP confirms that no schools in 2019-20 will receive “less funding” through SENI 2.0 than they did in 2018-19. Schools next year will also have more flexibility over how they spend their SENI funds, so they can better “address locally determined needs” for their most vulnerable students, such as English learners.

2. English learners.

The district will continue to implement its Master Plan, which includes growing its dual-language programs, expanding the state Seal of Biliteracy award to the fifth and eighth grades, and “providing targeted supports for newcomers,” district spokeswoman Barbara Jones wrote in an email. L.A. Unified recently implemented a strategy to develop individualized reclassification plans for English learners, with the hope of switching them to a “Fluent English Proficient” categorization before they enter middle school.

The goal is to have 22 percent of English learners reclassify in 2019-20 — the same goal as in 2018-19. About a quarter of L.A. Unified’s roughly 486,000 students are English learners.

See which schools offer dual language programs here. New programs are marked.

New help for LAUSD’s English learners: Individualized plans seek to boost graduation and reclassification rates

3. Special education students.

It was unclear to LA School Report from the budget and LCAP how programs and services are changing for special education students. A hearing on L.A. Unified’s special education plan and budget— which increased from $994 million to $1.03 billion for 2019-20 — was one of the last items on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, and generated no board discussion. The district serves more than 60,000 special-needs students.

Jones said four new schools — Vernon City, San Antonio and Hope elementary schools and Gage Middle School — are joining a pilot program that’s testing “inclusive practices,” which “means that students with disabilities are educated with their non-disabled peers to the maximum extent possible,” she said. The program started in 2014-15 and had 50 school sites participating by 2018-19, according to the LCAP.

January’s teachers contract also called for the creation of a task force to study special education teacher caseloads, though a start date wasn’t included.

4. Foster youth.

A key service for L.A. Unified foster youth, the Foster Youth Achievement Program,” is “not changing” in 2019-20, Jones said— though some advocates say that’s not entirely true.

The program focuses on boosting foster youth’s academic performance, largely through employing foster youth counselors. Jones said “the goal for next year is to provide local, integrated, specialized support services,” and ensure “that our students in foster care continue to be served effectively and consistently.”

The district has more than 7,000 students in foster care. The 2019-20 budget allocated about $15 million toward the program— a slight bump from roughly $14.1 million in 2018-19.

However, at least six state and local advocacy groups, such as Advancement Project California and Children’s Defense Fund — California, claimed at two board meetings this month that the program is in fact being “restructured” in 2019-20 so that counselors initially dedicated to foster youth will now also serve homeless students, youth exiting the juvenile justice system and other at-risk groups at designated school sites. They said this will more than double the number of students assigned to each counselor, from about 70 students to about 150. That data came from calculating the number of foster youth versus counselors in 2018-19 and comparing it to updated caseload breakdown sheets that the district reportedly provided to counselors in May, advocates told LA School Report.

The district will “say they’re trying to do a whole-child approach that’s more integrated at the school site,” Ruth Cusick, an education rights lawyer for Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that’s also following this development, told LA School Report. “That’s why we’ve shared the unique needs of foster youth and how impactful it has been to have this dedicated team to focus all of their expertise and all of their work for the success” of those students.

● Read more: ESSA Says State Report Cards Must Track How Many Students in Foster Care Are Passing Their Reading & Math Tests and Graduating High School. Only 16 Do

5. Funding from one lawsuit ends — and another is in its last year.

The Reed Investment Schools Program is “discontinued” as of June, according to the LCAP. The program — based on a 2014 settlement — has provided 37 middle schools and high schools across the district (listed here) additional supports to improve staff retention and student outcomes, such as assistant principals, extra counselors, mentor teachers, special education support providers and “unique” professional staff development opportunities.

This staffing has cost L.A. Unified about $26.8 million annually, according to the budget.

In 2019-20, Reed schools will be “receiving SENI 2.0 funding instead of receiving staffing and professional development,” Jones said. So while those positions will no longer be mandated, school leaders will have “flexibility” to utilize that SENI funding to retain staff hired through the Reed program if they choose to do so.

Meanwhile, 50 high-needs “innovation schools” (a list can be found here) will receive their last year of mandated extra funding following a 2015 lawsuit against the district. L.A. Unified has given about $50 million a year to these schools since 2017-18 to support new and expanded programs and services for low-income, English learner and foster students. ACLU of Southern California has noted, however, that only 38 percent of the $50 million allocated in 2018-19 was used. L.A. Unified will reabsorb any money that isn’t spent by June 30, 2020.

6. Miscellaneous and districtwide.

The district is lowering the minimum student enrollment required to receive a middle school assistant principal for counseling services. In 2019-20, middle schools with 700 or more students enrolled will get that assistant principal, compared to the 800-student threshold in 2018-19. There is no change at the elementary and high school levels.

Arts programs, such as dance, general music and film, also appear to be unchanged going into 2019-20. See the programs offered at each L.A. Unified school here.

Teacher contract promises

The latest teachers contract, which was signed after the January strike and runs through 2021-22, is fully covered in the 2019-20 budget. Here are the additions expected:

● Average class sizes in grades 4 through 12 will be reduced by one student, bringing them back down to 2014-17 teachers contract levels. Average class sizes will be further reduced by an additional two students at 75 “targeted high needs” elementary schools and 15 middle schools. English and math classes in middle and high schools are also now capped at 39 students, per the contract. The cap pre-strike was 46 students, the teachers union has said.

● 150 new nurse positions. Where these nurses are placed will depend, for example, on how many students at a given school have diabetes or other “health-related issues,” Jones said. She added that campuses with athletic teams may also qualify for a school nurse based on the programs’ size.

● 41 new library positions in secondary schools. There won’t be a full-time librarian at every secondary school with a library this year, but the goal is to have one in each by the start of the 2020-21 year, Jones said.

● 17 new counselor positions. Their placements will be determined to “maintain a secondary school counseling services ratio of 500:1,” Jones said.

A list of specific school sites receiving these support staff does not appear available yet.

There are no raises scheduled for 2019-20. Under the contract, teachers received a 3 percent raise retroactive to 2017-18 and another 3 percent in 2018-19.

● Read more: With High School Counselors Badly Outnumbered, Innovative Nonprofit Steps In to Offer Smart College Advising to Low-Income Students Across the Country

● Read more: A look into the LAUSD, UTLA contract deal ending the 6-day teacher strike

Supports for lowest-performing schools

The district states in its LCAP that the following resources are being provided this summer and during the 2019-20 school year for “Comprehensive Support & Improvement (CSI)” schools — the 110 schools within L.A. Unified boundaries that were identified by the state early this year as struggling to adequately serve students.

1. Summer programs. The district is offering a four-week program that includes “focused academic intervention in English Language Arts or mathematics for academically at­-risk students in grades K­-8,” according to the LCAP. There is also a 24-day summer program for high schoolers running currently from June 19 to July 24 to “recover credits and make progress toward graduation.”

More information is available here and here.

2. Title I Intervention Program. School sites will receive per pupil funding from the federal program that benefits high-poverty schools, allowing them flexibility to focus on math, English language arts or credit recovery based on students’ individual needs.
3. Social-emotional learning. L.A. Unified advisors or staff will identify and grow “age-appropriate” programs that —among other things — help students manage their emotions, establish positive relationships and set goals.

Of the 110 identified schools, 88 are district schools and 22 are charters. You can search for your school here or within this EdSource database.

For the first time in six years, California names its lowest-performing schools — & here are the 110 district and charter schools in LAUSD that require intervention

Parent engagement efforts

Responding to a question about parent frustration over the current budget and LCAP, Jones said the district has “committed to … a more transparent process for the next school year.” She added later that Superintendent Beutner plans to meet with central parent committees such as the District English Learner Advisory Committee and Parent Advisory Committee quarterly “at a minimum” in 2019-20.

He’s met with them three times since becoming superintendent in May 2018, she noted.

For parents interested in getting more involved, 2019-20 also marks the first full year that parents can volunteer at a school without paying a $56 fee for fingerprinting and background checks after the board voted to waive the fee last November. More information available here.

● Read more: LAUSD ends fees for parent volunteers

*This article was updated on June 24 to clarify that while next year’s SENI 2.0 allotment marks a sizable jump from the $25 million appropriated in 2018-19, the district had already been giving comparable funding to schools using its old equity index. Scott Schmerelson’s “no” vote was also added.

*This article was updated on June 25 to add more information on advocates’ concerns about the Foster Youth Achievement Program, a quote from Public Counsel’s Ruth Cusick and the annual cost of the Reed Investment Schools Program.

Parent Luz Maria Montoya addresses the L.A. Unified school board on Tuesday. (L.A. Unified)

*Updated June 17

Parents blasted L.A. Unified officials at a school board hearing this week — one even bursting into tears — offering an angry glimpse into the fractured trust between the community and the district just one week after voters overwhelmingly rejected a new parcel tax.

Many of the more than 20 speakers at Tuesday’s four-hour session expressed ongoing frustration with the ambiguity of L.A. Unified’s $7.8 billion operating budget and Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), a three-year plan updated annually that outlines the district’s goals and actions for improving student outcomes. Tuesday’s meeting was the first since L.A. Unified’s bid for a $500 million-a-year “Measure EE” parcel tax failed at the polls, and was also the first time the finalized 2019-20 budget and the LCAP were formally presented to the public. The board will vote on both next Tuesday.

“All of the voters are tired of you,” parent Luz Maria Montoya said in Spanish. “We don’t know what work you are doing.”

Some parents said district documents don’t clearly explain changes to student programs and services for next year. Others added that there isn’t transparency or robust “monitoring” of how L.A. Unified’s expenditures, such as professional development and training for teachers and principals, yield actual results for students. Montoya, for example, called district services for English learners and special education students “an embarrassment.” A few also accused L.A. Unified officials and principals of keeping parents out of budget and policy discussions — treating them “as sheeps, as herds,” as one speaker said— rather than welcoming them to the table as a partner.

“We have a lot of barriers” to knowing what’s going on, said parent María Daisy Ortíz, who addressed the board in Spanish. “We want to work with you, not against you. But respect us. … No one returns the wasted time to our children.”

Parent María Daisy Ortíz waves around district documents during Tuesday’s school board hearing on the budget and LCAP.

Ortíz had brought parts of the 112-page LCAP plan with her, noting that much of it feels like a “copy and paste” job. She waved the papers in the air, her voice rising. “Please don’t deceive us with false data that are doctored, because truly, that is why Measure EE did not pass,” she said.

Juanita Garcia, a grandmother of three children with special needs, broke into tears when recounting the difficulty she’s had getting help and answers from the district after one of them was injured in January. “Up to today I have not received a report,” she said in Spanish. “Is that what we call accountability and responsibility?”

District 4 Board Member Nick Melvoin addressed the lack of public trust at Tuesday’s meeting, peppering in some concerns of his own.

“I’ve asked ad nauseum for a document showing changes [to programs or investments] and have not received anything for months,” Melvoin said. “We’re not showing how this budget reflects our shared values or strategies for improving outcomes.”

Melvoin also acknowledged Tuesday that he didn’t think the budget presentation helped quell ongoing skepticism of “how we can balance our budget every year and yet cry poverty.” Melvoin’s comment was underscored by the 2019-20 budget showing the district operating in the black for the next three years despite ongoing threats beginning late last summer that deficit spending could force a county fiscal takeover if L.A. Unified began dipping into mandated reserves.

In addition to the frustrated comments of parents during the public hearing, two district-wide parent advisory groups — the District English Learner Advisory Committee and Parent Advisory Committee — offered more formal feedback to the board on the LCAP’s six goals. They are: 100 percent graduation, proficiency for all, 100 percent attendance, parent, community and student engagement, ensuring school safety and basic services.

Some of the key suggestions included:

● Having a strategic plan for how English learners will catch up on instruction time lost during January’s six-day teacher strike.

● More counselor focus on A-G requirements, which students need to meet to be eligible to apply to the state’s public four-year universities.

Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

● Attendance incentives that celebrate not only students with the highest attendance, but those who are “most improved.” “The kids at the end of the [attendance] spectrum, we really need to boost them up,” Parent Advisory Committee chair Paul Robak said.

● Making parent workshops accessible via Skype to boost access.

Superintendent Austin Beutner agreed with parents Tuesday that, “We have to become better program evaluators … focused on what the students’ achievement is in the schools.” His office sent out a statement during the meeting calling for “a new approach” to the LCAP.

In response to a question from LA School Report on why the parent committee presentations and public comment were scheduled only a week before the budget vote, a district spokeswoman said in an email that the two parent advisory committees held 11 total meetings “from January to June, and comments from those meetings were shared with the Superintendent a month ago. Feedback from [both] was incorporated in the LCAP, specifically the continuation of desired programs and the increase in school site autonomy and staffing.”

While parents have voiced concerns about transparency, accountability and parent engagement for years, the 2019 teacher strike and resounding parcel tax defeat could signal that the district and the board need to pay closer attention to stakeholders’ concerns as they campaign for more investment in the schools. The parcel tax’s demise, as observers have noted, was a reminder that the outpouring of support during January’s teacher strike is not unconditional — especially when it comes to money.

Los Angeles voters roundly defeat parcel tax, leaving LAUSD on shaky financial footing

Even without the tax revenue, the latest budget shows sufficient revenues for the next three years. That’s a sharp departure from a March budget update that projected the district’s ending balance would fall $749 million short of required reserve levels by 2021-22 if voters didn’t approve the tax. The district now estimates having a $10.5 million surplus in 2022. School officials said they managed that swing in their projections without the parcel tax money after finalizing some health care savings, receiving a state waiver that excuses L.A. Unified from paying penalties for its administrator-teacher ratio and enacting other budget realignments.

By projecting that it won’t dip into its mandated reserve in the next three years, L.A. Unified no longer appears to be under direct threat of a county takeover. Fiscal experts installed in January by the county Office of Education will stay with the district in an advisory-only role until at least December, Chief Financial Officer Scott Price told the board Tuesday.

Chief Financial Officer Scott Price presents the 2019-20 budget to the board.

But it’s not an all-clear. L.A. Unified still projects it will continue spending about $500 million more a year than it takes in. On top of signing a teacher contract in January that it can’t fully afford, it also faces growing pension contribution costs and declining enrollment — an estimated 14,656 fewer students next year — that lowers its state funding.

Down the line, upcoming health care and labor contracts could increase spending and push 2021-22 budget projections back into the red, a district spokeswoman confirmed in an email to LA School Report Wednesday.

At Tuesday’s meeting, President Mónica García said she “loved” the idea of “a weekly or monthly budget conversation so that more people understand the full picture.” Newly elected member Jackie Goldberg also suggested compiling public feedback on different parts of the budget in the months leading up to the final version.

When Goldberg served on the board three decades ago, members would “pick a different topic [within the budget] each month in March, April and May and invite the public — all our labor partners, everybody — to come and say, ‘What you’re doing with the budget is this,’ or, ‘We’d rather you do that,’” Goldberg said. “That helped encourage people to feel like there was much more transparency.”

Speaker Juan Godinez hopes any progress forward will be sincere.

“If we are partners, let’s have parent engagement because the district wants it,” he said. “Not because a law tells you to have it.”

This story was updated on June 17 to correct the misspelling of Nick Melvoin’s name.

Parents at a computer station at San Fernando High School. (Photo: LAUSD Facebook page)

*Updated April 9

L.A. Unified’s newest way to share information about how students and their schools are performing is coming up short for parents who find the online site “very frustrating and disappointing.”

Last fall, the district launched its Open Data Portal, a school accountability site with data about academic performance, graduation and college-going rates, enrollment, demographics and attendance. Advocates and parents applauded the transparency effort but also expected it would evolve.

At a school board meeting last month, the district unveiled its first update to the site: the addition of the Open Data Catalog. The catalog offers access to 19 complete sets of records and downloadable data on individual schools and the district as a whole in six topics: academic performance, enrollment, attendance, budget and finance, school climate and facilities projects.

• Read more: Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

But parents who spoke at the March 26 meeting were frustrated that the district had not acted on their recommendations for how to make the site easier to use and instead added data intended for researchers and not the general community.

“The user-friendliness of the portal left much to be desired then and still does,” Paul Robak, who serves on two of the district’s three parent committees (Community Advisory and Parent Advisory committees), and spoke at the board meeting, said in an interview. “I’m not quite sure why because not only do they have a full IT department but they pay thousands, if not millions, to consultants to assist in developing such things. I’m very surprised and disappointed to see that after all that time and effort, and money spent, we’re still wondering, ‘Why is it so difficult to navigate this?’”

Parents also noted that the most recent data about schools are nearly two years old, and there is only limited information about the district’s choice programs, including magnets and dual-language programs. To compare those, parents have to go to another site, Explore LAUSD, a school search tool that also launched last September. Independent charter schools are also not included.

“You can only see data by campus but not by each program,” said Evelyn Alemán, whose daughter attends Grover Cleveland Charter High School in the San Fernando Valley. “My daughter’s magnet program is one of the best in the whole district, but you cannot see that information there. I think parents should have easy access to that information so they can make well-informed decisions on what school is best for their kids.”

Robak, who has a seventh-grader at a gifted magnet and a high school senior, said he and other parents of the advisory committees were presented with an early version of the site, but their recommendations weren’t addressed in either last fall’s launch or this spring’s update that is meant for researchers.

“The district is always developing something. They never quite finish. And before they finish one thing, they sort of let that go and try something else — what I call the flavor of the month,” he said. “It’s very concerning.”

He added that “it’s nice to have some data available without having to file a Public Records Act Request to get it,” but he doesn’t think it is an effective tool for parents. “On the one hand, I want to tell parents at my school, ‘Hey, there’s this great Open Data Portal you can go to, it’s really great,’ but then hearing parents share their negative feedback, what can I say to that? I’m trying to support the district’s initiatives as much as I can. … It’s just very frustrating and disappointing to me.”

Yolie Flores, a former District 5 board member, said the portal needs to be more parent-friendly and parents need help navigating it.

“We don’t engage and equip parents to be able to understand [student performance] data” so they can “keep their kids on track,” Flores said.

And “it can’t just be a digital portal. A lot of our families don’t have access to the internet, they may not have computers at home. We know they have cell phones. And if they haven’t been walked through what these numbers mean, then they will be meaningless. And I predict that a lot of our families don’t have the experience reading these kinds of data charts to discern, ‘What does this mean for my kid? And what do I do with this?’”

The Open Data project is the district’s response to the frustration many parents experienced using the state’s new accountability tool, the California School Dashboard, which since its launch in the spring of 2017 has been criticized for not being parent-friendly.

The district’s goal with the Open Data Portal was to compile information from different sources, including state data, in one site so parents can find everything they need to compare schools. It was also meant to be “a change agent” that “shines a light on our perennially under-performing schools,” board Vice President Nick Melvoin, who co-authored the Open Data resolution, said in January last year when it was approved.

That transparency is even more important this spring, he said, as the district is trying to convince Los Angeles taxpayers to support its parcel tax on the June ballot.

“I think it’s important being transparent to build public trust, especially in a time when we’re going after the voters and taxpayers asking for more resources that are needed, but we need to show what we do with our existing ones,” said Melvoin in an interview after the data catalog was presented to the board.

Measure EE, which the school board last month approved placing on the June 4 ballot, would authorize a parcel tax for L.A. residents living within the school district boundaries. The district is hoping it will raise $500 million a year in revenue.

“I have been encouraging people if they don’t find what they’re looking for to request it through the portal so we can have a sense of who’s using it,” Melvoin said. “We’re always engaging with parents to find out what’s useful and how they engage with it.”

Melvoin said Open Data sets “a policy for transparency” and for continual improvement toward having one hub for parents to choose and compare schools, all under one unified enrollment website which is currently linked to the Open Data dashboard and catalog. It eventually can also be linked to a new school assessment framework, similar to a report card, that will allow parents to more easily compare schools as well as select the measures by which to evaluate them.

Melvoin noted that this School Performance Framework is still in development, and “its purpose is accountability: parents, school leaders and other stakeholders should be able to understand and compare how well schools are helping students reach their academic potential by looking at multiple factors, including academics, socio-emotional and school climate.”

He said the School Performance Framework “will become a part of Unified Enrollment’s Find a School feature. It will ultimately be a tool that parents can use to compare schools and find the best option for their children.”

“The goal of Open Data,” he said, “is to increase the transparency of district information by sharing data sets with researchers and providing infographics to understand data for non-researchers. Once the School Performance Framework is up and running, some of its data may also be on the Open Data site as well.”

The framework was established by a resolution sponsored by board member Kelly Gonez and is being developed by a group that includes school leaders, labor partners, parents, advocates and district staff, Gonez said in an email. The group is working out “the metrics, potential configurations, and weighting that will be used to evaluate schools’ performance. District staff are now working to pressure-test the model to ensure it provides an accurate look at our schools – both their overall achievement, student growth and socioemotional factors,” Gonez said. “They will be updating the workgroup and seeking additional feedback from key stakeholders, ahead of a public launch this fall.”

Katie Braude, co-founder and executive director of the parent advocacy group Speak UP, is a member of that working group and said the district is using the CORE framework — a collaborative of school districts in California that has developed data analysis tools about how schools are performing — as a reference in the development of the school performance framework. But she thinks there should be more accountability attached to it.

“It’s one thing to let parents and families know how well schools are doing so they can make choices. It’s another thing to identify struggling schools and say, ‘This is what we’re doing about them.’ And that’s the piece we haven’t heard about.”

Braude called the Open Data Portal “such an important big step forward that they’re actually sharing data. I think some of it works quite well. The one area that I’m hoping they would improve is the way they present budget information. That’s one of the biggest red flags for us.

“It’s still difficult to get full transparency on budget information, but I think there are ways it can be presented in a way that parents could much more easily understand where the funds are going,” Braude added. “I think it could be presented in a way that actually collapses the expenditure categories into something that is meaningful for parents. I think if we could also tell how much money is going to each school, that would be extremely helpful.”

Oscar Lafarga, executive director of the district’s Office of Data and Accountability, who also spoke to the board during the presentation of the data catalog, said the district is working to align the current LCAP scorecard into the Open Data Dashboard.

The Local Control Accountability Plan district’s scorecard includes information on student outcomes as required by state law — the Local Control Funding Formula — which allows schools to receive additional funding for highest-needs student groups such as English learners and low-income students.

Lafarga also said the district will inform parents about the newest addition of the Open Data Catalog portal the same way it did with the launch of the district’s dashboard: by contacting the local districts directly, school administrators, parent centers and through the district’s parent committees. He said there is an Open Data Hotline that’s also in Spanish: call (213) 481-3300, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“We’re exploring working with the city and other third parties, and we’re starting to outreach community parent advisory groups to find out what information they want to see in this resource,” he said.

How to use the Open Data Dashboard website:

When visiting the Open Data portal by clicking here, you will see two choices: 1) Open Data Dashboard and 2) Open Data Catalog. Click on the Dashboard, then at the top of the page, select from these topics: Student Demographics, Attendance, Student Outcomes, College & Career Readiness and College Persistence.

To find your school, scroll down below the graphics to “Schools List,” then type in the search field the name of the school. The information about that school will be presented in one single row. In the upper right-hand corner above that row, you will find two options: “Schools List” and “Schools List All Indicators.” Click on the latter one to see all “Student Outcomes” available.

To find out more about the school, click on the colored “Unified Enrollment” logo to the right of the school’s name, which will take you to that school’s site on Explore LAUSD.

*This article was updated to specify the district committees on which Paul Robak serves as a member and to add details from Melvoin about the School Performance Framework.

Less than half of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 are eligible for the state’s public universities, the latest district projections show.

As of March, 49 percent of the district’s 34,734 prospective graduates are on track to pass all of their “A-G” college preparation courses with Cs or better. This means that less than half of the class currently has the grades to qualify for the University of California and California State University school systems. These in-state schools are a popular option for graduates, especially as about 4 in 5 L.A. Unified students are minorities from low-income families — some first-time college-goers.

“I have very high expectations for where the district and where our students should go … so no, [these rates] don’t meet my expectations for what our kids are capable of,” said board Vice President Nick Melvoin, who amended last year’s “Close the Gap by 2023” resolution to require the district to start reporting students’ eligibility for state colleges in addition to the standard graduation rate.

• Read more: 86% of L.A. charter school graduates are eligible for state universities — two dozen points higher than LAUSD grads. Here’s how varying data and school policies complicate comparisons.

There are 15 A-G courses in all district high schools, including English, math, science, foreign language and other core electives. Students need to get Ds or better in those courses to graduate, and Cs or better to be eligible for the US/CSU systems. L.A. Unified’s Class of 2016 was the first cohort that had to complete all of those courses in order to earn a high school diploma.

The percentage of students meeting the state’s public university requirements has only slightly ticked up since then. About 46.1 percent of the Class of 2017 and 47.9 percent of the Class of 2018 got Cs or better. This data account for all prospective graduates in a given year — not just those who graduated — and include the district’s affiliated charter schools but not independent charters.

The Class of 2019 projections also reflect a continuing trend: a near-30 point difference in who meets graduation requirements versus those who meet state college eligibility standards. About 78 percent of that class’s students are on track to graduate with Ds or better, but only 49 percent are anticipating Cs or better. That means 29 percent could receive a diploma come June while simultaneously failing to qualify for UC and CSU schools. (Not to mention the 22 percent who currently aren’t on track to graduate.)

When only graduates are factored in, the percentage of those who got at least a C is notably higher: 60 percent in 2016-17 and 61.9 percent in 2017-18. This is because the students with the lowest grades — those who didn’t graduate — are not included in the count.

To confront the low rates, the district set a goal last year that 100 percent of high school graduates will be eligible to apply to a California four-year university by 2023. On top of offering credit recovery opportunities — there’s a session running from March to May, including during spring break, that’s open to students who have failed a class — L.A. Unified is also expanding its data transparency and access districtwide to college tests like the SAT. But early intervention efforts, parent engagement and staff’s own expectations for student achievement still continue to lag, advocates say.

“For kids to succeed — in A-G, graduation, all of these pieces — it starts earlier; we have to develop the pipeline, we have to have parents be part of this,” said Yolie Flores, a former school board member who is now chief program officer at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. “You can’t turn to another issue, and another issue, and not keep pushing.”

‘Better but unacceptable’

Flores remembers a presentation on A-G courses in 2011 that almost brought her to tears.

It was more than five years since scores of students, parents and community members blasted the district for how their schools — many attended by minority and low-income students — lacked the high expectations and access to A-G courses that more affluent neighborhoods had. An “A-G for All” resolution passed soon after in 2005, laying the groundwork for full districtwide access to these courses starting with the Class of 2016.

During one of Flores’s last meetings in office, the school board received a progress update: Only 26 percent of students were on track for meeting A-G requirements.

Flores was “devastated.”

“What came to mind was all of the work from the community, all of the advocacy and just blood, sweat and tears that had been spent organizing and finally getting this A-G resolution passed,” she said. “And we had made such little progress. I remember turning to my staff and saying, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt like crying in public like I do right now.’”

Looking at more recent data, Flores says the rates are “significantly better. But unacceptable.”

District officials and advocates offered numerous reasons why the percentages are still low. One is the caveat that L.A. Unified students can still graduate if they get Ds in their A-G courses, even though Cs are required for the UC/CSU systems. Graduation, therefore, doesn’t necessarily guarantee a college education or viable career choice.

The initial plan was to require students to pass their A-G courses with a C in order to get a diploma. But the D-or-better standard prevailed under the logic that “it’s not fair to kids to go from one year [having] no A-G courses, and for the next year, ‘If you don’t get a C, you’re not graduating,'” Melvoin said. He added that quickly changing the graduation requirement to passing with Cs would likely force more students into taking make-up courses. In 2015-16 alone, 42 percent of graduates had retaken a class they had failed or needed some other kind of credit recovery to graduate.

A C in itself still isn’t even always enough, as nonprofit organization Innovate Public Schools pointed out in a tweet. “You need to do even more [than getting a passing grade] to be ready for college and to be able to get into a more selective school,” the tweet reads.

Are you familiar with the A-G requirements? Completing these courses are critical to ensuring your child is college ready. pic.twitter.com/fzQLAO0NZx

— Innovate Public Schools (@InnovateSchools) January 11, 2019

So a D requirement effectively “does nothing for kids,” Flores said. “Kids try to get into schools, and they’re so behind.”

Melvoin cited underfunding and “systemic poverty” as other factors. (California’s schools rank 41st in the nation for per-pupil spending). And he added that L.A. Unified is still playing catch-up after decades of not holding all student groups to the same standards.

Disparities in college preparedness across student groups are stark. For the Class of 2018 — not including any charters — 46.3 percent of Latino students, 16.6 percent of foster youth and 21.3 percent of English language learners were eligible for the state’s public universities, according to state data.

Jennifer Cano, who works for United Way of Greater Los Angeles, has heard stories firsthand from students in the organization’s Young Civic Leaders Program. “They have teachers who are champions and teachers who are obstacles,” said Cano, director of education programs and policy. “Some who have even said to them, ‘Well, you’re not going to amount to anything,’ or, ‘College is not for you’. Or counselors [say it].”

Flores also spoke to the damage of low student expectations, which to her trumps the “poverty” argument.

“Yes, we have to fix [poverty] because that makes things harder, but that’s not an excuse,” she said. “We have to stop blaming poverty and ZIP codes. We have to start with high expectations.”

Moving toward change

L.A. Unified’s progress is moving “not nearly rapidly enough,” Melvoin acknowledges. But he cited increased transparency as one success, now that both sets of grad rates are reported. Last year’s launch of the Open Data Portal, which Melvoin spearheaded, is also getting more data to the public, though there’s still more work to be done to make that data more parent-friendly.

Transparency is important as L.A. Unified vies for new revenues, he said.

“Especially as we’re talking about the parcel tax, we want to make sure that we’re transparent,” Melvoin said. The parcel tax on the June ballot would raise about $500 million annually for L.A. Unified schools, costing $240 a year for an owner of a 1,500-square-foot home, for example.

Access to testing is also expanding. Last month was the first time L.A. Unified paid to have all district juniors take the SAT in school — a reported $1.2 million cost, according to the L.A. Times. This district-wide offering came after Local District South’s 29 high schools piloted a free testing day last year that nearly doubled the percentage of its students who took the test.

All traditional high schools provide opportunities for Advanced Placement courses as well, the district confirmed. Although, “based on the size of the school and student interest, some schools offer more AP courses than others,” a district spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Here are some other efforts to boost A-G pass rates that are being pursued or suggested:

● Credit recovery courses. District students can retake a class they failed during the regular school day. There are also Saturday sessions — offered through the Division of Adult and Career Education — that are running from March through the end of May, as well as every week day during spring break, the spokeswoman confirmed. About 800 high school students are currently enrolled.

● Getting to a C graduation requirement over time. “Not immediately,” Melvoin said, “but in four or five years so that it’s a warning sign to eighth- and ninth-graders that, ‘Hey, you’re going to need to do this in order to graduate.’”

His office confirmed that there are no related resolutions scheduled at this time.

● Replicating good practices of other schools. About 87 percent of 2018 graduates attending 72 independent charters earned Cs or better in their A-G courses — a rate more than 25 percent above their traditional school peers, according to data provided by the California Charter Schools Association.

Independent charter schools have the freedom to operate differently than traditional schools, however: They can require students to earn Cs to graduate, they can have more counselors and lower class sizes, and they have to submit detailed academic five-year plans in order to be authorized, which serve as roadmaps.

“I’m encouraging the district to look at our schools, including our charters … figuring out what they’re doing and trying to replicate those practices, which the district doesn’t do nearly enough,” Melvoin said.

● Early intervention. Cano said a barrier to success with A-G courses is when there isn’t “access to the forward-thinking concentration” on academics across all grades.

“There may be bits and spurts of it right from the early childhood. You may have some really wonderful elementary teachers who are doing the best they can with the resources, and parents who are informed,” she said. “Then middle school gets very complex; parents don’t necessarily know how to navigate for their students in middle school. And there begins separation, specifically in [English Language Arts] and math. So by the time someone emerges from eighth grade, they’re in the game or they’re not.”

There are college and career coaches assigned to all Title I middle schools, with “a focus on students who display ‘early-warning indicators,’ such as low or inconsistent attendance, challenging behavior as evidenced in discipline reports, and low achievement in math and/or [English],” the spokeswoman wrote in an email. The goal is strengthen these students’ literacy skills and get them to that C or better college standard.

There are 108 such coaches for the 2018-19 school year. The ratio is 790: 1 for schools with predominantly minority students, and 890: 1 for schools with more diversified enrollment.

The district is also piloting “Eighth Grade PASS Intervention Curriculum” for English and math that’s “designed to support students who have failed the Fall Semester in Math or [English], or both,” the spokeswoman wrote. “The courses build academic proficiency, mastery of skills and standards, and readiness for the transition to A-G courses.” Teacher training starts next month.

● More parent engagement. “There is a need to actually understand what parents do know” about A-G rates and college eligibility “and inform them of what the reality is,” Cano said. “So then you have parents who want to connect with counselors, who are trying to navigate it for themselves. … You’re also wanting to encourage them to get involved with other parents — because it’s the multiplicity of voices that will result in a structural change.”

● More local autonomy. Melvoin said putting more resources into the school sites themselves and allowing principals to decide, “Do I want a library aide or do I want a math coach? What’s going to get us closer to that 100 percent college readiness?” could create a system that better caters to a school’s personalized needs.

All of those things together will hopefully continue to move the needle, Melvoin said.

“It’s not something the district was going to be able to fix overnight,” he said. “But we have to confront deficiencies where they are and hold everyone to a higher standard.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article attributed independent charter data to an entire cohort. The data were referring to graduates specifically. This article has been updated to reflect the change.

*Updated Feb. 5

For the first time in six years, California has released the names of its lowest-performing schools.

The 780 schools are in the bottom 5 percent of public K-12 schools as measured by the state’s new accountability tool, the California School Dashboard, and require “comprehensive school improvement.”

The state identified a total of 1,640 schools that need comprehensive or targeted assistance because they are struggling to adequately serve students. They represent 16.5 percent of all California public schools.

L.A. Unified has 110 schools that require assistance; 56 of those are in the bottom 5 percent of schools in L.A. Unified.

The names of the schools can be found in spreadsheets included with California Department of Education letters sent last Thursday to district superintendents. It is the first time the state has identified its lowest-performing schools since the old API scores that measured student achievement were discontinued in 2013.

The federal law known as ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act, requires that states identify the bottom 5 percent of schools — the lowest-performing schools — and additionally identify schools with one or more groups of students whose performance meets the criteria for “lowest performing.” Schools that have been flagged for targeted support won’t be eligible for that support until the 2020-21 school year.

“The state was really quiet in releasing this list of schools and there are no clear guidelines of how parents are supposed to be engaged in the process of improving those schools,” said  Carrie Hahnel, co-executive director of the state advocacy organization EdTrust-West. “For parents who have children in one of those schools, I’d like to know when they will be notified, will they be invited to share ideas about how to improve the school, how to get the school to a better place? Those things are unclear at this point.”

She said school administrators have been notified that their schools are on the list, but she is concerned if parents “would have easy access to this information.”

“We are glad to see that aspect of federal law take shape here in California. But data doesn’t close opportunity gaps. People have to do that, so we now need people to take action.”

This is a breakdown by the California Department of Education of the state’s lowest-performing schools:

• A total of 1,640 schools were identified for assistance, representing 16.5 percent of all California public schools
• 300 of these schools are identified for having a graduation rate under 67 percent. Of these, 223 are alternative schools, such as court schools, community day schools and continuation schools
• 481 of these schools are identified for overall low performance
• 859 of these schools are identified for low student group performance
• Of the 1,640 schools identified for assistance, 1,471 are non-charters and 169 — or 11.5 percent — are charters
• Of the non-charter schools, 81.3 percent are located within districts and/or county offices of education that are already receiving assistance under California’s state system of support.

LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS

Of the 110 schools identified for improvement in Los Angeles Unified, 88 are district schools, serving about 44,200 students, according to a district spokeswoman. The other 22 — or 20 percent — are independent charters.

“These identified schools will receive supplemental supports to meet the needs and accelerate achievement for students,” the district spokeswoman said by email. “Additional resources will be allocated to align with the schools’ identified need.”

Of the 110 L.A. schools, Hahnel said, at least two dozen need comprehensive support. “That means overall these schools are underserving students severely.”

Hahnel noted that as the state’s largest school district, L.A. Unified has the highest number of schools on the list, but “there are other school districts that have a larger proportion of schools on the list.”

“But still, 110 schools that need additional support is a lot of schools. And I would imagine that overwhelmingly these schools serve students of color and low income,” she said. “These are the schools that are really struggling in the California School Dashboard’s indicators.”

Seth Litt, executive director of Parent Revolution, an L.A.-based parent advocacy group, said he was hoping the state would have done a much better job providing information that would be “accurate, comprehensive and actionable.” He believes the way it was released makes it hard to access for districts and the public in general.

The lists must be accessed through the state Department of Education’s website in the specialized programs section; click the first link in the database section to download the spreadsheet with the list of schools. Then the information can be filtered by district or county.

Here is the list of the 110 schools in L.A. Unified that require support:

LA Spreadsheet (Text)

Litt also said it was very disappointing that the list includes opportunity schools, which offer students personalized pathways to graduation and provide alternatives to the traditional school setting, as well as special education schools. When these schools are included, it means “we get a much smaller list of standard elementary, middle and high schools on the comprehensive support list,” he said. “If you see that list, maybe half of the high schools on that list are opportunity high schools.”

Of the 110 schools in L.A., 22 are district high schools and six are charter high schools.

Litt said because the list does not factor in student growth, it “does not provide an accurate and sufficient window” and L.A. Unified should not limit its school improvement efforts to just those schools.

“It would be disappointing if LAUSD would come up with a plan for just of the lowest 5 percent of schools and then to think that it is a sufficient plan to improve student outcomes in L.A.,” Litt said. “We expect the district to do a whole lot more, with a much more comprehensive approach for all the schools in the district.”

Last year, Parent Revolution supported a group of parents who demanded the district develop improvement plans for low-performing schools. It also released a report showing that 234 L.A. Unified schools fell in the bottom two levels — orange or red — for both English and math on the dashboard and that many of the existing school improvement plans had been approved by the school board despite being incomplete. They also showed that there was little district oversight of school improvement plans.

• Read more: Lots of talk but little action to help the lowest-performing schools in Los Angeles and California

Hahnel said there’s a big concern that no new improvement plans will be developed for the schools beyond the state-required Local Control Accountability Plans.

Hahnel explained that currently school districts are only required to release their plans for improving student achievement during the LCAP process each spring. “I understand there isn’t additional planning oversight that’s put on top of that. That’s something that I’d like to press harder at the state level and I think parents should press on their school districts and find out what additional plan is going to happen,” she said.

“There are a lot of questions whether any real accountability and oversight are going to happen, even if new plans are going to be developed in the first place.”

She said federal law does require that the state review and approve the improvement plans for schools on the list. “I seriously question whether the state has the capacity and the ability to review 780 improvement plans,” she said. “We think the state will push that to the counties through the LCAP process, and that’s already a heavily burdened process.”

And that would make it even harder on parents, she said.

“In this era of local control, there’s so much autonomy and fewer requirements that I think it is very difficult for parents to understand their options or how to engage.”

*This article has been updated to correct the number of state schools identified for comprehensive and targeted assistance, and to add more state data.

The California School Dashboard is a state-run platform that rates districts, schools and student groups on indicators such as test scores and student suspensions — and, as of this month, chronic absenteeism and college/career readiness — on a scale of five colors: red (the worst) to blue (the best). The dashboard, which replaced the abandoned Academic Performance Index, first debuted in March 2017 as part of the state’s accountability system under new federal education law. It drew criticism nationwide, however, for its complicated design and poor functionality, prompting Gov. Jerry Brown to pump $300,000 into a dashboard facelift.

While the new version is more visually appealing and “an improvement,” advocates say it still falls short in presenting student data in a way that’s meaningful for parents.

The updated dashboard does not:

1. Flag which schools and districts the state has identified as the lowest-performing.
2. Allow users to compare schools’ and districts’ performances to one another.
3. Clearly explain how colors for each category are determined.

Sharing “clear information” with families is an important tool for helping parents find the right schools for their kids, Parent Revolution executive director Seth Litt told LA School Report. “It’s a huge missed opportunity that we are once again failing to do that.”

What’s new

The 2.0 version is touted as more user-friendly than its predecessor. It’s viewable on mobile devices, uses a gauge instead of a pie graphic to visualize student performance, generates printable PDFs and keeps more data on single pages, allowing users to scroll rather than click through multiple links. It is scheduled to be fully translatable in Spanish by early January, relying on experienced translators versus the often-inaccurate web translating tools the platform used previously.

Example of the old California School Dashboard design (top) versus the updated design (bottom). The updated design’s data are listed once you scroll down the page.

The dashboard will only be available in English until then, a state education department spokesman confirmed.

“We’re really excited about the Spanish translation,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, co-executive director at the Education Trust — West. “It will just reflect that our state has a sizable population of Spanish-speaking parents who this site should also be able to serve.” About 1 in 5 of the states’ students is an English language learner, according to the dashboard.

The new dashboard also displays data for the first time on two indicators: chronic absenteeism for grades K-8 and college/career readiness for high schoolers.

Fall 2018 data, which the state education department released last month in anticipation of the dashboard update, show 9 percent of California’s K-8 students are chronically absent, meaning they miss 10 percent or more of the school year — a 0.3 percent increase from 2017.

It also reveals only 42.2 percent of the state’s high school graduates are “prepared” for college. California, meanwhile, reported a near-all-time-high graduation rate of 83 percent in 2018.

For each indicator, users can toggle between a school’s or district’s data and the state average.

Example of L.A. Unified data. On the left is the chronic absenteeism rate for L.A. Unified students. Pressing the “State” toggle then reveals the state comparison.

• Read more: California’s graduation rate rises, but there’s no improvement in students’ eligibility for state universities

Both Arrillaga and Litt said all of these changes are improvements over the old version and integrated stakeholder feedback, such as nixing the pie graphics.

But a caveat remains. “The site is still not intuitive at a glance,” Arrillaga said.

What’s still missing

For Arrillaga, one drawback of the dashboard is that it doesn’t explicitly flag for users which schools and districts the state has identified as low-performing — even though under the Every Student Succeeds Act, all states have to identify their bottom 5 percent of schools and craft “comprehensive” improvement plans for them. State or county financial aid is also available for districts that have at least one student group with two or more “red” dashboard indicators, such as suspensions and chronic absenteeism.

The state has identified 374 school districts and county offices this year— about one-third of California’s districts — to receive assistance. This number spiked from 226 last year, largely attributable to the addition of the chronic absenteeism and college/career readiness indicators. The Los Angeles County Office of Education is included on the list.

But Arrillaga said parents might not know this information exists, or how to access it outside of the dashboard.

“Parents would not know from first glance [on the dashboard] that their school had been identified for assistance,” she said. “And stakeholders and parents should have a really clear idea of what those schools are so that they can be advocates as well for ensuring that the school is getting the resources that it needs to adequately serve all of the students.”

Other omissions include an English language learner progress color rating, which the state withheld this year because it switched to a new test. And parents still can’t compare school or district data to one another, though the news site EdSource offers a separate tool that enables comparisons.

“Every parent wants their child to go to a school that is going to meet their needs; where the child is going to come home happy, where they’re going to feel successful and smart,” Litt said. “We should be making sure all families have a good shot of finding [that] school.”

The state education department spokesman noted that the dashboard isn’t intended to be “a ranking system for schools.” He added that “it’s more of a diagnostic tool so people can identify the issues that need to be addressed in their school or district.”

Even so, California’s color-coded system leaves much to be desired in helping parents understand student data, experts say. The state has stuck with using colors rather than a summative rating, such as A-F or 0-100 grades. More than 40 states use summative ratings within their systems, the Education Commission of the States reported in May.

The dashboard “is not interactive, so you can’t necessarily click on a color and understand why a school was rated that way,” Arrillaga said. To see how color-coding works, parents can select the “Resources” drop-down option in the “About” menu, then click on California Model Five-by-Five Grid Placement Reports and type in their school or district.

The state received parent feedback during the redesign that explaining color parameters along with the data was “off-putting and distracting,” the spokesman wrote in an email.

Here’s where to find an explanation of the dashboard’s color-coded system.

Litt bemoans the color yellow, in particular, which he says masks “just how far we are from what we would hope for our children.” He pointed to L.A. Unified’s college readiness data, which reveal only 38.2 percent of graduates are “prepared” for college. That indicator’s gauge is pointed to the middle, at yellow. This, to Litt, doesn’t signal an urgency for change.

“Is the mayor going to get up and take a megaphone and walk down the streets screaming ‘6 out of 10 of our children are not ready for college’?” he asked. “I don’t think the presentation [in the dashboard] compels people to do that. There’s no clarity here.”

L.A. Unified’s school board passed a resolution in June calling for 100 percent college readiness by 2023.

• Read more: LA’s graduation rate will now be reported in a second way to reveal how many students are actually eligible for state universities

The state has maintained that the dashboard is a work in progress. The California Board of Education “approved a process to review progress on implementing the new system annually,” providing an opportunity “to make changes or include additional indicators or data elements in the future,” according to the state education department.

Litt isn’t convinced, though, that the state will go beyond what it has to do to comply with federal law.

“It’s fine if this is just some federal compliance thing that we’re doing, but if we actually believe this has real bearing on how all schools do their work and how well the public understands how schools are serving their children … this is a critically important tool,” he said. “It’s worth getting right.”

About 12.9 percent of the state’s high schoolers attending schools with so-called “credit recovery” programs are enrolled in them. That’s 60 percent higher than the national average of 8.1 percent, according to a report released Thursday from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education think tank.

And for schools that enroll 20 percent or more of their students in credit recovery courses, California is more than double the U.S. average. Large enrollment in credit recovery could indicate abuse, the researchers warned.

• Read more from The 74: New Report Raises ‘Cautionary Flag’ on Schools With High Numbers of Students in Credit Recovery Programs, Calls for Greater Accountability

Credit recovery allows students who have failed a class to make up the credits through alternative coursework. Although there’s no federal definition of what credit recovery entails, formats can include in-person courses with a teacher, “blended learning” that incorporates both in-class time and online work, or online programs without face-to-face teacher interactions. Students can take the courses during regular school hours, during school breaks or summers, on Saturdays or on their own time, depending on the program.

Credit recovery in California and other states has ramped up in recent years, largely to satiate federal aspirations to boost graduation rates. California just last week posted a near all-time high graduation rate for the Class of 2018— 83 percent, only slightly below the national graduation rate of 84 percent in 2016, the most recent year available.

• Read more: California’s graduation rate rises, but there’s no improvement in students’ eligibility for state universities

Yet “there’s little evidence that students are learning more as a result,” Fordham’s report states. The report is one of the first times any nationwide data on credit recovery have been analyzed.

A LOT ‘WE DON’T KNOW’

Fordham’s report, using 2015-16 data from the Office for Civil Rights and National Center for Education Statistics, sheds light on how many schools have active credit recovery programs — meaning at least one student is registered — and how many students in those schools participate. Charter schools are included.

But it laments how “reliable data are non-existent when it comes to how states and districts define credit recovery programs, much less when it comes to gauging their quality.” Other information, such as how many makeup classes students take and how many pass versus fail, also remains largely unknown.

“What we don’t know” the report says, is whether the credits students earn in these programs are the result of “high-quality alternative courses that expect students to demonstrate the same knowledge and skills of the original courses,” or if it’s all just “a sort of educational fakery.”

Previous studies have raised alarms that schools could be sacrificing the quality of students’ education — especially with online classes — to post higher graduation rates. A 2016 analysis of Chicago Public Schools’ online credit recovery program, for example, found students “had lower algebra assessment scores, grades and credit recovery rates” than those taking face-to-face courses.

Another caution is that graduation rates are up while student performance on tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress has stalled nationwide. (California’s NAEP scores rose this year, but on its own state standardized tests, high schoolers lost ground.)

“For those of us who are concerned about maintaining standards and holding students to high standards, we get very worried when it seems like we maybe are just handing out diplomas,” Adam Tyner, Fordham’s associate director of research and co-author of the report, told LA School Report.

The American Enterprise Institute, which also analyzed the 2015-16 OCR data, wrote in its September report that “done well, credit recovery can give students a second chance to stay on track to graduation. Done poorly, it creates a second track that threatens school cultures and lowers our expectations for our most disadvantaged students and the schools that serve them.”

CALIFORNIA’S DATA

What Tyner found most compelling about California’s data was the extensive use of credit recovery — even though the state almost mirrors the national average for the percentage of schools with active programs.

Nearly 70 percent of high schools in both California and nationwide enroll at least one student in credit recovery programs. Yet in California’s case, about 18.6 percent of those schools register 20 percent or more of their students, more than double the U.S. average of 9.1 percent.

Figure CA-1 shows California mirroring the national average for schools with active credit recovery programs, though the rate of students enrolled in those courses is nearly 60 percent higher in California. Figure CA-2 shows California’s higher enrollments in those programs. (Credit: Fordham Institute)

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. high schoolers who take credit recovery courses at actively participating schools are from California, according to data in Fordham’s report. That’s about 154,000 students in the state.

Tyner did note that high enrollment numbers were “a pattern throughout the western states,” though he added, “I can’t explain why that is, but it’s something that we noticed — and it’s definitely something that California conforms to.”

A handful of the state’s school districts stood out in Fordham’s report for their high rates of students in credit recovery courses, most in urban areas. Urban schools are most likely to enroll large percentages of students in credit recovery, as are schools with large shares of low-income students or children of color.

Of the 45 largest U.S. school districts with active credit recovery programs, seven are in California, including L.A. Unified, according to the report.

Four of those districts surpass the 8.1 percent national average of students in credit recovery. All are districts near either San Diego or Los Angeles, and they only serve grades nine through 12. They are Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista just outside San Diego, Chaffey Joint Union High School District in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles, Antelope Valley Union High School District north of Los Angeles, and Grossmont Union High School District east of San Diego.

The most notable outlier in the report is Grossmont Union. About 99.7 percent of its more than 9,000 students who attend high schools with active credit recovery programs are in some type of makeup course. That’s 42.5 percent of the district’s enrollment.

Tyner told LA School Report that Fordham “did contact [Grossmont] because they had such a funky number … but did not hear back from them.” He also warned against taking more localized data at face value.

“This is self-reported data; there’s not a verification process,” he said. “If we’re looking overall at the country, we can be reasonably confident that it tells us something. But the more you dig down into individual schools and districts, there may be some who have misreported.”

L.A. UNIFIED’S INVESTMENT

The percentage of L.A. Unified students engaged in credit recovery — 5.9 percent— fell below both the state and U.S. average, according to the data Fordham studied. That data, however, only accounted for the first year of the district’s so-far $45 million investment in credit recovery.

There are also some discrepancies. While Fordham’s report counted nearly 4,500 L.A. Unified high schoolers in credit recovery in 2015-16, the district reported that 33,071 students had completed “at least one credit-recovery course” that same year, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The district was unable to provide updated numbers or context on how it defines and tracks credit recovery by the time of publication.

What is clear, though, is that as L.A. Unified has expanded its use of credit recovery, its graduation rate has continued to rise.

After investing $15 million in credit recovery in the 2015-16 school year, the district’s graduation rate jumped 5 percentage points to 77 percent. But 42 percent of that year’s graduates had retaken a class they had failed or needed some other kind of credit recovery to do so, LA School Report reported.

• Read more: 

EXCLUSIVE: 42 percent of LAUSD’s record graduation rate was due to credit recovery or makeup classes

LAUSD’s credit recovery program boosts grad rates, but do students learn?

In L.A. Unified’s PASS credit recovery program, students can make up a class in as little as a week. The district’s schools can also modify credit recovery programs, or craft their own, with their local district superintendent’s sign-off. The LA Times reported last year that the district “hasn’t instituted across-the-board standards for what credit-recovery options schools offer or how they should teach or grade them,” and that it lacks records for “how many students tried and failed to complete such courses, and how long it took them to finish a class.”

The American Institutes for Research, funded by a $3.3 million federal grant, is currently studying the effectiveness of online credit recovery programming within L.A. Unified. Researchers are looking specifically at how “blended learning” credit recovery courses affect student performance in Algebra 1 and ninth-grade English.

The study reviewed courses during the 2018 summer session and is continuing observations during the 2018-19 school year. The goal is to release preliminary results on the 2018 summer session in March, principal researcher Jordan Rickles told LA School Report in an email.

The Fordham report outlined the following recommendations to states and their districts:

1. Adopt formal guidelines for credit recovery programs.

2.  Districts should give separate assessments from what is provided via the credit recovery courses. For example, requiring students to pass the same end-of-course exams — or similar tests — as peers enrolled in traditional courses.

3.  Require districts to collect more information, including whether courses are taken in person or online, the qualifications of the instructor and the types of test or exit exams required for each course.

States and districts should “do a better job of vetting these programs, make sure that there are incentives in place to hold the line on accountability, and not just let everybody who shows up to school get a diploma,” Tyner said.

Disclosure: The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, the William E. Simon Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and The 74, the parent of LA School Report.

California posted a near all-time high graduation rate — 83 percent for the Class of 2018 — but the rate of students eligible to apply for state universities hasn’t budged, according to data released last week by the California Department of Education.

In LA Unified, the state’s largest school district, the graduation rate rose to 76.6 percent.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a news release that “much work needs to be done to make certain all students graduate and to close the continuing achievement gaps between student groups.”

The data are typically published in early spring, but the department wanted to ensure the latest information would be ready for next month’s update to the California School Dashboard, the state’s new accountability system. The dashboard’s update will include 2018 data on a revamped, more user-friendly platform that will be viewable on mobile devices and translated into Spanish.

Here are six main takeaways from the new state data:

1. Graduation rates are up …

The Class of 2018’s graduation rate was 83 percent, up from 82.7 percent for the Class of 2017 and considerably higher than the 74.7 percent rate California posted in 2010.

LA Unified’s graduation rate for 2018 was 76.6 percent, up from 76.1 percent in 2017, according to the state data.

Graduation rates across California pre-2017 were slightly higher because they were calculated differently. They had to be adjusted last year after an audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General found California did not calculate its rates according to federal requirements.

The nationwide high school graduation rate for 2016, the latest data available, was an all-time high — 84 percent.

2. … but only slightly for English learners, poor, black and Latino students.

While graduation rates for most California student groups grew — especially for foster youth — minority groups only made small inroads:

• Black students: A 0.2 percentage point increase in 2018, from 73.1 percent to 73.3 percent.
• Hispanic or Latino students: A 0.3 point increase, from 80.3 percent to 80.6 percent.
• English language learners: A 0.8 point increase, from 67.1 percent to 67.9 percent.
• Poor students: A 0.8 point increase, from 78.8 percent to 79.6 percent

Foster youth graduation rates reached 53.1 percent in 2017-18, compared to 50.8 percent the year prior.

White students, however, lost ground, dropping to 87 percent last year from 87.3 percent in 2016-17.

3. There is no change from last year in college readiness.

Nearly half — 49.9 percent — of the Class of 2018 met admission requirements for the University of California and/or the California State University systems — the same as in 2017.

The state reported that for LA Unified students, 61.9 percent met those requirements, up from 59.8 percent in 2016-17.

LA Unified’s school board in June passed a resolution to get 100 percent of students “prepared for college, career and life” by 2023. To boost accountability, it will announce two graduation rates moving forward: the percentage of students who graduated meeting state standards, and the percentage of how many were eligible to apply to state schools.

“We’re raising the bar, being aspirational, and believing on what we can do,” board President Mónica García said at the time.

College preparedness struggles in California mirror a nationwide dilemma. A 2017 survey revealed only half of U.S. seniors think their high schools have prepped them for a post-secondary education. Another analysis of more than 900 U.S. colleges found that about 23 percent of them had more than half of their incoming students enrolled in at least one remedial course.

4. Chronic absences got worse — for nearly every subgroup.

During the 2017-18 year, 11.1 percent of California’s students were “chronically absent,” which the state defines as missing 10 percent, or about 18 days, of the school year. This is up slightly from 10.8 percent in 2016-17 — and tallies to 16,000 more students in 2018 who were chronically out of school.

The state next month is adding chronic absence data to its California School Dashboard, but only for students through eighth grade. It began collecting and reporting chronic absence data from schools and districts for all grades in 2016-17.

California’s reported chronic absence rate is hard to compare to the U.S. average because national data, collected by the Office for Civil Rights, defines chronically absent students as those missing 15 or more days of school. The U.S. average for 2015-16 — the most recent year for which nationwide data is available — was about 16 percent. California was below the national average at 12.2 percent.

LA Unified had an 11.9 percent chronic absence rate in 2017-18, a slight bump from 11.7 percent in 2016-17, according to the state. Of all ethnicities, black students in the district have the highest rate of chronic absences, at 20.9 percent. For all students districtwide, 1 in 4 kindergartners is also chronically absent.

The effects on academics are calamitous when students miss school: Children who are chronically absent in preschool, kindergarten and first grade, for example, are much less likely to read at grade level by third grade, a report last year found.

And absences are increasingly expensive. In 2016-17, LA Unified lost about $630 million in revenues from students not coming to school. (The state’s school districts receive federal funding based on average daily attendance, rather than enrollment.)

Superintendent Austin Beutner said in May that if LA Unified can turn 8,000 to 10,000 kids into better attenders, “they’ll learn, and absenteeism matters to the whole classroom because the revenues come back.”

5. Enrollments are down, dropouts are up.

Increases in graduation rates contrast with declines in enrollment and growing dropout rates.

In California, student enrollment has decreased every year in the past five years except for 2016-17, according to state data.

At the same time, its dropout rates are rising. The number of 2018 dropouts statewide totaled 48,453 — up nearly 3,500 students from 2017. The dropout rate as a result rose from 9.1 percent to 9.6 percent. The highest rates were reported for foster, homeless and American Indian or Alaska native students, according to the new data.

Nationwide, the U.S. high school dropout rate was 6 percent in 2016.

LA Unified is similarly losing thousands of students each year; it’s lost more than 24,000 students in the last two years. Its high school dropout rate as of 2016-17 was 12.2 percent, according to Open Data.

The student enrollment loss annually is “the equivalent of closing 12 major high schools,” board Vice President Nick Melvoin said earlier this year. “Are we sending out RIF (reduction in force) notices and pink slips?”

6. Traditional public schools have higher graduation rates than charters.

When only considering traditional public schools, the state graduation rate hikes to 91.7 percent. “Alternative” schools such as juvenile court and county-run special education schools bring down the overall state rate.

Comparatively, independent charter schools have a graduation rate of 84.2 percent, the state data reported.

LA Unified students rally outside the district’s headquarters in June to support the “Close the Gap” resolution, which includes more support for English learners. (Photo: Families In Schools Facebook page)

For California parents watching how well their public schools are doing at educating their children, the fall release of state test scores has brought only slim encouragement. Elementary school students, particularly in third and fourth grade, moved ahead, while 11th-graders lost ground.

But the grimmest news was, once again, reserved for parents whose children are still learning English — particularly for those in LA Unified schools.

English learners, who represent nearly a quarter of LA Unified’s half a million students, showed no growth at all in reading over last year, and their math scores inched up by only a minuscule 0.04 percentage point, according to state results on the CAASPP tests released last week. Statewide, they gained less than 1 percentage point over last year.

English learners’ test scores in California and LA have barely budged since the new tests were introduced four years ago, even though the state has funneled more funds to school districts with high numbers of English learners and other disadvantaged students. And English learners’ performance remains at the bottom of all subgroups of students, lower than for all ethnic groups and for all students receiving special education and those in poverty.

In each of the last three years, less than 4 percent of LA Unified’s English learners scored proficient in reading and less than 6 percent did so in math — significantly lower than their peers statewide.

LA Unified posted slightly more progress with its reclassified English learners, those who have completed a four-step process that includes passing the state’s English proficiency test. But they still lag behind the statewide rate.

“This is not acceptable, but it is also a complex issue,” said Magaly Lavadenz, professor of educational leadership and director of the Center for Equity for English Learners at Loyola Marymount University.

Lavadenz outlined a range of factors that contributed to the “depressing test scores,” including the specific challenges to these students and how school districts are supporting both them and their teachers.

The students are clearly struggling with the content as well as the language. “When English learners are tested at any test, any assessment that is in English is also a test of the language as well as of academic content proficiency,” Lavadenz said.

The language barrier affects students even in math, because those sections of the test are also heavily language-based, making them difficult for English learners, she said.

And school districts are not consistently using accommodations available for English learners during testing.

“One of the things I think districts can do better is to take advantage of the language accommodations that are available for English learners within the test itself, such as bilingual dictionaries or simpler forms of language,” she said. “We know these accommodations are not being used as much as they could, especially with students at the lower level of English proficiency.”

Teachers also need more training and support to better prepare their English learning students for the test and to learn how they can understand students’ progress in previous academic years. Getting all teachers the tools and training to teach English learners should be “a non-negotiable,” Lavadenz said.

“From when teachers are beginning to teach to when they reach expertise, having access to high-quality professional development is essential. Policy evolves, education reform, curriculum reform, they all continue to shift and evolve over time, so their continual learning is essential so they can address the needs of English learning students.”

She said newer teachers also need to be coached and mentored into the profession as research shows that the youngest and least prepared teachers tend to be placed in schools and in communities with higher poverty rates and a high concentration of English learners. These teachers aren’t getting the support they need and end up leaving those schools.

“Other student subgroups are also underperforming. Latinos are underperforming statewide. Test scores are one indicator of a student’s learning during a few days of testing. It’s a complicated issue. The social, the emotional, the community conditions that are present have an effect,” Lavadenz said. “But we must still continue to have the aspirations and the expectations that despite all of this, children can learn. They need to be held to high expectations.”

Attempts to raise English learners’ proficiency rates have yet to bear fruit, such as the new California English Learner Roadmap and millions of extra dollars that have been spent supporting English learners and other disadvantaged students over the last five years through the Local Control Funding Formula.

“The implementation of the new English Learner Roadmap, which set a clear map toward English learners’ achievement, it’s been difficult in classrooms across the state,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, co-interim executive director of The Education Trust — West. “We know that there are some school districts that are doing a good job. I think one of the things the state should be doing moving forward is using these as examples to put the roadmap into practice.”

Over 20 percent of the students in California’s public schools — or 1.3 million children — are English learners who speak any of about 65 languages other than English, but an overwhelming majority, 82 percent, list Spanish as their first language at home.

Lavadenz said parents need to ask their school administrators and teachers questions such as:

• Did you provide accommodations for my English learner child during the testing? What kind?
• What kind of preparation are they getting for the test?
• How can I support you with my child at home to be better prepared for the test?
• Are there any resources available in my native language that I can use to help prepare my child?
• Are you providing tutoring for the test after school?

TEST RESULTS

Here are the percentages of students who met or exceeded state proficiency standards in the 2018 CAASPP, or Smarter Balanced, tests, which students took in May, compared to the previous two years:

ALL STUDENTS IN LOS ANGELES

2018 scores

• 42 percent met or exceeded standards in reading
• 32 percent met or exceeded standards in math

2017 scores

• 40 percent in reading
• 30 percent in math

2016 scores

• 39 percent in reading
• 29 percent in math

ALL STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA

2018 scores

• 50 percent in reading
• 39 percent in math

2017 scores

• 49 percent in reading
• 38 percent in math

2016 scores

• 48 percent in reading
• 37 percent in math

ENGLISH LEARNERS IN LOS ANGELES

2018 scores

• 3.6 percent in reading
• 5.4  percent in math

2017 scores

• 3.6 percent in reading
• 5.4 percent in math

2016 scores

• 3 percent in reading
• 6 percent in math

ENGLISH LEARNERS IN CALIFORNIA

2018 scores

• 12.6 percent in reading
• 12.6 percent in math

2017 scores

• 12.1 percent in reading
• 12.3 percent in math

2016 scores

• 13 percent in reading
• 12 percent in math

RECLASSIFIED ENGLISH LEARNERS IN LOS ANGELES

2018 scores

• 45 percent in reading
• 31 percent in math

2017 scores

• 43 percent in reading
• 30 percent in math

2016 scores

• 43 percent in reading
• 30 percent in math

RECLASSIFIED ENGLISH LEARNERS IN CALIFORNIA

2018 scores

• 58 percent in reading
• 41 percent in math

2017 scores

• 57 percent in reading
• 45 percent in math

2016 scores

• 58 percent in reading
• 40 percent in math

LATINO STUDENTS IN LOS ANGELES

2018 scores

• 36 percent in reading
• 25 percent in math

2017 scores

• 33 percent in reading
• 23 percent in math

2016 scores

• 33 percent in reading
• 23 percent in math

LATINO STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA

2018 scores

• 39 percent in reading
• 27 percent in math

2017 scores

• 37 percent in reading
• 25 percent in math

2016 scores

• 37 percent in reading
• 24 percent in math

SPECIAL EDUCATION STUDENTS IN LOS ANGELES

2018 scores

• 10 percent in reading
• 8 percent in math

2017 scores

• 8.01 percent in reading
• 6.45 percent in math

2016 scores

• 8 percent in reading
• 6 percent in math

SPECIAL EDUCATION STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA

2018 scores

• 15 percent in reading
• 12 percent in math

2017 scores

• 14 percent in reading
• 11 percent in math

2016 scores

• 13 percent in reading
• 11 percent in math

LA Unified will eliminate $43 million in administrative salaries as part of an emergency cost-cutting plan to stave off its fiscal overseers.

The cuts won’t be at school sites this year, but rather at the central and local district offices. The number of jobs that will be lost will be left up to each department, but they represent an overall 15 percent reduction.

The specific positions will be identified in January, with the people in those jobs receiving notices in March and leaving by the end of June.

The job cuts are one half of a two-part strategy to right-size the district’s budget, which is projected to be on the verge of bankruptcy in two and a half years. They also come as the district is negotiating raises for teachers under the threat of a strike, and after it has approved salary increases of about 6 percent for two-thirds of its workforce.

Because it faces a fiscal cliff, LA Unified had been put on watch by its overseers at both the state and Los Angeles County, and the county had given LA Unified until Monday to detail exactly how it plans to stay out of the red.

The county’s main concern was getting details on how the district will cut $72 million from this year’s budget and another $72 million from next year’s budget, which is required for the district to have a 1 percent reserve at the end of the 2020-21 school year.

LA Unified is coming up with those savings in two main ways, said Chief Financial Officer Scott Price: jobs cuts and dodging a state fine.

The 15 percent across-the-board cut in staff at the district’s central office and in its local district offices will save $43 million. That’s just for this year though. The district will have to cut enough jobs to equal $43 million again next year.

Last June, when the budget was presented, the district said it planned a 15 percent job cut that would eliminate or reassign about 500 positions, but it said then that fewer than 70 people were expected to lose their jobs.

The second cost-saving measure is getting out of paying a state fine for having too high a ratio of administrators to students. For LA Unified, that fine is $35 million a year. The district differs with the state about how to count administrators.

The district has now received the waiver for this school year and for the last two years, but it has not yet secured it for next year.

“We will make sure that does happen,” Price said. “But if we can’t, we will make additional cuts, like restricting travel and cutting back on providing cell phones.”

• Read more: It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

The school board voted unanimously last Tuesday, with no discussion, to approve the budget revisions.

LA School Report talked to Price on Friday, the day the district’s revised budget was hand-delivered to the county. The county has until Nov. 8 to decide whether to accept the revisions. If it is not satisfied, it will put in motion a series of steps that could eventually lead to a fiscal takeover of the district.

The county’s main message, Price said, was, “We’ve got the recurring budget deficit, our reserves are dwindling, we’re using one-time funds to pay ongoing expenditures, and our reserves were only at $1.5 million. That sounds like a lot of money to folks, a million dollars sounds like a lot, but in a $7.5 billion budget, being only $1.5 million above your (required) 1 percent reserve is not a lot of reserves.

“I believe our budget will be approved, but the county is saying, ‘We are watching very closely what you are doing.’”

In a half-hour interview, Price also talked about those reserves and the contract negotiations with the teachers union, including the union’s assertions about the size and durability of those reserves.

His comments have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Would you summarize for parents what the county is asking you to do and when you will do it?

Dr. Price:  The county asked for some clarifications on our Fiscal Stabilization Plan. So the Fiscal Stabilization Plan that we had, had called for a 15 percent cut across the board in our district and local district offices. The county asked for more information on that.

So we went ahead and broke down the numbers that would be required, by division, to make the $43 million cut that that 15 percent represents. We went ahead and did that as part of the Fiscal Stabilization Plan that was approved by the board on Tuesday.

The other thing that the county asked us for was some information about some of the charter schools that we have. Some of them have fiscal plans that have a third year that is questionable, so we worked with our charter schools division and that also is being delivered to the county office today.

Can you say how many charters that is?

It was 12 out of the 230 or so.

What other savings are in the plan?

One of the pieces of our original Fiscal Stabilization Plan also calls for getting a waiver for our administrator-to-teacher ratio.

We were able to secure that for the current year, and we secured it for the prior two years. We’re working and hoping to find a way to address that in the out years, but that’s about $35 million a year, so they asked, What happens if that doesn’t happen?

Well, we’re going to make sure that it does happen. So we went ahead and worked out a plan that would take additional cuts from the district office. If we are not able to secure that waiver, then there will be some restrictions on travel and other types of expenditures like that in the district office, like not providing cell phones.

Do you anticipate the county will approve your budget?

Yes. …  It’s technically a good budget. But here’s the thing. We do have the recurring deficit and the county points that out, and they should point it out. We point it out every time we give our budget talk. We have a recurring deficit, our reserves are shrinking, and we have a long-term problem that we need to address.

So the county is coming in and talking to us on the technicalities on the budget. They ask us for the details on these things in order to clarify and bring to the forefront and let us know, let the district know, “Listen, we know you have a recurring deficit and a problem that you have to take care of. Your reserves are dwindling, you’re using one-time money to pay for an ongoing cause, and you have an issue here that you have to address on the longer term.”

That’s the biggest message of the county coming in, and if we don’t address those they will need to move to the next step. What will happen is, I believe that our budget will be approved and in the technical sense, but the county is saying, “We are watching very closely what you’re doing.” So when we get the first interim (budget report) in December, they’re going to say, “OK, you gave us more details on this 15 percent in the district office. We know that you have to announce layoffs early in the year 2019 to make the March deadline,” but, “You have to have more details for us in the first interim report of what you’re going to do because otherwise we won’t believe that you’re actually going to do what you say you need to do to make things happen.”

So, the bigger message is, we’ve got the recurring budget deficit, our reserves are dwindling, we’re using one-time funds to pay ongoing expenditures and our reserves were only at $1.5 million. That sounds like a lot of money to folks, a million dollars sounds like a lot, but in a $7.5 billion budget, being only $1.5 million above your one percent reserve is not a lot of reserves.

So, the county made sure that they came in and communicated to us and the board that we are on watch, basically and they are want to make sure that we know that they know.

Would you say there will be significant layoffs next year?

Right. Unless there’s a significant change in the state budget. … We’re working on other ways to cut the expenses and find efficiencies, and now there’s a bigger plan at work. If we can find ways to get more efficient and make some reductions, we’re going to work as hard as we can so that we can reduce that amount of people that we would have to lay off.

Do you anticipate that when the actual jobs that will be lost are announced at the end of June, will that be more than the small number of the last couple of years?

Yes. When I first came in just under a year ago, they had announced a 30 percent cut to the district office which turned out to be about, when all was said and done, about a 22 percent cut overall. It was people and other efficiencies, it was a mixture.

We’re going to have to have detail in January exactly what positions we’re going to be cutting. We will have to know in January what those are. We don’t just announce them in June, we’d have to know where we’re going before that.

You said when we last talked a month ago that parents would not see any cuts this year. Is that still the case for this current year?

The cuts that we’re talking about, the 15 percent, are all at the district and local district office. None of those are scheduled for school site type of cuts. That was one of the things that we wanted to stay away from. That’s the plan right now, that it’s all going to come out of central or local district offices. Just like the last cut did, that was the 30 percent cut right when I got here that they’d already organized and done.

When we last talked, you said that the budget had set aside what is equal to a 6 percent raise across the board. Since then, the district has increased its offer to the teachers union, and yet the county and the state officials both expressed concern that the new contract will be too expensive. Have you adjusted the budget to reflect the new offer?

We still have set aside what’s equivalent to the 6 percent, which is the 3 percent in 2017/18 and the 3 percent in 2018/19. That’s set aside for both teachers and for other groups that haven’t yet settled.

• Read more: LAUSD sweetens its offer on teacher raises, continues to call for a new category in evaluations to identify highly effective educators

The $1.8 billion in district reserves — is this a record amount, as the union has said?

What the county has as reserves is what’s called your unassigned balance. We start the 2019-20 school year with about $700 million in reserves. The union counts what is counted as carry-over money for schools, what is carry-over money for supplemental and concentration grants and other pieces that you’ll see in those budget documents. They count those as our reserves. But as the board sees it, the carry-over for supplemental concentration grants, school carry-over for funds they haven’t spent, those are funds set aside for specific purposes that aren’t the general savings, the reserves that we have. That’s what the dispute is. It’s not really a dispute. The union wants to include certain other things that the county doesn’t include as what our reserve is and the state doesn’t include as what our reserve is.

They’re looking at different numbers of funds that are set aside for specific purposes that are committed for specific purposes. If you look at the original budget documents, you’ll be able to see all those set aside. We make sure we’re transparent and clear about what those are and why they’re there.

It’s money at school sites, it’s donations at school sites that have been made, those type of carry-overs that are part of our larger number the union is claiming is available for them.

• Read more: 

LAUSD cuts positions to plug a budget hole without increasing class sizes

115 administrators are reassigned, but LAUSD may not see much decrease in staffing levels next year

New data show that almost half the teachers at LA Unified’s lowest-performing schools have not been evaluated for at least three years, and nearly all of those who were had received favorable ratings.

Now the school board’s vice president is calling for more regular evaluations, which he said could require negotiating changes to the city’s teachers union contract.

Teachers have been working without a contract for over a year. Early this month, United Teachers Los Angeles declared it was at an impasse with the district in its negotiations. Then the union reversed itself and said talks will resume this Tuesday as scheduled.

On Friday, the administrators union reached a tentative agreement with the district for a three-year contract that includes raises totaling 6 percent.

“As a former teacher, I know evaluation is a tool for improvement, and I think it’s important that teachers as professionals are regularly evaluated to know where they’re strong and areas of growth, so the idea that we’re not evaluating our teachers is not just a disservice to the kids in our schools and their families but also to the teachers that can really benefit from understanding how to continue to improve,” Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, told LA School Report.

“The one thing I’m hoping to understand is how much of this can we do unilaterally,” Melvoin said. “We need to be evaluating teachers more regularly. It’s only fair to them, not only the kids. But also, can we do that, or do we have to bargain it? And if we have to bargain it and negotiate on evaluation, then this is an important thing.”

Board President Mónica García declined to comment on the teacher evaluations and the union contract.

While over 70 percent of the students attending the 44 lowest-performing schools in the district are not proficient in either math or reading, 46 percent of their teachers were not evaluated at all from 2014 to 2017, says an analysis of district data by Parent Revolution, a nonprofit education advocacy organization in Los Angeles. Only one of those schools evaluated more than 50 percent of their teachers, according to public records revealed just weeks after the end of the school year.

Parent Revolution obtained the data in the spring through a records request, showing that in the 2016-17 school year, 7 out of 10 teachers working at those 44 schools were not evaluated, even though only 27 percent of students at those schools were proficient in English language arts and only 20 percent were proficient in math.

Those schools are rated at the lowest two categories — red or orange — in reading, math, and English learner progress on the California School Dashboard, the state’s accountability system that launched in the spring of 2017. Only one of the 44 schools showed any improvement in reading from the previous year, and 31 of the schools showed worse results.

The 44 schools together served 25,589 students in the 2016-17 school year who were taught by 1,316 teachers, of whom 899 — or 68 percent — were not evaluated that year. Of the 417 teachers who were evaluated that year, 400 — or 96 percent — were found to meet or exceed standards, while 17 teachers were rated below standards.

From 2014 to 2017, 23 of the schools gave every teacher who was evaluated a satisfactory rating.

(Source: Parent Revolution)

“The district has the data, they acknowledged it. We are very interested in seeing if the district will choose to do any differently or if they think this is OK,” said Seth Litt, Parent Revolution’s executive director. “California has not come up with the definition of what is considered an effective teacher, so it’s the responsibility of the district to figure that out. With an ongoing (contract) negotiation, this needs to be addressed.”

Melvoin said, “I hope all the parents at Parent Revolution would help us work with the union so they can see this is actually beneficial for teachers.”

Melvoin said the district has tried to strengthen teacher evaluations, but the teachers union has taken the district to court over making students’ test scores part of teachers’ job performance evaluations.

In 2013, former Superintendent John Deasy moved to make test scores 30 percent of teacher evaluations, but UTLA filed an unfair labor practices complaint. The union and the district eventually agreed to include test scores as part of evaluations but did not agree on a specific numeric requirement.

The union contract states that “teachers have to be evaluated every other year and probationary teachers are evaluated every year. Teachers with 10 years of district experience may stretch evaluations to every three, four, or five years with the consent of their evaluator, who has complete discretion. All teachers who receive a final evaluation of ‘below standard’ must be evaluated the following year.”

Litt said, “I wonder if all 46 percent of those teachers who had no evaluation in three years had been teaching more than 10 years and whether they have an evaluation on record at another school during those three years. It’s hard to tell without the district sharing that information.”

He said the district knows how long each teacher at those schools has worked but Parent Revolution did not receive that information because of contract rules.

We looked at 44 of the lowest-performing schools in LAUSD. More than half rated every single teacher satisfactory or above three years in a row, even as schools churned out low student outcomes. @PIENetworkhttps://t.co/tOjBMzplC5

— Parent Revolution (@parentrev) July 13, 2018

In an email explaining the district’s evaluation process, an LA Unified communications officer said the district’s evaluations rely on multiple measures, including classroom observation, conferences, professional goal-setting, and a series of reflection activities throughout the year.

“The goal should be to evaluate at least 25 percent of school staff members. New teachers and those who have received an overall ‘below standard’ evaluation in the previous year must be evaluated. The actual number will vary depending on the composition of the staff,” according to the district statement. “While the Local Control Accountability Plan set a goal of evaluating 25 percent of teachers in 2016-17, 30.4 percent of teachers across L.A. Unified were evaluated during that period, as were 31.5 percent of teachers in high-needs schools. Districtwide, 96.4 percent of teachers met or exceeded standards, which mirrors the results of teachers in high-needs schools.”

Data from the National Council on Teacher Quality show that 52 percent of the nation’s largest school districts do not require that all teachers be evaluated every year. It found that all 123 of the largest districts evaluate inexperienced or non-tenured teachers at least once a year, but districts do not see that need for more experienced teachers.

Not-so-fun fact: In over half of the 123 largest school districts, tenured teachers can go 2-5 years between full formal evaluations, as long as their previous evaluation rating was proficient or above. Learn more about how teachers are being evaluated: https://t.co/KUHTCM4UVo

— NCTQ (@NCTQ) July 17, 2018

In over half of the districts, tenured teachers can go two to five years between full formal evaluations, as long as their previous evaluation rating was proficient or above. In the interim, many districts evaluate these experienced teachers using abbreviated evaluations, such as only using student growth data or bypassing some of the metrics, according to NCTQ, a nonpartisan research and policy organization committed to modernizing the teaching profession.

The organization states that because a teacher’s job is multifaceted, they should be evaluated using multiple measures that capture different elements of their practice. It says evaluation ratings are more stable and better at identifying more effective teachers when they combine three general measures: professional practice, student growth, and student survey data. Twelve districts — mostly in California — only evaluate teachers on one measure: professional practice, which is based on a teacher’s classroom observations, the organization found.

To help its most struggling schools, LA Unified this coming school year will use a new student needs index to distribute resources more equitably, and it will continue advocating for fair school funding at the state and federal levels, according to the district’s statement. “As we better serve our students and families, we must provide more effective teacher training, mentoring and evaluation. It is our goal to ensure equitable distribution of effective teachers and leaders across schools, subjects and specialty areas. We will continue to partner with parents and community groups to improve student success and enhance the quality of parent engagement.”

Bill Lucia, president of EdVoice, an advocacy organization, said in a Parent Revolution news release, “The evidence demonstrates these schools are clearly failing students, and yet certificated staff are overwhelmingly receiving satisfactory or above ratings by evaluators. The district appears to be systematically derelict in taking seriously the state law requirement to actually identify and endeavor to assist struggling teachers so they can become effective in helping all their kids reach grade-level academic expectations.”

Elsie Garcia, mother of an LA Unified eighth-grader, said in the news release that it’s very important for parents to know whether or not their child has an excellent teacher in the classroom. “I’ve seen firsthand the difference it makes when my son has had a great teacher, and I’ve also seen him fail to be challenged by teachers who clearly need more guidance and support. All students in LAUSD deserve excellent teachers for every year of their education.”

This spring, members of Parent Revolution’s Parent Power Network asked LA Unified board members to review the current improvement plans at the lowest-performing schools. They presented the board with examples of what they saw as poorly constructed school plans, which had been approved by the district.

At the June 12 board meeting, a majority of board members acknowledged that the improvement plans the parents had shown them are incomplete or insufficient and that they had been approved without proper oversight.

In a resolution the board unanimously passed at that meeting, “Realizing the Promise for All: Close the Gap by 2023,” the board has directed the district to develop tougher school site improvement plans and to exempt the principals of the lowest-performing schools from having to hire off the district’s “must-place” teachers list.

• Read more: LAUSD board frees principals of struggling schools from having to hire teachers sent to them by the district

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, asked at Tuesday’s meeting for all schools to be allowed the hiring freedom.

Updated June 15

About one-fourth of LA Unified schools have just won a coveted freedom: the right to hire the best teacher for the job.

However, the majority of Los Angeles schools are still shackled by a longtime districtwide policy that forces principals to hire from a “must-place” list of “displaced” teachers.

But that could soon change. Board members have directed the new superintendent to “work to eliminate the pool of teachers who are displaced one year or more.”

Teachers are “displaced” if they are forced out of a school either because they are deemed ineffective or are bumped by a more senior employee, or if they are returning from a leave of absence and have not yet been hired at a school site.

The displaced teachers continue to draw full salary and benefits, and the district keeps them on the rolls indefinitely, unlike some other districts nationwide that terminate teachers’ employment if they haven’t been hired within a certain timeframe, such as a year.

• Read more from The 74: NYC Teachers Who Lost Their Jobs But Remain on the Payroll Receive Big Raises as Budget Watchdogs Call to Reform $136M Absent Teacher Reserve

There are currently 708 displaced teachers on LA Unified’s payroll, and 211 of them have been on the list for more than a year, the district reported Wednesday in response to a public records request. Last year, the “must-place” teachers cost the district about $15 million, and an independent review panel has urged LA Unified to end the pool.

The new hiring freedom came through Tuesday’s unanimous school board approval of the “Close the Gap” resolution, which seeks to ensure that all students, particularly those with high-needs students, can meet state academic standards and qualify for a four-year in-state university. The resolution also seeks to strengthen school improvement plans, and it requires the district to start reporting its graduation rate in two ways: the percentage of students who graduated meeting state standards, and the percentage of those eligible to apply to state colleges.

• Read more: LA’s graduation rate will now be reported in a second way to reveal how many students are actually eligible for state universities

The primary focus of the resolution is improving the district’s lowest-performing schools, so those are the schools that are getting the hiring freedom.

The resolution states that: “No teachers who were displaced one year or more should be assigned to schools in the lowest performing band of schools based on the School Performance Framework or the high and highest need schools based on the Student Equity Needs Index 2018.”

Together, those schools are estimated to be roughly a quarter of the roughly 1,000 district schools. LA Unified also has 224 independent charter schools, which are not bound by the district’s hiring restrictions.

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, asked why only a portion of the district’s schools should get the hiring freedom.

“What is the purpose of not placing these teachers in the lowest-performing quartile [of schools]? The same logic would apply to all classrooms and all students,” Melvoin said during Tuesday’s board discussion. “I’d like to see us work to not have them in any schools.”

He proposed adding language that would give all schools the freedom, but board member Kelly Gonez objected because of possible financial implications. So a compromise was crafted. The amendment states, “The Superintendent will work to eliminate the pool of teachers who are displaced one year or more, via training, help with replacement, or exit from the District.”

“The logic of my amendment is, If it’s not good enough for some kids, it’s not good enough for all kids,” Melvoin said in a phone interview Thursday. “The biggest thing this is about is mutual consent in hiring. Teachers and principals shouldn’t go where they aren’t excited to go, and school communities shouldn’t have teachers and principals they’re not excited to have.”

He said he will continue to push for all schools to be included. “I will hold him (the superintendent) accountable for that and see what we can do in bargaining. I’ll also continue to raise these concerns at board meetings when colleagues want to create more exceptions, which I think will continue to happen, especially when principals and families reach out about equity.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, board member Scott Schmerelson called for adult schools to be included. He said, “I don’t want us to put displaced teachers in continuation schools.”

Board President Mónica García said Thursday that she “welcomed Mr. Melvoin’s amendment. Again, in working to close the gaps, the resolution did not solve all district challenges. When SENI (the Student Equity Need Index) passed, we understood that was dealing with money and change in policies that is being highlighted now. Bottom line: I would stand with every parent that expects every member of our school staff to be qualified and able to do their job well.”

‘Can you help my principal’

Melvoin said, “One of the things that led to my amendment is, now having visited every school in my district, parents are so excited and grateful for the amazing teachers that their kids have. And yet they’re frustrated when they’re in a class with a teacher that’s less than excellent or they hear from their principal the difficulty in hiring the right teachers. When I usually hear from parents, it’s parents calling saying, can you help my principal because we can’t get this teacher, or we’re losing this great teacher, or we have to place this teacher.”

Melvoin said contract changes will likely be necessary to extend the hiring freedom districtwide.

“I say this as a former teacher: I think we should have a contract that respects teachers as professionals and also kids as the most important actor in the system, and I don’t think our current contract does that. I think that it doesn’t put kids first, and I also don’t think that it’s respecting teachers as professionals. Because if I’m told that I have to go to a school that doesn’t want me, or I can’t stay at a school that wants me, that’s devaluing my service as a teacher, and that has to change. And I think that’s actually going to be the way that we attract better teachers, is by treating them as professionals, and our contract does not do that right now.”

García noted Thursday that the local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, “will have an impact on our ability to negotiate and address systemically” the district’s hiring policies.

Ben Austin, a school reform advocate and executive director of Kids Coalition, which aims to give students and their parents legal rights in decisions about their education, agreed that the district should end the practice of forcing principals to hire from the list of displaced teachers.

“Must-place teachers are Exhibit A for why the LAUSD needs to translate ‘Kids First’ from a hashtag into a civil right,” Austin said by email Thursday.

‘Dance of the Lemons’

The practice of districts shuffling ineffective teachers from school to school is known as “the dance of the lemons.”

In 2010, after a five-month investigation by LA Weekly, then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced that “the district plans to substantially cut back on granting lifelong tenure to inexperienced teachers.”

But that hasn’t happened.

The displaced teachers are different than teachers who are facing allegations of sexual or physical misconduct, however they too receive full pay and benefits while they are out of the classroom, which has been estimated to cost the district more than $300 million in recent years.

But the far larger problem, LA Weekly reported, is one of “performance cases” — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. From 2000 to 2010, district officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle was $500,000.

During the same time period, when LA Unified fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service-protected workers were fired at City Hall, LA Weekly found.

The cost of ineffective teachers

An effective teacher is widely seen as the most important factor in a child’s success in school, and even more so for disadvantaged students and those in minority groups.

Requiring principals to hire first from the must-place list “is just a terrible, terrible way to staff a school,” said Daniel Weisberg, chief executive officer of TNTP, an education nonprofit that helps school systems address educational inequity. “There’s no school, no principal, no parent, no teacher who wants to be in a school where somebody is forced on them and may not want to be there and may not be a good fit for the school or the students or the community.”

But in attempting to fix the problem, he cautioned, “It’s squeezing the other end of the balloon. If you exempt (some) schools, those teachers are going somewhere.”

Many LA Unified principals say they are frustrated with being forced to fill vacancies with teachers from the “must-place” pool.

Three-quarters of Los Angeles principals surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy group focused on teacher effectiveness, said they were unable to hire their teacher of choice because they needed to hire from the priority placement list. The same 75 percent of school leaders said that teachers on the must-place list are rarely if ever a good fit for their school.

Kency Nittler, manager for teacher trends at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said their 2011 survey of LA Unified principals found that “the majority of principals in LAUSD were rarely or never satisfied with the teachers they were forced to hire from the must-place list.”

Kate Walsh, the organization’s president, said, “If you’re going to hold schools accountable for results, you need to make it possible for the leader in that building to decide who is going to work there.”

Legal attempt to address ineffective teachers

A lawsuit filed on behalf of LA Unified students in failing schools sought to make it easier for schools to get rid of ineffective teachers.

A ruling by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge in 2014 in the case, Vergara v. California, found that the state’s tenure and seniority systems, which can protect ineffective teachers, harmed all students, but especially poor and minority students, leading to outcomes that “shocked the conscience.” The case ended last year when the California Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court ruling.

The intention to give LA’s high-needs schools a waiver from having to hire off the must-place list was announced by then-Interim Superintendent Vivian Ekchian at a school board committee meeting in March that presented the new “Student Equity Need Index,” which the board then adopted in April as a primary funding model for the district to ensure dollars designated for the highest-needs students actually reach them. This week, Ekchian was named deputy superintendent.

At that same April meeting, board members voted to create an assessment framework that will allow parents to more easily compare schools as well as select the measures by which to evaluate them.

Katie Braude, executive director of the grassroots parent organization Speak UP, noted afterward that the district should report how many must-place teachers are on a school’s staff.

The assessment framework, which Gonez said could lead to school report cards, could “shine a light on things we don’t have any information on at all,” Braude said, such as “looking at teaching staff, how long teachers have been at a school, how frequently they are evaluated, how many substitutes a school has for a year, how many must-place teachers are on staff. … It gives parents an opportunity to make good choices.”

This article has been updated to include the number of independent charter schools and that they are not bound by the district’s hiring restrictions.

Sara Mooney, education program officer with United Way of Greater LA, and members of the CLASS Coalition celebrate the passage of the “Close the Gap” resolution outside LAUSD on Tuesday.

LA Unified made a big commitment Tuesday: by 2023 all students will be college-ready, and — to make sure parents can hold the district accountable — it will now report two different graduation rates.

Through unanimous approval of the “Realizing the Promise for All: Close the Gap by 2023” resolution, the board members “publicly commit” to students — including English learners, special education students, foster youth, and those living in poverty — to provide the support they need to graduate eligible to apply to a state four-year university.

“We’re raising the bar, being aspirational, and believing on what we can do,” said board President Mónica García, who co-authored the resolution with board member Richard Vladovic. Ref Rodriguez and Kelly Gonez were co-sponsors.

The resolution also directs the district to develop tougher school site improvement plans and exempt the principals of the lowest-performing schools from having to hire off the district’s “must-place” teachers list.

Board Vice President Nick Melvoin requested Tuesday that the resolution be amended to include a requirement that the district report two graduation rates each school year — one that reflects the percentage of students who graduated meeting state standards, and another one that shows how many were eligible to apply to state colleges.

The difference is what grade students receive in a set of college-prep classes called A-G courses, which all students are required to take in order to graduate. Students who pass those classes with D’s are still eligible to graduate, but they need a C or better in those classes to be able to apply to the University of California or Cal State schools.

Last year, 80 percent of the senior class graduated, but only 56 percent passed all their A-G classes with a C or better.

“I want to make sure that all our students are not only able to earn a diploma, but that the diploma they earn will signify that they are graduating college- and career-ready,” Melvoin said Wednesday by email. “We can’t simply celebrate our rising graduation rates without holding ourselves accountable for the 44 percent of students in the Class of 2017 who graduated high school ineligible to attend an in-state college or university.”

Last year, only 53 percent of Latino students, 28 percent of foster youth, and 22 percent of English Learner graduates were college-eligible, according to United Way of Greater Los Angeles’s CLASS Coalition, whose members spoke at Tuesday’s board meeting, joining dozens of parents and education advocates who rallied outside district headquarters to support the “Close the Gap” resolution.

Sara Mooney, education program officer with United Way of Greater LA, said the resolution doesn’t mean that high school students will be required yet to graduate with a C or better. “The requirement of being eligible is not on the students to reach that mark, but on the district to provide the support for them to be prepared to reach a C or better, but not now. For now, the goal is that the district provides, reflected in the budget, the support they need to eventually reach that mark.”

Less than 2 percent of the district’s overall budget goes to programs that specifically support higher-needs students’ achievement, according to CLASS, or the Communities for Los Angeles Student Success, which pushed for the creation of this resolution. CLASS is headed by the United Way Greater of LA and is a collaborative of 150,000 parents, students, and educators, and 70 community-based and civil rights organizations, dedicated to ensuring that all students receive an equitable education.

García said the resolution pushes back on the practice of low-performing schools becoming home to displaced teachers and acknowledged that some changes will have to be made to the policy of requiring principals to hire first from the “must-place” list of teachers.

“We’re not determining a policy as where those teachers should go, but certainly we’re saying not here” in low-performing schools, García said. “This resolution is about protecting by policy high-needs schools from this practice.”

“This resolution is just the beginning. LA Unified has to make changes and do things differently in order to make progress in these areas,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said. His office will have to draft a plan on how to reach those goals within 180 days.

As directed by the resolution, the district will have to focus on supporting the lowest-performing schools based on the “Student Equity Need Index 2.0” resolution, which was passed in April and provides a primary funding model for the district to ensure dollars meant for the highest-needs students reach them.

The superintendent will also have to report to the board on the steps that will be taken to support highest-needs schools in hiring and retaining highly qualified teachers and aides, based on the “School Performance Framework” resolution, also approved in April, which enables the district to identify and track the overall performance of each school annually with a uniform set of measures to evaluate them so parents can compare them.

SCHOOL SITE PLANS

The resolution also aims to strengthen the improvement plans that each school is required to have.

It states that “all schools engage in a Single Plan for Student Achievement development process that includes root cause analysis, cycles of inquiry and improved equity-based budgeting,” which would help schools hit higher expectations by allowing school leaders to make their own choices to improve their schools. “We have to let schools’ leadership make choices about how to best address those issues,” García said in an interview last Friday.

A group of parents has been requesting for months that the district review the current improvement plans at the lowest-performing schools.

“Achieving any ambitious goal requires a good plan and holding yourself accountable to follow through on that plan,” said Seth Litt, executive director of the advocacy group Parent Revolution, which is supporting the parents.

“A majority of board members acknowledged that the next step to improve outcomes for kids in this district is for LAUSD to take a closer look at its current efforts to improve low-performing schools, including a close look its current school improvement plans,” he added.

Vladovic apologized to the parents during the meeting, saying he had reviewed the plans and agreed with their assessment. “Sorry, you were right,” he said. “The plans are written but there’s no coordination of services. … The basic plan should start with, where are the deficits, what do the children need.”

Responding to a request the superintendent provide more information on the state of the plans, board member Scott Schmerelson said, “I don’t want an informative, I want the directors to check the plans.”

One of the resolution’s main objectives is to reverse the high rate of students in the district who are failing to meet academic standards. Over 60 percent of third-, eighth- and 11th-grade students scored below standards in the state tests in English language arts and more than 70 percent scored below standards in math.

Those rates are even higher at chronically low-performing schools, where 88 percent of students score below standards in English and 90 percent in math.

During Tuesday’s meeting, the board also approved unanimously Rodriguez’s resolution “Increasing Supports for LGBTQ+ Students, Their Families and Schools,” which among other things will recognize October as LGBTQ+ History Month and increase LGBTQ+ competency training for educators, staff, administrators, and parents.

The board also approved former interim superintendent Vivian Ekchian as the new deputy superintendent of schools, at an annual salary of $262,500.

Also Tuesday, the new student board member was introduced. Tyler Okeke takes up his new post in August.

Goals of the “Close the Gap” resolution by 2023:

• Prepare all students to reach proficient on Reading Assessments by the end of the first grade.
• Prepare all third graders to meet or exceed standards on state summative assessments, setting the foundation for literacy, college and career readiness.
• Prepare all students initially identified as English Learners in kindergarten or first grade to be Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP) by the end of sixth grade.
• Ensure all Potential Long Term English Learners, Long Term English Learners and at-risk English Learners participate in the Individual Reclassification Plan (IRP) process to ensure benchmarks are met.
• Ensure all Standard English Learners will experience English in classroom environments that validate, value, and build upon the language and culture of the students.
• Prepare all English Learners and students enrolled in Dual Language programs since kindergarten or first grade to receive Seals of Biliteracy by grades 5, 8 or 12.
• Prepare all eighth-grade students to be A-G ready as demonstrated by a “C” or better in grade level English Language Arts and Math.
• Prepare all high school graduates to be eligible to apply to a California 4-year university and ensure they are well-equipped for career opportunities as defined by the California Department of Education.
• Prepare all high school students to successfully complete at least one Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or one semester/two quarters of Dual Enrollment courses.  
• Ensure all 4th-12th grade students will report having at least one supportive adult connection at their school site per the annual School Experience Survey.

CALIFORNIA’S ESSA PLAN REJECTED AGAIN

The board’s focus on improving LA Unified’s lowest-performing schools comes as the state is struggling to define and address the bottom tier of California schools.

This week, the U.S. Department of Education once again rebuked California’s plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal law signed by President Obama in 2015. California has submitted several iterations of the plan since September 2017; each of them has been returned due to inadequacies. California is now one of only six states whose plans have not been approved. If the state does not secure federal approval of its ESSA plan, it risks losing billions of dollars in federal aid.

“California state bureaucrats continue to fail to demonstrate the state is serious about providing equitable educational opportunities to disadvantaged students,” Bill Lucia, president of EdVoice, said in a statement Wednesday.

“The education establishment in Sacramento talks a big game when it comes to equity, but they continue to dodge basic accountability to address the state’s most struggling schools and provide help for the neediest students. Meanwhile, California languishes at or near the bottom of the country in academic achievement. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), California’s low-income fourth-graders — a group of students targeted for support under the federal law — ranked 50th in math, and California’s own state tests reveal millions of students across the state continue to fail to read at grade-level.”

Parents who have been calling for improvements at LAUSD’s lowest-performing schools gather after speaking at a board meeting in May.

As LA Unified school board members press ahead with how to improve the district’s lowest-performing schools, a vote is scheduled for Tuesday on a resolution with higher student achievement and graduation goals as well as ways to strengthen individual schools.

Growing frustration by parents who have children in the bottom tier of LA schools led to inclusion in the resolution of more specific goals for schools’ improvement plans.

Some of those parents have been filling the seats at almost every board meeting for nearly six months to ask the district “What’s the plan?” to improve their schools.

Board President Mónica García, who is co-authoring the resolution, said she heard the concerns of the parents, who are supported by the advocacy group Parent Revolution.

“Specifically on what the parents are asking us, I saw what they sent us, I had conversations with local district leaders, and so the parents are lifting issues of concern, every (local) district, every board office, every community, has some level of goals of what they want to change or improve the next year,” she said. “The challenge of the district is that there’s a concentration of concern in some communities.”

The resolution, “Realizing the Promise for All: Close the Gap by 2023,” co-authored by García and Richard Vladovic, calls for all schools to “engage in a Single Plan for Student Achievement development process that includes root cause analysis, cycles of inquiry and improved equity-based budgeting.” It also calls on the superintendent to “provide bounded autonomy for evidence-based, high impact investments and curated supports for college and career readiness.”

García said this resolution will help schools hit higher expectations by allowing school leaders to make their own choices to improve their schools. “We have to let schools’ leadership make choices about how to best address those issues.”

García said the resolution builds on two others that were approved in April: the “New Performance Framework” resolution about identifying which schools need more support, and the Student Equity Need Index 2.0 resolution to use dollars differently and help the highest-needs schools first.

The new resolution also sets a goal of every graduate eligible for a four-year public California university by 2023. That means students will have to earn at least a C in a set of required college-prep classes, known as A-G courses. Currently, students can graduate with D’s in those classes. Of last year’s graduates, only 56 percent were passing the college-prep classes with a C or better, and some board members last fall called for that bar to be raised.

To get to that goal by 2023, the resolution states that all first-graders will be proficient in reading, third-graders will be proficient on state tests, English learners who were identified in either kindergarten or first grade will be reclassified by sixth grade, and every high school student will successfully complete at least one Advanced Placement class, International Baccalaureate, or one semester of dual enrollment courses with a college.

Asked whether those goals can be reached despite the district’s financial crisis, García said, “It’s absolutely possible! The ‘Closing the Gap’ resolution is about addressing that we have the right policy we need to support kids better,” she said in an interview Friday. “It’s not about changing the course, it’s about strengthening the pathway. We were at the place where we lost $2.9 million and kids did better not because we changed the kids but because we changed the rules around the way we were supporting schools,” she said, referring to the board’s decision a decade ago to ensure that every student has access to the A-G curriculum.

Parents sound the alarm over low-performing schools

The parents who have been calling for academic improvements at the worst-off schools have been showing up at board meetings and meeting with district officials, asking what plans are on the books for those schools.

In April a district official told the parents those schools already have “a plan,” called the “Single Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA),” which is a federal requirement for every school.

The parents reviewed some of those plans but found them incomplete and with few workable solutions for improvement.

“What we as parents want is not any plan, but a strong plan, a comprehensive, detailed, and clear plan,” Blanca Espinosa said during public comment at the May 8 board meeting. Her grandson attends a school in District 2, represented by García.

Espinosa said that school is in the red category in English Language Arts and in the orange category in math — the two lowest categories on the California School Dashboard, the state’s school evaluation tool.

“By reading these plans, the goals don’t seem to come from accurate data and don’t reflect the school’s actual performance. We need a plan with accurate goals, accessible to parents, and that we can understand, knowing who is accountable for the plan,” Espinosa said.

At the May meeting, the group of parents asked LA Unified’s new superintendent and the school board members to analyze those plans and present their findings publicly at the June 12 board meeting. They delivered a letter and other documents, electronically, including a list of the 49 lowest-performing elementary and middle schools and the district.

Their request does not appear in the Tuesday meeting’s agenda as an item itself, but the SPSA plans are mentioned in García’s and Vladovic’s resolution.

García said she saw the documents the parents delivered to the seven members of the board and the superintendent, and she thinks parents did the right thing.

“It‘s important that we hear our community continue to advocate for changes in our schools. The plans are different across all schools — it’s the execution of the plan, the relationships at the school site, but at the core, there’s no one solution for immediate turnaround,” she said.

While she recognized there are schools that are not “where we want them to be, and others show inconsistent improvement, some are improving every year.” But she believes there’s not one solution for everybody.

“I think that it is the district’s responsibility how are we supporting all schools, but in my district, when a principal and local superintendent make choices, I generally see better results than when big Beaudry (LA Unified’s headquarters) makes a choice about something,” García said.

Seth Litt, executive director of the advocacy group Parent Revolution that supports the group of parents, said the new resolution would improve the process, including goal setting, for the single plans. But he added, “Nothing will improve for children until the organizational culture that refuses to hold itself accountable, even to its own rules and resolutions, changes.

“We want to know why schools, local districts, district leadership and the school board have all been approving school plans that violate the current requirements. The lack of coherent school improvement plans for the district’s lowest-performing schools is just one symptom of that culture.”

He added, “Parents are very disappointed. Some of them are still determined to seek for change, but others are getting ready to move their kids out of those schools. Parents have shown they want to be partners in improving their schools and their community, but there has been no room for them.”

(Courtesy: “Report Card Progress in Los Angeles Schools: Rigor, Fairness, and Engaging Families”)

Two reports released Tuesday urge LA Unified to start making tough choices to boost student achievement and to move faster in delivering more funds to the schools serving the neediest students.

The first study found that LA Unified has been slow to get increased state funding to the schools serving students with the highest needs, particularly in elementary and middle schools. The fourth annual “Report Card Progress in Los Angeles Schools: Rigor, Fairness, and Engaging Families,” released by United Way Greater Los Angeles and UC Berkeley, indicates that district officials may not be meeting their legal obligation in allocating the money generated for that purpose.

After four years of state legislation that shifts billions of dollars to students with the highest needs, LA Unified “has taken just tiny steps in funding needy schools” and lacks a plan to change that, the study says.

“We continue to see little fairness in how LAUSD distributes dollars to schools, ignoring whether they serve high or low shares of low-income children,” said Bruce Fuller, UC Berkeley professor and the study’s director.

LA Unified task force says ‘Hard Choices’ must be made

Also Tuesday, the LA Unified School District Advisory Task Force released its fourth report, titled “Hard Choices,” which also calls on the district to create a budget focused on students’ needs rather than just balancing numbers, and with real input from the community.

The task force presented its report at Tuesday afternoon’s school board meeting.

“There are hard choices ahead, and the intention of the report is to be truth-tellers, raise the tough questions about how the district will develop a long-term plan that outlines investments, not just about dollars and cents but about impact on students’ learning,” task force co-chair Wendy Greuel said.

The volunteer and independent task force examined student learning, workforce, and equity in funding in light of the financial crisis faced by the district, which could lead to bankruptcy in the next two years, even with this year’s $548-million surplus. But Greuel says that can be addressed at the same time the district makes strategic and intentional decisions to improve student academic performance.

“The district will have a deficit of $400 million by school year 2020-21, so we cannot wait to address that issue because we know we don’t see an increase of the revenue and the LCFF (the state’s Local Control Funding Formula) is not projected to increase going forward,” Greuel said Monday during a media conference call.

“It’s really about reconnecting resources and choices that strengthen student learning, not just about reducing costs.”

The task force’s report was conducted in collaboration with data analysis organization Education Resource Strategies, which developed comparative data analyses from other districts including Oakland and Denver, which can inform LA Unified on how to allocate money where the impact can be greater, like early instruction and literacy, and professional development for teachers and school administrators.

Joe McKown, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, told board members Tuesday that their research found that LA Unified’s benefits investments are high compared to other districts, that the criteria for those increases don’t necessarily reinforce district strategies, the school day is short in comparison to other districts, teachers have less time for collaboration as professionals, and the district invests more in administration.

The proportion of students in more restrictive special education settings is also higher, and there is more variation in special education class sizes, which McKown said is leading to over-investment. Special education class sizes tend to be smaller than the district target, so money can’t be used in other ways, “such as interventions that would prevent students from moving into special education in the first place.”

He recommended revising health and welfare benefits, as LA Unified’s “investment is higher on a per person basis than in the peer districts we studied. There is a broader set of people getting benefits, and the benefits are more costly.”

The report also found that “LA Unified’s principals are changing schools on average every two to three years and district teachers devote limited time to professional development with no time set aside for peer-to-peer collaboration and only 2.9 days per year devoted to professional learning.”

The report recommends doubling the current investment in English and math instruction and literacy for specific grades such as third grade, as research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is crucial for continued academic success. It also recommended more overall investment in instruction for all grades including transitional kindergarten and in after-school and sports programs.

The task force’s goal, said Janelle Erickson, its executive director, is that the board considers the findings and the data in the report to generate more transparency on the budget by connecting allocation of resources to how that can impact student achievement.

After the presentation, LA Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner welcomed the recommendations and said he expects the board to reconvene in September with a plan. Beutner was co-chair of the task force before being elected superintendent last month. Tuesday was Beutner’s first board meeting.

The task force report “happens to coincide with the United Way and CLASS coalition report,” Beutner said. “Together they identify a series of challenges the district must address.”

Beutner echoed Greuel, who said warnings to the district about its eroding finances have been presented multiple times since 2004. “The rate of increase for health care costs has exceeded the increase of revenues for this district for 20 years,” he said.

“The budget deficit, structural or otherwise, is large and growing,” he added. “Unless something does change … students and communities will be harmed.”

He called LA Unified a “top-down organization” and said, “We need to immediately design an organization that puts appropriate resources at the schools. That’s upside down of what we have today.”

He added, “The debate should no longer be about whether these challenges exist but how we can work together to solve them.”

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, said the report presents an opportunity for the board to have a conversation on the district’s values and to develop a plan of action. “This presents a new way we can stretch dollars more efficiently and have a better return on investment. I expect we will have a plan in the coming weeks or months, not in years from now.”

Board member Richard Vladovic called for a September meeting to address the issues raised in the report. “We’ve had a series of reports and we’ve never really followed any of them.”

Board President Monica Garcia welcomed the report and acknowledged that hard choices need to be made. “Whatever celebrations are happening” in the district, she said, “there are kids being left out of that success.”

United Way calls out LA Unified for being slow to fund neediest students

According to the United Way study, LA Unified each year receives about $1 billion in new funding under the Local Control Funding Formula legislation to support disadvantaged students, including those living in poverty, in the foster care system, and English learners, but the district spreads funding evenly among low-income and middle-class schools, which is not aligned with the state’s goal of closing racial and economic disparities in student achievement.

“The intent of the Local Control Funding Formula was to ensure that the schools serving our most vulnerable students receive additional funding to support academic and enrichment learning,” said Elise Buik, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “This report highlights that this is not happening, and students are struggling as a result. It’s time our educational leaders in Los Angeles Unified School District invest strategically and equitably to close the opportunity gaps for all students.”

The fourth annual report card of how LA Unified implements school finance and related reforms was developed by United Way along with the 70-group Communities for Los Angeles School Success coalition (CLASS).

What was highlighted as positive is how LA Unified has been directing the most dollars per pupil to high schools serving large concentrations of disadvantaged students, enabling more of these students to access the A-G college prep courses.

“Wider access to A-G courses, encouraging students to pursue college, has boosted graduation rates,” said Jeanne Fauci, executive director of the Center for Powerful Public Schools, a member of CLASS.

But overall, the concern remains as the outcomes don’t reflect the increase in per-pupil spending. LA Unified student proficiency rates on state tests had almost no increase for the past two years.

Last year’s test results showed that less than half — 40 percent — of them met or exceeded standards in English language arts. Only 30 percent did so in math.

The district’s per-pupil budget has climbed from about $9,400 in the year before the 2008 recession to $13,200 in inflation-adjusted dollars, a 40 percent jump in total spending, according to the study.

In order to better serve families with quality and equitable services, the United Way study recommends the district focus in three areas: create support and interventions to underserved students, target dollars in elementary and middle schools in historically underserved communities, and work closely with parents and school site leaders to shape school-level budgets.

In representing the state Board of Education and Superintendent Tom Torlakson in an official response released last week to a lawsuit filed against them in December 2017, California’s attorney general asserted that parents and taxpayers should not be able to complain if only 4 percent of kids in a school can read at grade level. The lawsuit, Ella T. v. The State of California, was filed in Los Angeles by Morrison & Foerster LLP and Public Counsel on behalf of 10 students. It alleges that the state has violated these students’ fundamental right to a basic education by depriving them of access to an equitable opportunity to learn to read at grade level. The state’s response to these children is, in essence, “So what?”

Of course, the state didn’t miss a beat in claiming that it has made “extraordinary efforts” to provide extra billions of dollars to school districts through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which purportedly addresses the extra needs of English learners, students in poverty, and foster youth to help them read at grade level. With all the extra money and the listing of state priorities, according to the attorney general, the state Board of Education and the superintendent of public instruction have met any obligation owed to California’s children. And, as to the 96 percent of students at La Salle Avenue Elementary School who haven’t been taught to read? Well, they should simply take their complaints elsewhere. In other words: Tough luck, kids. Mala suerte, niños.

Unfortunately for California’s children, this lawsuit isn’t the only example of politicians turning their back and skirting their responsibilities to help our most vulnerable students. When scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released in April, many state leaders in Sacramento did the same thing. The NAEP, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, showed California again falls near the bottom of national rankings. Despite all the “extraordinary efforts” and billions of dollars of new money going to school district bureaucracies, California’s low-income fourth-graders fall next-to-last place in math. In eighth-grade reading, NAEP results revealed that the average score for African-American students was 28 points lower than for white students.

State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, who recently reported he will no longer seek another term, said he was “pleased” with the progress on the NAEP.

California’s statewide tests, given to all public school students in grades 3-8 and 11, didn’t paint a much better picture. Less than half of all students in California were proficient in reading. Nevertheless, Torlakson also said he was “pleased” with these results. Meanwhile, at La Salle Elementary School, one of the schools in the Ella T. case, not even 5 percent of students met grade-level standards in reading on California tests. The results from these state tests for every school in California were sent to Sacramento bureaucrats; simply put, the state knows these schools are failing children.

Do the state and its politicians have a responsibility to educate California’s children? The California Constitution and the California Supreme Court say yes. Instead of patting themselves on the back at the same time they are turning their backs to our kids, state politicians and bureaucrats should actually recognize that throwing money at the school bureaucracy is not enough and California’s “leaders” have a constitutional responsibility to do something serious about persistent school failure.

As part of LCFF, the state, apparently not trusting the competence of the California Department of Education, created yet another state bureaucracy called the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE). But the CCEE has done nothing to help schools (its director called part of the school accountability process a “monstrosity”) and hasn’t even visited the schools described in the Ella T. lawsuit.

Sacramento is pouring more money into school districts and bureaucracy, but that doesn’t mean the politicians have figured out a way to get the money to the classrooms where the kids and teachers really need it. Opportunity and achievement gaps don’t magically go away with more money when there’s no accountability or transparency for the money or academic results.

California politicians have taken very little action to make sure that each individual child has the opportunity to reach their full potential, no matter which public school they attend in this state. Instead of being “pleased,” the politicians need to take responsibility — and then take action. They must start by standing and facing the situation the children of California and their parents face every morning and admit that the state is facing an education crisis.

Bill Lucia is president and CEO of EdVoice, which advocates for policies to increase measurable student achievement for all students in California and eliminate inequality of educational opportunity in public schools.