The Legislature is working on legislation to make California eligible – and hopefully competitive – for federal “Race to the Top” grant funding worth up to $750 million for California.
SB5X 1 by Senator Gloria Romero (D- East Los Angeles) is the bill that I, education reformers, and the Governor support, but it is sitting in limbo in the Assembly Education Committee. The California Teachers Association is opposed to it. The Romero bill contains many genuine reform elements that deserve support and applause. It permits pupil education data to be used for teacher and administrator evaluation and employment decisions; removes the statutory cap on the number of charter schools in California; creates the “Open Enrollment Act” permitting pupils in specified low-performing schools to transfer to other schools within or outside their district; requires intervention in the 5% of California schools that are identified as the most persistently low-performing; allows the creation of alternative teacher credential programs for science, technology, engineering, math and career technical educators; allows 50% of the parents of children in specified low-performing schools to sign a petition requiring the school to adopt one of five federally prescribed alternative governance structures, and; requires the State Board of Education to amend California’s reading, writing, and mathematic academic content standards to be in accord with upcoming federal standards, while specifying that those new standards must not reduce the rigor of California’s current standards.
The bill supported by the California Teachers Association, and other establishment entities, is AB5X 8 (Brownley, D – Santa Monica). That bill passed the Assembly and is set to be heard in the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday. The Governor has threatened to veto it. If the bill gets to him in its present form, he should.
The Brownley bill would allow parents to request a reform strategy at a failing school, but only if 50% of all parents vote for it at a public hearing. The bill does not require the school board to hold the meeting at the school. The bill also mandates the adoption of new audit requirements for charter schools without any input from representatives of the charter school community, but gives those most hostile to charter schools input into the new audit guidelines. There are also new guidelines for granting charters under the guise of raising their accountability to that of traditional schools, but these would actually bring charters down to a lower level by allowing low-performing charters to continue operating. The charter school community, through EdVoice, supports closing low-performing charter schools, not putting them on the same life-support the state provides low-performing traditional schools. EdVoice believes this will kill innovation and improvement in charter schools. As far as the idea of raising standards in charter schools generally, the Brownley bill ignores the simple truth that charters schools are already held to a higher standard than public schools because they are subject to voluntary enrollment. Traditional schools have compulsory enrollment, but like the East Germans, many of their schools are so bad they need a wall to keep their kids in. The bill does contain some good innovations about merit pay for teachers but then subjects these innovations to collective bargaining agreements, meaning they will never be implemented because the unions oppose them. And finally, while the Romero bill mandates that California’s standards stay high regardless of the new federal Common Core State Standards Initiative, this bill would mandate California adopt the new standards even if they are lower than what California has today.
I urge the Senate to take action in the Appropriations Committee to move Senator Romero’s bill, amend Brownley’s AB5X 8, or start from scratch.
