I hope you’ll share your reactions and thoughts to these video clips here on InterACT – agree or disagree.

In this first clip, Ravitch considers the unfortunate idea behind NCLB – that eventually, every American public school would be labeled a failure.  She also considers “parent trigger” laws, and suggests that public schools are a public institution, not established and maintained for the sole benefit of the current students, but for the good of society overall and all of the students yet to come.  Why then, should a majority of current (and soon-to-be) parent community have the right to make a decision about potentially drastic changes to an institution that belongs to all of us?

In the second clip, Ravitch looks at the deprofessionalization of education – the sadly popular notion that TFA interns or other alternative-route teachers are good enough to be the classroom teacher of record with so little training, and that principals and superintendents need not have a background in teaching in order to lead effectively in a teaching organization.  When teachers protest these ideas, especially through their unions, the unions themselves are subject to attack for obstructing progress – nevermind that the leading states and nations all have strong teachers unions, while the lowest performing states, generally, are non-union or have weaker unions.

State Capitol Building (photo by the author)

Today in Sacramento (beginning at 9:30 a.m.), Accomplished California Teachers (ACT) will co-present “Teaching Quality and California’s Future” – an event sponsored by the Stuart Foundation and organized by ACT, the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), and Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy Equity (SCOPE).  We are excited to see months of planning culminating in what we hope will be an informative and useful event for our audience.

I’ll try to post short, timely updates on some of the highlights and takeaways of the day, with more of the materials available online soon, here, or at the ACT website.

You can keep apprised of the event and catch some ideas and links by using Twitter.  The main event hashtag will be #CAteaching.  Tweets from the event will come from the following accounts (that we know of):

@AcmpCA_Teachers 

@scope_stanford

@alicemercer

You might also want to follow event participants as indicated below in the event overview.

Event highlights will include:

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will make an announcement and offer opening remarks.

The Bay Area New Millennium Initiative (a project of the Center for Teaching Quality) will present their work on early -career teachers looking at reforms to the profession that would help retain teachers and offer greater variety of roles and responsibilities for teacher leaders.

Anthony Cody (@anthonycody)and I will present ACT’s teacher evaluation report, and argue for a new way of thinking about teacher evaluation – as a robust, ongoing and growth-oriented process that improves all teachers, rather than a bureaucratic procedure focused on compliance and baseline quality control.

Julia E. Koppich and Daniel Humphrey will present their research on peer evaluation in two California school districts.  Their findings indicate that evaluation of teachers by teachers produces some important benefits in both the quality and quantity of the evaluative feedback, and even in the quality of the labor-management relationships between local teachers associations and district administrations.

John Fensterwald (@jfenster)will moderate some discussion and Q&A with the presenters above.  Then, our expert discussant panel will take the stage to react and respond to the presentations.  The participants in this panel are Shannan Brown (2011 CA Teacher of the Year and president of the San Juan Teachers Association), Richard Carranza (Deputy Superintendent, SFUSD), Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes (author of teacher evaluation legislation, AB-5 from last year), and Eric Heins (@ericheins, Vice-President of the California Teachers Association).

Linda Darling-Hammond (photo by the author)

Linda Darling-Hammond will wrap up the event with some final thoughts and reflections on the teaching profession in California.

with Diane Ravitch at the SOS March, July 2011, Washington, D.C.

And then, to cap off the day, several hours later many of the same cast will attend a speech by Diane Ravitch at the Sacramento Convention Center.  All in all, it promises to be a dynamic day for education policy discussion and advocacy in California’s capitol.  (Sorry there aren’t many links in this post – stay tuned for updates, though!)

• The Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project continues to update its research findings, and continues to argue that standardized tests and value-added measurement would be useful in teacher evaluations.  (Washington Post article).
• A study by Harvard and Columbia researchers uses value-added measures to quantify the effects of good teaching in various outcomes for students, well into adulthood. (NY Times article)

A friend of mine sent a Facebook message this morning to ask what I thought of the latter study, but let me say a bit about each of them.  In both cases, I remain skeptical regarding the use of standardized tests to suggest so much about students and teachers.  In the MET project, I actually like much of what I’ve seen reported and summarized regarding their work.  We should definitely pursue ongoing rather than intermittent evaluations, the involvement of multiple evaluators, and try to find ways to include student feedback.  If reformers and politicians would compromise on the use of standardized tests, we would overcome the main policy obstacle in teacher evaluation reform efforts and find much to agree on.  I share Randi Weingarten’s concern, however, that as long as we see anyone coming to this debate with a mindset about ferreting out the bad teachers instead of supporting all teachers, we have work to do to shift that frame.  Her written statement was quoted as follows in the Washington Post (article linked above):  “Until we make a commitment to develop evaluation systems that are first and foremost about continuous improvement and professional growth, we will continue to struggle in our efforts to provide every child with a high-quality education.”

As for the economic analysis of “high value-added teachers” and “low value-added teachers” – yawn.  Did we need another study suggesting that kids who perform better in some measure of academic skills end up earning more money?  Did we need a study to show that some teachers’ students produce better test scores than others and that better test scores correlate with higher earnings, etc.?  These analyses offer little if any guidance for what to do with actual teachers in actual schools.  They try to make their findings sound more significant by multiplying out the variations over decades.  Having that “high value-added teacher” helps a student earn $9,000 more in their working years, so… $9,000 divided by forty-plus years of work, divided by forty-something working weeks in a year, divided by five days per week… we’re talking about loose coins here if we work the math in the opposite direction.  But no – the authors then multiply the effect by all the students in the class and make it look really huge.  Hey, let’s assume retirement age goes up in the future and just throw in another 5 or 10 % on top of that, while we’re at it.

Sadly, if you read the NY Times article, you see the predictable call to make it easier or quicker to fire the weak teachers.  Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of fantasizing about terminations, some fiscal conservatives out there saw these types of studies and said, “You know, if we spent a little more money right now trying to improve the quality of teaching for every teacher, in every classroom, we’d be multiplying these effects by millions of teachers and hundreds of millions of students over the next several decades and we’d be adding billions of dollars in value!  Let’s do it!”

(Note: My reactions to the NY Times article were shaped in part by seeing the reactions of Sarah Goldrick-Rab, Liam Goldrick, Bruce Baker, and Cedar Reiner earlier this morning – so, credit where it’s due!).

photo by the author

• The most exciting part of my edublogging year was probably the Save Our Students March and Call to Action in Washington, D.C.  I was able to be in Washington that week because of the 2011 conference for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, but I managed to divide my time a little bit.  I composed Sending Out an S.O.S. more quickly than anything I’ve ever written of similar length, and posted it within minutes of leaving my hotel room to take in the rally.  I concluded that post as follows:

President Obama and Secretary Duncan have failed as educational leaders.  I’ll offer credit where its due on some initiatives relating to technology, community colleges, and preserving teacher jobs during a difficult economy, but I refuse to lower my expectations for our students and our public education system as a whole.

Gentlemen, we have assessed your education priorities and policies for over two years, and found your efforts are below proficient.  There is a higher standard, and the stakes are high.  Considering that you have the power in this situation, and the pulpit from which to demand the changes we really need, the buck stops with you, but you refuse to engage in an honest evaluation of your failures and correct your course of action.  I understand that; you’re politicians.  That is why people are sending out an S.O.S.  The improvement of public education depends on applying political pressure against you, because dialogue has proven fruitless.

See you on the Ellipse.

•  Another stroke of good fortune in 2011 was being invited to address a meeting of the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, which convened in San Jose on April 21st.  My remarks to the commission were not composed for the purpose of the blog, but I ended up with enough material for two blog posts: Equity and Excellence, Part One, and Part Two.

•  A blog post I’m particularly proud of came in response to a thoroughly misguided policy in a pair of Orange County high schools that used color-coded identification cards and a variety of incentives and shamings to try to motivate students to score well on state tests.  Eugenic Legacies Still Influence Education was the longest and most thoroughly researched blog post I’ve ever composed, and it generated the most comments as well.  I almost didn’t write it:

“I’d have thought the policies were so obviously wrong, so insensitive, so counterproductive and so poorly aligned with what we know about motivation and performance, that it would almost be unnecessary to write a blog post about the incident.  I’m glad that Anthony Cody did, but I didn’t think I’d have much more to contribute.  Until I mentioned eugenics – first on Anthony’s blog, then on Twitter.  In a series of exchanges with someone I respect, I was repeatedly challenged on my claim that this policy had connections to eugenics.  So here we go.”

•  The most read InterACT post of 2011 was Common Core Confusion: ASCD Edition – which received a nice boost in readership from ASCD Smartbrief.  However, months later, I see that post and its predecessor, Common Core Confusion, still showing up in our daily and weekly blog traffic.  I attribute that fact entirely to interest in the topic rather than any particular insights I’ve offered.  Common Core standards, implementation, and assessment will also be the subject of my first blog post in 2012, I anticipate, when I have the time to synthesize a wealth of information and opinions that arose in an education policy summit I attended a couple weeks ago.

• Another significant education policy issue this year was NCLB waivers, which prompted me to write Duncan Seeks Cheap Conversions – “In recent news, we learn that Duncan may be willing to waive NCLB provisions and penalties, in return for states’ compliance with his favored policies.  I thought Race to the Top was an overreach, but this time, Duncan’s move brought quick criticism from wider quarters.”  

• Federal policy relating to school turnarounds did some damage here in California, which I discussed in The Illogic of School Turnaround Models – “San Francisco will implement an unsanctioned approach to an illogical policy that replaces most local decision making to conform to inflexible federal policies.  It makes little sense educationally, but this policy couldn’t be any more politicized.  It might appeal to some of President Obama’s supporters in the so-called education reform camp, but it didn’t please civil rights leaders and organizations, and I doubt it’s going to win over many voters who are just wondering why the their kids’ principals and teachers had to be replaced in an arbitrary manner.”

• The political and economic climate around the country put unions in the news quite a bit this year, leading me to address the topic twice.  First, I recalled my great-uncle Phil and wrote Union Proud, and then I joined in EduSolidarity with some other bloggers and wrote Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions.

• In What’s Missing in Discussions of Children’s Interests? I wrote: “Another simplification I hear and read often is that school reform must be carried out with the interests of children placed ahead of the interests of adults.  Most recently, I found it (and commented on it) in a blog post by John Merrow.  What a beautiful sentiment!  You can’t argue against that, can you?  Well… I’m going to.”  

• Maybe 2012 will see some improvement in education reporting.  I was not in a charitable mood regarding education journalists when I wrote Appeal to Education Writers: Evaluate Opinions – “It’s been said that everyone is entitled to their opinion, and you’re entitled to report it.  But they’re not entitled to their own facts, and it would help if you would report which side has an opinion backed by facts.”

• Back in 2010, I found myself repeatedly writing about the application of business and management principles in education; I guess 2011 was the year I dabbled in law a bit.  First, I imagined a court case tackling the issue of value-added measurements used in teacher evaluations, and wrote the cross-examination I would love to hear some day: Turning the Tables: VAM on Trial.  Then I read through portions of the judge’s ruling in the case of Lobato v. Colorado, and hoped that the implications of that ruling for similar cases in California might finally mean that it’s Time to Throw Money at the Problem of debilitating education budgets.

• On a lighter note, I put out a small wager to Checker Finn this year, responding to his Half-Baked Teaching Analogy, I but never heard back from him.  No deadline, so I’ll repeat the offer and anyone interested can click on the link for details: “Mr. Finn, I feel a little bad for critiquing your analogy so thoroughly, so here’s an offer in case I’m off-base: if you can find a classroom teacher who will send me a guest blog post preferring your analogy of teaching and learning over mine, then lunch is on me next time you’re at Stanford, and I’ll have learned a culinary lesson.”

Thanks for reading, and come on back in 2012!  Happy New Year!

Kelly Kovacic

Continuing to wrap up 2011 at InterACT, today I highlight a few of the great posts that Kelly Kovacic contributed this year.  (Prior installments include best guest posts and best posts by Martha Infante).  As a result of her time as a California Teacher of the Year, Kelly has kept quite busy not only here in California, but also participating in national, and even international events.  While the pace of InterACT posts has understandably dropped off, it’s always a pleasure to see what Kelly has to offer, whether as a result of her leadership and travels, or just from her perspective as a classroom teacher.

Let’s start off with one of those posts that offer Kelly’s insights relating to her Teacher of the Year experience.  The title is “Learning After You Know It All” – and the topic…

[It] was quite remarkable to attend the recent International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York City where a global collection of ministers of education, labor organization representatives, and teachers sat side-by-side to listen, discuss, and learn. This was the first time such a summit had been held in the United States.  Delegations from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, The People’s Republic of China, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, and United Kingdom joined our home-grown delegation to explore four main topics: Teacher Recruitment and Preparation; Development, Support and Retention of Teachers, Teacher Evaluation and Compensation; and Teacher Engagement in Education.

Kelly’s most read post of the year was “Open Letter to the Public Education Budget Cutters” – which, surprisingly generated no comments for all of those page views. (It’s not too late to comment, by the way).  Perhaps that’s just a blog idiosyncrasy, but I prefer to think that Kelly’s post was just so clear and articulate that there wasn’t much left to say.  It’s important to note that Kelly works at a charter school that has produced some wonderful results for English language learners, students living in poverty, and first generation to attend college.  However, she doesn’t hold up her school’s success as a way to beat up on other schools that haven’t been able to produce similar results.  She writes:

We definitely need more vision and innovative programs to improve those schools that are in trouble.  The success of the students at my school, who all live below the poverty line, is proof that such vision and innovation can and do make a difference.  Schools in trouble deserve immediate, bold, and surgically precise help.  But, it is time to tone down the largely uninformed noise about a complete education system that is “broken.”  It is time to stress and build on the positive; to recognize the excellence that is taking place in most classrooms throughout our nation.  It is time to start treating teachers like valued professional partners, not targets.  It is time to take a courageous stand against rumors, innuendo, and rhetoric.  It is time to support, not attack, public education.

I’m also glad that Kelly took the time to explore an important topic in forward-looking education discussions, in the post, “My teacher… the computer?”  The adoption and implementation will certainly change the way we educate our students and ourselves.  I have no doubt that in another fifteen or twenty years we’ll look back at a system that will seem excessively rigid, linear, and homogeneous; however, Kelly’s conclusion is spot-on:

As we envision schools for the 21^st Century, technology will undoubtedly play an important and integral role.  But, it will be the 21^st Century teacher in the classroom – providing guidance, a passion for learning, an understanding of what is necessary to move a student to the next level of inquiry and excellence, and an unwavering belief in each student’s potential – that will continue to make the ultimate difference.

Martha Infante preparing to speak to the USDOE Equity and Excellence Commission, ( San Jose, CA; 4/21/11)

I’m going to take some liberties in putting together an end-of-year page for Martha Infante, because I think the most significant blogging she did on InterACT was a series of posts that started in 2010 and ran well into 2011 before concluding.  Back in the fall of 2010, Martha’s school was slapped with a label and declared a “failing school.”  Such labels are gross over-simplifications, and as I wrote about earlier this year, when the term “failure” is linked to adequate yearly progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind, it’s becoming an increasingly useless distinction.  Martha’s posts on this topic have allowed readers to see behind the label, to look at the school, the students, teachers, and community, and to see so much of what everyone should understand about the situation.  They are not failing.  The high-stakes and extra pressure are counter-productive.  The result of the whole process was to waste thousands of hours of work that could have been dedicated to purposes closer to the classroom.  The label was removed a year later, leaving people cynical and demoralized.  I hope you’ll take some time to look back at this important series of blog posts by Martha Infante.

• Month One as a Failing School
• Month Three as a Failing School: The Hatchet Drops 
• Month Five as a Failing School
• Month Nine as a Failing School
• Failing School No Longer (But Were We Ever?)

But as significant as these posts were, I’d also be remiss in my duties if I failed to note that Martha’s most read blog post of the year was Not Insulted, in which she takes Arne Duncan to task for trying speak for teachers – and against Diane Ravitch.

You can view all of Martha’s blog posts by using the index in the right-side column of this page – or just click here.

Martha is also an active Twitter user – why not follow her?

Today, the Colorado State Board of Education voted 4-3 to appeal that ruling.  One of the “no” votes came from Elaine Gantz Berman, who wrote about her perspective on the case for Education News Colorado.  In her guest post on their blog, I think she shows a common sense reaction to the ruling.  She writes,

I cannot come up with any reasonable rationale to defend the status quo of how we fund schools, and I believe the students of Colorado deserve a first class education system. Today, we do not have a first class education system in our state.

It’s my hope that this ruling will force the legislature and the governor to come up with a solution now – and not delay the important discussion. Since the solution must not harm other important existing programs – such as Medicaid, higher education, prisons and transportation – I can see no way around the fact that we need additional revenue to address our antiquated school funding model.

I encourage you to read the rest of her post, and hope that here in California, we’ll see similar leadership as our own education funding and equity cases move through the courts.  As I said in my prior post, it’s not that I like the idea of litigating these matters, but the state’s citizens and politicians don’t yet seem inclined to face up to the enormity of the problems and solve them.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper approved of the board’s decision to appeal the case, and issued a statement about the appeal and the ruling, raising issues of practicality and possible conflicts with other portions of the state constitution.

Stop Racing, Start Listening – Sandy Dean, associate director of ACT, started us off this year with her reactions to President Obama’s remarks about teachers and respect for the profession.  This guest post set a tone for the year, questioning the divide between rhetoric and policies.  Another ACT member, Anthony Cody, suggested in his own blog that perhaps this year marked an “awakening” – turning point in exposing the failures of currently favored “reform” strategies.

Teacher-Driven Education Reform That Works – Lynne Formigli wrote about the good work happening in schools that benefit from the Quality Education Investment Act.  For those married to the myth that teachers unions are the problem in public education, Lynne has a powerful rebuttal showing how the California Teachers Association has played a significant role in improving needy schools.

California Teacher Pensions: Are We Really Breaking the State? - one more guest post by Lynne Formigli, tackling another crucial issue in state education policy.  Though it may not have as much to do with classroom practice, it clearly was interesting to readers, and turned out to be the most visited guest post of the year.

Unrealistic Education Reform Goals: A Business Perspective – ACT member Dave Reid allowed us cross-post from his blog, in which he reacted to ambitious but highly specific quantitive goals for Los Angeles Unified School District.  As a teacher with decades of prior experience in business, Dave observes:

Reaching out to the community, involving parents, and motivating students are all critical and necessary to improve academic achievement, attendance and safety; they will yield significant advances in primary and secondary education.  However, the blind adoption of arbitrary, albeit just sounding, quantitative targets is foolish at best, and tremendously harmful at worst.

Getting Less From More - One of my favorite blog posts of the year brings us straight into the classroom of Jane Ching Fung, unpacking hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of curricular materials and wondering why.

Next Steps for LAUSD Teacher Evaluations: You, Me, and AGT – ACT member Lisa Alva Wood shared a number of posts with us this year, and provided us with this thoughtful perspective on teacher evaluation reforms in Los Angeles.  The post generated some interesting comments as well.

Later this week, I’ll post additional 2011 highlights from InterACT.  Stay tuned next week for a post on Common Core Standards implementation and assessment in California, following up on an event I attended a couple weeks ago that featured Linda Darling-Hammond, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, State Assemblymember Julia Brownley, Deb Sigman of the California Department of Education, and other education leaders.

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Just a reminder: teacher evaluation is a topic of great interest to us here at ACT, and the subject of our policy report, “A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: An Evaluation System That Works for California.”  We will be presenting this report in Sacramento on January 20, 2012, as part of a larger education policy summit on teacher quality.  Look at our website and use the Contact form there if you’d like more information on the event.

Imagine for a moment that California used letter grades rather than the Academic Performance Index to rate schools. If I were a parent whose child attended a high school with a “D” on its state report card, I would be gravely concerned that this school would fail to provide my student with the skills to succeed in college, and a college education is vital to my child’s future. If I had a choice, I would certainly want to move my child to an “A” school. I know these report cards aren’t perfect, but there must be a world of difference between the “D” and the “A” rankings, right? And if the “A” school was also listed among Newsweek’s Best High Schools, so much the better, I’m sure.

Wrong. The “D” school is better.

Or to be more precise, the “D” school is better if the measure of quality is college preparation. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this study – “College- and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success” – from Florida. Writer Chad Aldeman sums it up this way:

“While [the 'D' school] got dismal marks from state and federal accountability schemes, it was actually quite successful in a number of important ways. It graduated a higher percentage of its students than [the “A” school] and sent almost the same percentage of its graduates off to college. Once they arrived on college campuses, [the 'D' school] graduates earned higher grades and fewer of them failed remedial, not-for-credit math and English courses than their ['A' school] peers.

“In other words, D-rated [High School] was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida’s accountability systems didn’t measure college and career success in 2006, nobody knew.”

The study concludes, as you might anticipate, with a call for more data going into accountability systems, and it’s hard to argue with that. But the catch is that any rating or ranking is going to miss something, and is going to create simplistic lists of winners and losers out of what should be a more complex view of school quality.

It is time to distinguish between having data and claiming to know what it means. If we were conducting chemical experiments, it might be different. With schools, we are “measuring” extended periods of highly complex interactions among hundreds or thousands of people (different combinations of people every year), operating under different combinations of influences, and we have yet to agree as a state or society about the outcomes that matter most in that complex setting.

Ultimately, I would argue that the state should be in the business of providing resources and guidelines, and leaving the final assessments of quality and success to professional and local agencies. These agencies must ensure transparency and protect the interests of all stakeholders. They should be comfortable examining widely varying types of data and appreciating the value of each. Their judgments and conclusions would be informed by data and observations, but expressed in words – reports that don’t hide behind the false certainty or pseudo-objectivity of final scores, points, grades, or gold stars.

California high schools already engage in an accreditation process similar to that description, carried out by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Why not make it more meaningful, but less intensive, and expand the approach to other levels?

If our citizenry can’t handle that shift, then we have a goal for our educational system, not to produce citizens, media, and political leaders who would prefer to have a meaningless “A” or “D” slapped on a school, rather than understand and express the complex realities of school quality.

[UPDATED: 12/13/11 - see end of post]

It’s a well-worn phrase: you can’t just throw money at the problem. Well, what if the problem is a serious lack of money? Essentially, that’s the issue playing out in the Colorado court system.  The most recent developments were reported by the Denver Post:

In a ruling that could have profound consequences for Colorado’s budget, a Denver judge Friday said the state’s school-funding system is not “thorough and uniform” as mandated by the state constitution.
The state’s school-funding system “is not rationally related to the mandate to establish and maintain a thorough and uniform system of free public schools,” District Judge Sheila Rappaport said in a 183-page ruling in which she called the system “unconscionable.”
“It is also apparent that increased funding will be required,” Rappaport wrote.
The case, Lobato vs. State of Colorado, was filed in 2005.

Though the case will be appealed before its outcome compels any action by the state of Colorado, Judge Rappaport’s ruling suggests that the plaintiffs made a powerful case at trial, proving that the underfunding of education denies Colorado’s students their constitutional rights.  The government of Colorado is obligated to “provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state.”

California’s constitution contains a similar provisions, and similar cases are currently working their way through our court system.  In one of those cases, the plaintiffs, Campaign for Quality Education (CQE), are represented by Public Advocates, Inc.  I spoke with staff attorney Tara Kini about the Lobato case in Colorado, who was naturally encouraged by the ruling in Colorado.  “It’s very exciting, a tremendous victory for the plaintiffs,” she told me by phone.  Among the findings she was most enthusiastic about was that the problems with school funding were not deemed to be a temporary result of a weak economy, but rather, a chronic problem exacerbated by a fundamentally flawed approach that denies adequate funding to all Colorado schools (for reasons detailed below).  Public Advocates and CQE are making a similar argument in their case, which lower courts have declined to hear and will soon be appealed to a higher court.  One key difference between the California and Colorado cases is that the CQE case not only argues the inadequacy of school funding on its own faults, but also argues that the inequities in school funding across regions is a violation of students’ rights to equal protection.

In the meantime, I hope public education advocates around the country will look into the details of the Lobato case.  While the precise language of consitutions and statutes will vary across states, I think the underlying logic displayed in this ruling would be broadly applicable, possibly laying out a strategy that could help compel states to provide a real quality education for all students.

I’ve picked out some of what I find to be the most important and compelling portions of the ruling, which you may read in its entirety (PDF) if you wish.  My citations are from the page numbers of the ruling itself, not the PDF, and I’ve offered a short comment on each selection.

Not one State witness was able to identify specific inefficiencies in the Plaintiff School Districts or any school district in the State that is wasting money. [State Education] Commissioner [Robert] Hammond is unaware of any district expenditure that is not related to fulfilling the principles of the “thorough and uniform” clause. (163)

Apparently, Judge Rappaport was not swayed by arguments that schools could be run more efficiently, since the defense was unable to show waste.

Dr. [William] Moloney does not know whether any of the examples he cites in his policy brief of schools doing “more with less” have actually resulted in any achievement gains.

…

Dr. Moloney believes schools should be reconstituted along the lines of parochial or Kipp schools, which he considers to be among the most successful schools. Kipp schools are distinguishable for two reasons. First, a recent national study on KIPP found that its schools serve fewer students with disabilities and students classified as English language learners. Second, Colorado Kipp schools report that public funding does not cover all the costs of running its schools, leaving a significant shortfall that is covered by private philanthropy. On average, Colorado Kipp schools receive $1600 more per student than the state per pupil revenue. (164)

The “doing more with less” argument was likewise not accepted without convincing evidence.  The evidence offered by the state’s witnesses apparently turned out to show schools doing more with more, and with an easier student demographic.

In many of the cases, the courts disagreed with Dr. [Erik] Hanushek’s expert opinion and found for the plaintiffs. In some of the cases, the courts actually found the data underlying Dr. Hanushek’s opinions to be questionable or problematic and found him to lack credibility….

Dr. Hanushek arrived at his conclusion that achievement across Colorado school districts bears little relationship to spending differences before he did any review or statistical analysis of Colorado data and before he spoke to any education officials in Colorado. In fact, his expert opinion in this case is essentially the same as the one he rendered for the State of Colorado in a public education case ten years ago. Hanushek Trial Tr. 5058:5-5059:6, 5059:23- 5060:3, 5160:9-21….

Dr. Hanushek did not visit any Colorado school districts or speak with any administrators, school board members, teachers, students, or family members in any school district in the State in connection with his work in this case. Nor did he review any Colorado school district budget or specific district policy.  Hanushek Trial Tr.5048:13-5050:2. (165)

Judge Rappaport does not seem persuaded by an economist coming into the state to rehash prior testimony about opinions formed without any specific knowledge of the case.

Kristin Waters, the former principal of the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, testified — and Defendants have argued — that she made the gains she did at Bruce Randolph with no additional funding. Bruce Randolph’s budget from FY 04-05 to FY 08-09 indicates otherwise. During her tenure, Bruce Randolph received fifteen percent more than the per pupil revenue from the State from other funding sources. (166)

Once again, “doing more with less” turns out to be something other than we’re led to believe.

This Court has previously ruled that the following issues raised by the Defendants are not at issue in this case: (1) that public education is not the only required or important state service; (2) that it is rational for the General Assembly to “control the public debt”; (3) that it is rational for the General Assembly to “further local control over instruction” and (4) that it is rational for the General Assembly to “balance appropriations among public services.”  (169)

I think this part is crucial to the discussion of the overall issues.  In other words, the state cannot, as Tara Kini described it to me, “put a right on hold.”  The state cannot excuse itself from providing a proper education due to competing demands for scarce funds.  I recognize that such a ruling has huge budgeting implications, but it does compel the state and the voters to decide if we stand by the concept of a right defined in our constitution.

A system of public school finance that fails to provide sufficient financial resources to the school districts to permit local boards of education to provide the services, instructional programs, materials, and facilities necessary to meet the substantive mandate of the Education Clause violates the Local Control Clause. (171)

In other words, the state cannot be said to meet its legal duty to provide local control to educational agencies if it fails to provide the funding necessary to exercise responsible control over the educational program.

Thus, the General Assembly has fundamentally linked the Education Clause mandate to the standards-based education system and specifically to student attainment of the academic standards as demonstrated by performance on statewide assessments. The Court in Lobato particularly noted that the State’s “education reform statutes with proficiency targets and content standards” may be used to evaluate the constitutionality of the legislature’s actions. Lobato, 218 P.3d at 372, fn. 17. At the very least, the public school finance system must be rationally related to accomplishing the requirements of the State’s own standards-based education and education accountability systems…  (173)

Now this is how accountability should work.  If the students in Colorado are not meeting standards, then it is the state first and foremost that must be held accountable.  Before we reconfigure systems to fire more teachers, before closing down failing schools, before willy-nilly reconfiguration schemes that move around the pieces and produce the same results, we must examine whether or not the state has met its obligations.  They set the standards; did they take provide the resources to allow schools, teachers, and students to meet those standards?  In this case, the answer was absolutely not.

[The] General Assembly set the statewide base funding amount by working backwards from the total funding that it intended to appropriate and carrying forward preexisting school district expenditure levels. There was no effort to analyze the relationship to the actual costs to provide an education of any particular quality. The failure to do any cost analysis and to provide for funding based on such an analysis demonstrates the irrationality of the existing school finance system. (175)

The Court therefore concludes that the entire system of public school finance, including the PSFA, categorical programs, and capital construction funding, is not rationally related to the mandate of the Education Clause. (176)

In the real world – you know, schools – we try to operate by backwards design: knowing where our students need to arrive, we determine how to get them there.  In government, they come up with an amount of money they’re willing to spend, without considering whether or not the money is adequate to reach the objective.  Judge Rappaport finds for the plaintiffs in determining that such an approach is irrational.

School superintendents, finance officers, principals, and teachers described the obstacles and limitations imposed by an irrational, inadequate, and unplanned finance system on the education they are able to provide to the children entrusted to their care.
The Defendants offered no evidence or even information to rebut the conclusion that the finance system is completely divorced from the reality of the education system enacted by the General Assembly in the name of the Education Clause. (177)

I know that if I had sat through this trial for weeks, I’d have been frustrated hearing from people who do not work in schools claiming that the people in the schools must simply make do with what little they have, and that additional resources might be nice, but non-essential.  Apparently the defense was not able to respond to the plaintiffs effectively on this matter.  You can read the details in the ruling, but here’s a summary of how the real-world inadequacies are hard to wish away with words and charts:

The Court finds that due to the irrational funding system and significant underfunding, rural and urban poverty School Districts are unable to hire, compensate, and retain effective, highly qualified teachers and administrators; to provide the curriculum, technology, textbooks, and other instructional materials necessary to meet student performance expectations; and to construct, maintain, renovate school buildings and facilities. Many of these School Districts are relegated to obsolete textbooks and materials, lack of necessary computers and internet connectivity, and dilapidated and unsafe classroom and other facilities. These School Districts have been for many years and are today unable to respond effectively to the changing demands of standards-based education.
The impact of irrational and inadequate funding is not, however, limited to rural and urban poverty School Districts. The Court finds that all School Districts are unable to provide the early childhood and kindergarten programs that are critical to student achievement. All School Districts are unable to provide the classroom time, professional training, and instructional interventions that are critical to meet the expectations of CAP4K, the Education Accountability Act, and SB 10-91. All School Districts are unable to provide the classroom time, professional training, and interventions critical to the education of under-served student populations, including students at-risk of academic failure, non-English speaking students, students with disabilities, students of minority racial and ethnic heritages, students of low-income families, and gifted and talented students. All School Districts lack the funding necessary to meet the increased expectations of the current revisions to standards-based education, and particularly CAP4K, the Education Accountability Act, and SB 191. (178) [emphasis added]

Here’s a real potential victory for Colorado students, teachers, and schools.  The plaintiffs established what is necessary for a quality education, and Judge Rappaport found the evidence strong enough to conclude that every school district in the state – and therefore, the state itself – must invest more money in order to meet consitutional obligations.

These problems are not attributable to inefficiency or inability at the school district level. There is no evidence that any School District is managing its finances ineffectively.  178 [emphasis added]

I hope states around the country are taking a close look at this ruling.  The tighten-your-belt fiscal conservatives are full of homilies about waste and thrift, but at least in this case, they couldn’t prove it in court.  I hope advocates for public education are cheered by these findings, and able to use this ruling to chart a strategy to push, prod, or if (sadly) necessary, litigate our states towards the provision of an education worthy of our ideals and our children.  In California, as in Colorado (and other states), our constitution recognizes a right and offers a guarantee; it’s time for all of us who claim to respect individual rights and state laws to now pay our bills for public education.

UPDATE [12/13/11]: John Affeldt of Public Advocates, Inc., has issued a press release regarding the ruling in Colorado, in which he states, “As in Colorado, California’s underfunded school districts are unable to provide their students with the education that is required by the state constitution and necessary for success in our society. If anything, the California constitution is even stronger than Colorado’s, because the State Supreme Court here has determined that the right to a high quality public education in our state is a fundamental right which can only be impinged by the State for very rare and compelling reasons.”