A Plan to Save Our Schools

In 1960, a tidal wave of baby boomers was crashing through the state’s K-12 system toward college, and higher education was totally unprepared. State policymakers could have patched together remedies that would ease the crisis while doing little to elevate the quality and ranking of the state’s colleges and universities. Instead, led by then-UC President Clark Kerr, they crafted a visionary master plan.

The plan’s promise was revolutionary: All California high school graduates could have a low-cost college education. Its ingenious blueprint laid out a coordinated, three-tier system of community colleges, California State University and University of California campuses to produce highly trained scholars, educated citizens and a well-prepared workforce. Gov. Pat Brown declared: “This is the most significant step California has ever taken in planning for the education of our youth.”

Across the state, citizens were similarly inspired and energized. In the following decades they transformed California’s universities and colleges into the finest system of public higher education in the world while providing a college education to the largest and most diverse group of students ever. Today, despite the state’s dramatic economic, political and demographic shifts, California’s colleges and universities remain remarkably robust.

The rest of California’s education system has not fared so well. Since Proposition 13 capped property taxes in 1978, drying up the flow of local tax dollars to public schools, California’s K-12 schools have declined precipitously. The state has assumed a larger funding role, but funding has not begun to keep pace with inflation, and with state money has come more state control of spending. For two decades, state officials--prodded by lobbyists and other interest groups--have layered policy on top of policy, program on top of program, regulation on top of regulation. Put bluntly, the state created a labyrinth for school districts to navigate to secure a share of a capricious resource base.

Today, a second tidal wave of young people has hit California’s schools. This time, it is the K-12 system that cannot cope. Incoherent policies and under-funding have made our once-excellent schools the object of national scorn. We have elaborate educational standards, but no guarantees that students have the resources and opportunities needed to meet them. Detailed rules dictate which textbooks schools can buy, but nothing requires that schools provide textbooks at all. Complex requirements govern who can teach, but loopholes allow thousands of uncertified people to teach each year. The accountability system--made up of an “off the shelf” test that doesn’t match the state’s content standards--lacks the information parents and policymakers need to fix the problems that keep students from learning.

The overall mess has meant that some good ideas have had disastrous consequences. Take the state’s requirement for a 20-1 student-to-teacher ratio in some grades. It is a good idea, basically, but because it requires many more teachers, the state’s class-size-reduction initiative turned a serious shortage of qualified teachers into a full-fledged crisis. It triggered an exodus of qualified teachers from schools in poor communities into more advantaged ones that offer better working conditions. Many schools serving the most vulnerable children have been left with fewer than half of their teachers certified.

Perhaps now there is a chance to reintroduce some sanity to K-12 schooling. Facing a challenge even more daunting than that of 1960, the Legislature this year has set out to extend the reach and promise of its master plan to the entire public education system. A joint Senate and Assembly committee led by state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-San Diego) charged dozens of civic leaders, academics, businesspeople, educators, parents and other ordinary Californians to study and recommend a new master plan for bringing the state’s schools, colleges and universities into a cohesive system--from kindergarten through all levels of the university experience and beyond.

Former UC President Kerr, now in his early 90s, wished the Legislature well: “We had a golden moment in the 1960s, and we made a lot of progress in creating greater equality of opportunity and a better economic system.... And now we face this choice: Are we going to continue the suicidal course of the last 20 years or are we going to move in the direction of paradise regained? That depends tremendously on the report that your committee is going to turn out.”

Released last week, the first draft of that report awaits the scrutiny of the Legislature and the public. The new master plan, which I helped draft, contains more than 50 recommendations that would revamp our schools in the service of splendid goals: universal access to preschool; a qualified and inspiring teacher in every classroom; a rigorous curriculum that will prepare all students for success in postsecondary education, work and society; adequate learning support services; and uncrowded physical learning environments that are safe, well equipped and well maintained. Already it has sparked education officials to begin analyzing the state’s bulky and sometimes irrational education code to see how it would fit--or not fit--with the plan.

In the weeks ahead, much debate and lobbying will likely focus on narrow provisions of the proposed plan. This is to be expected. Undoubtedly, we will hear the familiar assertions that the recommendations undermine local control, add stifling regulation, are too costly and so on. Many will claim to support the new plan in principle but then try to “fix” it by dismantling its recommendations in ways that protect old interests. The sausage-like policymaking process will try to accommodate by grinding the draft’s tough-minded recommendations into more palatable platitudes. Much will be negotiated and changed.

The current draft is not, of course, flawless. Particularly troubling is the suggestion that the California Constitution be amended to eliminate state responsibility in some areas, leaving children with nowhere to turn when their local districts fail them.

However, three tough-minded structural changes at the heart of the plan must not be compromised. These are what will transform California’s K-12 schools, much as the earlier master plan transformed higher education.

First, the plan advocates “Opportunity to Learn Standards” that specify what government agencies--the state and school districts--must provide all schools. These standards spell out the educational essentials that many California students now lack: a qualified teacher, a curriculum aligned with the state’s standards, enough texts and materials for both classroom use and homework, clean and safe learning environments and so forth. It’s simply unthinkable that California doesn’t have such standards already.

Second, the master plan restructures the accountability system to make the adults in the system--from the governor on down--answerable to children and communities, rather than vice versa. The performance of these adults would be measured and reported each year in an “Opportunity to Learn Index” that would complement the state’s Academic Performance Index, which measures student performance at each school. Rather than judging students (and their schools) only by the number of correct answers students “bubble in” on standardized tests, students’ learning will be linked to what they had a chance to learn--what their teachers taught, and under what conditions their learning took place. The independently elected state superintendent would become the accountability watchdog, providing the public with the information it needs to hold state agencies, school districts and schools accountable for providing what teachers and students need to teach and learn. Parents and communities would have ways to act when the system fails.

Third, the new master plan replaces an impossibly irrational education finance structure with a model that begins with the actual costs of high-quality schooling. In place of more than 70 categorically funded programs, a “California Quality Education Model” would spell out the critical components of an education based upon rigorous state standards and the funding needed to provide a quality education to every student. This model won’t end the politicking over each year’s education budget. However, it would allow legislators to focus more on the big picture of quality education rather than giving exclusive and myopic attention to individual programs.

Most people will wonder how the state could possibly undertake such radical change at the same time it’s trying to close a $20-billion budget gap. By borrowing against the future and some draconian cuts elsewhere, Gov. Gray Davis preserved--if only barely--the funding guaranteed to the state’s public schools in 1988 by Proposition 98. Yet if the current crisis says anything, it says that the educational system can’t be left to the vagaries of economic swings and political maneuvering. This governor has spared K-12 education, but another might not have.

Now is the moment for the state to take its lead from the smartest and toughest businesses, which in hard economic times reexamine their goals and operations to maximize productivity and ensure a vital future. It’s not that this plan won’t cost--it certainly will, just as the 1960 master plan did. But Californians have shown themselves willing to spend on education when they’re confident the money is being well spent, and the plan offers a map for investing in well-thought-out ways, many of which will cost less in dollars than in brainpower and courage.

Sen. Alpert and state legislators need to hear from Californians. Tell them not to squander this moment. Remind them that the record is clear: When California has kept its educational promises, its students have met the state’s highest hopes for their learning. This was and remains the story of California’s system of higher education. Likewise, when and where California’s will and educational infrastructure slacken, student performance suffers. The 1960 master plan made promises and showed how Californians could deliver on those promises. It’s time for California to promise and deliver again.