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John Affeldt

California's shift to a new weighted student funding model represents simply the nearly recent example of how Democratic state policymakers here are charting a different course in education policy than the Obama Administration and Congress.

As I noted in a post last calendar week, California and Washington take taken distinctly different approaches to achievement gaps that increasingly are most closely associated with economic inequality. Rather than focusing on firing "bad" teachers and endmost schools, California has moved to direct more resource to low-income districts and increase local decision-making, with sanctions a last resort after support and technical assistance have failed.

Other examples of the deviation between California and Washington grow. It's not just that Gov. Brownish and Secretarial assistant Duncan failed to come to terms over a waiver from No Kid Left Backside when well-nigh 40 other states have. While the feds have pushed for greater linkages between student and instructor information, Brown (with the unions quietly auspicious) vetoed funding to implement a teacher database, CALTIDES.

In March, the California Committee on Teacher Credentialing, headed by Brown's appointee Linda Darling-Hammond, pushed back confronting the federal predilection to ensure teacher quality by de-emphasizing grooming standards in favor of a holy grail of downstream effectiveness measures. The Commission voted to ramp up pre-service training requirements for interns didactics English learners and in-service supervision requirements for all interns, peculiarly those pedagogy ELs. And Washington's darlings, Teach for America and the charter school entrance hall, suffered a rare loss when the credentialing commission adamant "innovation" tin't excuse putting teachers who know little or nothing well-nigh teaching English as a second language in front of English learners.

Beyond the conclusion evidenced past the country's new school funding formula to focus on poverty head-on, the biggest divergence between Washington and California is over the use of standardized examination scores for accountability purposes, which has been firmly ensconced in D.C. policy since No Kid Left Backside (NCLB) was enacted and has been largely adopted past the Obama Administration. Governor Dark-brown, all the same, has denounced standardized testing and its narrow measurement by fill-in-the-bubble, starting with his 2009 Race to the Top comments through to his virtually recent Land of the State speech.

While the federal Section of Didactics presently plans to advise new regulations bringing K-12 test scores to teacher didactics accountability (amidst other things, limiting federal pupil aid to students in teacher preparation programs if their prior graduates haven't produced loftier enough student test scores), Brownish and the Legislature have chosen for a new "holistic, multi-dimensional" accountability system with the Local Command Funding Formula legislation. By October 2022 the California Country Board of Teaching must adopt a set of evaluation rubrics along these "holistic" lines to make up one's mind when districts are to receive technical assistance or afterward intervention or ultimately possible trusteeship.

The candidates for inclusion among the evaluation rubrics include more than than a dozen academic and school climate measures, including rates of graduation, student suspension and absenteeism, English learner reclassification rates, Advanced Placement grade test scores and percentages of students qualifying for admission to the University of California and California State University.

It remains to be seen whether California's future accountability arrangement, focused on multi-dimensional outcome evaluation, technical assistance and support, with intervention and sanction as a last resort, will square with the future federal accountability organisation under the side by side version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA; commonly known equally NCLB) or whether the state will continue to be forced to operate two accountability systems, ane state and 1 federal. It'southward a fair bet, though, that Washington, particularly its Republicans, have become weary of NCLB'southward federal prescriptions and will adopt a new ESEA that gives states much broader elbowroom.

One thing is for certain: other than getting on board with the Common Core State Standards — which Brown sees equally a way to motility abroad from the fill-in-the-bubble tests — California'southward governor and Legislature, both influenced by the teachers unions and both solidly in the Democrats' camp, aren't reading from the same education policy book every bit Washington these days.

Is it too much to hope that Washington will begin taking notice and start moving toward the anti-poverty educational policies being pursued in the state where i in 8 public school students nourish school? Or perhaps the best we tin can hope for is that continued partisan gridlock in D.C. will continue to create opportunities for California to go its own way.

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John Affeldt is Managing Chaser at Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit police force firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination, and is a leading voice on educational disinterestedness issues. He has been recognized by California Lawyer Magazine equally a California Attorney of the Year.

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