Crucial Issues in California Education 2000

California’s schools may face scarcities of many key ingredients, from qualified teachers to modern classrooms. But there is no shortage of ideas when it comes to how policymakers are eagerly searching for ways to fix the state’s troubled public schools.

The team that crafted this volume, Crucial Issues in California Education 2000: Are the Reform Pieces Fitting Together?, faced a massive challenge simply keeping up with the reforms being legislated in Sacramento and the ways in which local districts have struggled to implement them. While the new mandates forged by policymakers have been well-intentioned, they threaten, in number and complexity, to overwhelm educators.

California’s educators have gone through several generations of school reform. The 1960s brought early categorical programs aimed at serving previously underserved groups, from children with weak reading skills to non-English speaking youngsters. In 1983, more than 40 separate reforms were approved by the legislature. The 1990s brought new initiatives in the school-choice arena, such as charter schools, a new state testing program, a mandated attempt to end social promotion of children, and radical reductions in class sizes. Bilingual teaching methods were outlawed unless a critical mass of local parents demanded that they continue.

But the new Sacramento-led accountability system, successfully pushed through the legislature by Gray Davis during his initial months as governor, is unprecedented in a number of ways. Aiming, in the governor’s words, “to restore the greatness of California education,” Sacramento for the first time is tracking which schools effectively raise children’s learning curves over time and which schools fail to do so. Carrots or sticks are allocated by Sacramento. Curriculum guidelines and a new statewide exam, only partially aligned with what teachers are expected to teach, are also crafted in the state capital. The legislature has now told all school districts to implement a peer-evaluation process for all teachers. Districts continue to struggle with reducing class sizes and finding enough qualified teachers, as well as ending social promotion and creating new summer school programs for those who flunk a grade level.

Yet only in selected cases do schools and teachers receive additional resources to push hard on all these reform fronts. From a policy perspective, the governance of public education continues to steadily move to Sacramento and away from local school boards. The expectations and mandates placed on these local boards, district staff, principals, and classroom teachers are rising dramatically. But Sacramento’s—as well as the voters’—political will to provide additional resources to get the job done remains constrained. In March 2000, a majority of voters said they did not want to make it easier for local educators to sell bonds to renovate dilapidated school facilities.

In this volume, the PACE team offers mixed observations about this flurry of reform activity. On one hand, the PACE team feels good about the civic debate that has invigorated California for the past decade and a half. The expressed concerns of parents, civic leaders, employers, and editorial boards has moved policymakers—at both state and local levels—to enact a breathtaking array of policy initiatives.

On the other hand, the PACE team wonders if these myriad reforms will add up to a coherent set of institutional changes. That is, are we weaving together a patchwork quilt that, while colorful, fails to hang together over time? Several of the chapters that follow detail pieces of the reform puzzle, then ask whether the pieces are fitting together. A second set of questions must be put on the table: How do these reforms deliver more highly qualified and skillful teachers, and how do they motivate the state’s teachers to innovate and implement more effective teaching practices? In other words, do these puzzle pieces of reform fit together into a coherent “theory of action” whereby policies emanating from Sacramento will energize teachers in the school down the street?

From the outset, PACE focuses on the question of policy coherence. The chapters that follow push forward on the issues of whether teachers will be moved to improve and whether mandates without additional resources will really be able to bring forth more stimulating classrooms and pedagogy.