This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
California K-12 schools have come a long way over the past 20 years, but according to an exhaustive overview of the state’s school system, further progress may require tinkering with a long-entrenched form of school governance: local control.
That’s among the conclusions of the much-anticipated Getting Down to Facts report released Thursday, a 1,000-page undertaking written by more than a hundred K-12 education researchers.
“We’re in a much better place than we were,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education and one of the report’s authors. “But we need a coherent governance system if we’re going to continue to progress.”
The Getting Down to Facts reports, published every 10 to 12 years, are large-scale reviews of California’s K-12 system – what’s working, what’s not, and how lawmakers should respond. For this report, researchers looked at everything from special education staffing to school closures to overhauling high schools. The report is based on extensive data analysis and interviews with hundreds of superintendents, principals, school board members and parents.
The report’s timing is important because the state’s K-12 school system is at a transition point, said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Stanford who is among the lead authors of the report.
The political landscape is changing in California, with voters electing a new governor and state superintendent of public instruction this November. Artificial intelligence is expected to drastically change the way students learn in the coming years. And the state is finally emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended learning for nearly all of California’s 5.8 million public school students.
Lack of consistency and accountability
For at least a century, California has had a convoluted system of school oversight, with the governor, Legislature, state superintendent and state school board all sharing policy-making authority. Local school districts have wide leeway to adopt those policies to suit the unique needs of their students. That system was further strengthened more than a decade ago when the state shifted the bulk of funding decisions to local districts through the Local Control Funding Formula.
But that’s left big gaps in student performance and questions over who’s accountable for what, according to the report.
“California has invested a lot in education and there are instances of real excellence,” Loeb said. “But we haven’t been very good at scaling it so there’s consistency across the state.”
Transitional kindergarten, expanded after-school programs and community schools are a few new programs that have led to big improvements, according to the report. Low-income students especially have benefited from these initiatives. For example, low-income students who attended TK scored higher in math and reading in third and fourth grade, especially if they attended well-funded elementary schools, researchers found.
Big investments, big improvements
In the mid-2000s, California schools were in a sorry state. They ranked near the bottom nationally in nearly every metric. That was the impetus for the first Getting Down to Facts report in 2007, which aimed to stop the downward slide.
The state has almost doubled per-pupil spending since then, when factoring for inflation, and now ranks well above the national average. Because of the Local Control Funding Formula, which allocates more money to districts with larger numbers of high-needs students, there’s more equitable funding than existed in the past, the report noted.
California students are scoring significantly higher in reading and math than they did two decades ago, even when accounting for pandemic setbacks and even as the percentage of English learners, low-income students and other high-needs students has grown.
“Over the past two decades, the state has adopted stronger standards and assessments, made school funding more equitable … and improved achievement scores, especially in reading,” researchers wrote. “These changes have not solved California’s educational challenges, but they have left the state better positioned than it was fifteen years ago to pursue broader and more ambitious goals for students.”
Solutions and ideas
Concentrating more power with the state could bring some accountability and transparency, help narrow the achievement gaps and ensure that all districts are adopting programs that have shown promise, researchers said. For example, the state could require districts to adopt curricula that have been successful, hire more tutors or counselors, or expand after-school programs.
Some of that power shift may happen soon. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed moving most of the state superintendent’s duties to the State Board of Education, whose members are appointed by the governor. This won’t solve the problem entirely, but it’s a good start, Darling-Hammond said.
The report also suggested improving conditions for teachers and administrators. The state needs to do a better job recruiting and training teachers and making sure they stay in the profession. It also needs to reduce paperwork for administrators, who spend far too much time filling out forms that are redundant and of little use.
“California has strong foundations, ambitious goals, and visible examples of what richer and more coherent educational experiences can look like,” researchers wrote. “The central challenge is whether state policymakers (and others) can connect policies, supports, and institutions into a system that delivers those opportunities consistently for students.”
