California's Children

Will local districts spend $ on foster youth instead of a bus to the regional football play-offs?

The Daily Quote: “If it’s not categorical funds, I guarantee the money will disappear and not reach foster kids,” Teacher Mike Jones, at left, Founder and Executive Director at Courageous Connection, Elk Grove Unified School District, Sacramento County.

UPDATE, May 22, 2013: The reality gap between boots-on-the-ground teachers and the generals back in Sacramento is underscored in the struggle to keep Foster Youth Services (see backstory below the jump) in categorical funding in the '13-'14 budget, as revealed in a story this morning on EdSource by Susan Frey. 

("At Greater Risk: California Foster Youth and the Path from High School to College," a March 2013 report funded by the Stuart Foundation and written by Kristine Frerer, Center for Social Services Research, Cal Berkeley; Lauren Davis Sosenko, Institute for Evidence-Based Change; and Robin R. Henke, MPR Associates; gives critical statistics on California's 42,000 foster youth students: 1/4 have a disability; 1/3 are African-American; 56% are girls; 1/2 attend schools in the bottom 30% of performance; 1/2 score in the lowest two ranks on state tests; only 45% complete high school.

In the May revise, Governor Brown included a trailer bill that ostensibly solves the problem: foster-care students are a subgroup in the Academic Performance Index (other subgroups being ethnicity, low-income, special education, English learners). By making foster children more visible to academic evaluators -- and by rewarding their progress as measured by a district's goals -- the Brown administration is assuming that the financial carrots offered districts and county departments of education for achieving those goals will be sufficient incentive for channeling funds into foster-student specific programs (i.e., Foster Youth Services). 

As Frey reports... these advocates, including [director of FosterEd for the National Center for Youth Law Jesse] Hahnel, are concerned that the requirements for county Offices of Education are not strong enough to ensure that the $15 million currently going to county offices for [FYS] will remain dedicated to foster children. Under Brown’s proposal, the money will continue to go to the county offices, but the funds can be spent on any educational purpose, while most of the accountability for foster children’s academic achievement falls on school districts...Under Brown’s proposal, county offices would act in more of a supervisory role if districts fail to meet their goals regarding foster children. The county offices are also expected to continue to coordinate services for foster youth with school districts and social service agencies and attempt to minimize changes in school placement...Michael Jones, a resource teacher who works as an advocate for foster youth at Elk Grove Unified, said the governor’s new accountability plan would work if the Foster Youth Services funding remains dedicated and is tied to services. He calls the governor’s proposal to lift restrictions on the funds “naïve and irresponsible.”

“If it’s not categorical funds, I guarantee the money will disappear and not reach foster kids,” Jones said.

March 15, 2013: In a commentary on Chronicle of Social Change, publisher Daniel Heimpel reported on the Sacramento hearings before the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education (chaired by Susan Bonilla, D-Concord) that focused on Brown's proposed Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). Heimpel notes that "Despite a letter of protest from more than 50 organizations including several County Offices of Education [and] a call to preserve [Foster Youth Services] in the San Francisco Chronicle...it wasn't clear that the message was getting through to [Assemblymembers]..."

The message: that FYS, a state Dept. of Education program currently protected by the device of categorical funding, should not be thrown into the communal pot with the 41 other programs for which monies will be determined by local school boards under the LCFF.

The DQ: George Packer on the perverse worship of "reform celebrities"

May 20, 2013: Writing an opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times, George Packer, at left, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" (which will be released today), articulates a phenomenon most of us have uncomfortably been experiencing over the last twenty years. Below is an excerpt; reading the full column is recommmended.

Our age is lousy with celebrities...There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.

After all, if you are the institution, you don’t need to play by its rules...The obsession with celebrities...obliterates old distinctions between high and low culture, serious and trivial endeavors, profit making and philanthropy... An activist singer (Bono) is given a lucrative role in Facebook’s initial public offering. A patrician politician (Al Gore) becomes a plutocratic media executive and tech investor. One of America’s richest men (Michael R. Bloomberg) rules its largest city.

This jet-setting, Davos-attending crowd constitutes its own superclass...far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies...

... their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

 

"The rug rat race" -- early ed is the winner's edge

April 30, 2013: "...the rich-poor gap in [schools' standardized] test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago." -- Sean F. Reardon, at left, "No Rich Child Left Behind," in Sunday's New York Times. Reardon is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford University.

Below, a few excerpts from an essay that should be read in its entirety. Emphases are ours.

...In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race....

...the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points...These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well...

Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. ...

...It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school....

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources -- their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school -- on their children's cognitive development and educational success...because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich....

... The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition...

The solutions?

In California, teachers won't be packing heat: AB 202 is shot down

April 17, 2013: “I wouldn’t want my child in a classroom with a teacher who had a gun." -- Assemblymember Joan Buchanan (D-Alamo).

Sacramento reporter Patrick McGreevey posted tonight in the Los Angeles Times that the state Assembly Education Committee rejected today a proposal to allow school districts to train teachers and administrators to use guns to protect campuses against armed intruders.  Modeled after the air marshal program, the proposed school marshal program would exempt from public disclosure information on which teachers or administrators were authorized to carry concealed weapons on campus. As reported in the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert, "under current law, the California Public Records Act requires disclosure of concealed weapon permit holders.

...Only one member of the seven-member committee voted for the bill introduced by Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-Twin Peaks), at left, in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook....

Donnelly said his school marshal program would serve as a deterrent to campus violence because school districts would openly act to participate. Criminals would not know which teachers, if any, might be carrying a firearm, he said.

“It would send a very clear signal to a would-be deranged killer,” Donnelly said.

As U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said tonight on The Rachel Maddow Show in the wake of the this afternoon's U.S. Senate killing the background-check gun control compromise bill, "The Republicans have made it very clear. They just sort of want to pass out guns to everyone, the good guys and the bad guys, and let them shoot it out and hope the good guys win."

Technology's impact (or lack thereof) on education: SBE's Kirst

March 22, 2013: State Board of Education President Michael Kirst (his second go-round on the job; he was a member of the SBE in the first adminisration of Governor Brown -- 1975-82, serving as president from '77-'81) is Professor Emeritus of Education and Business Administration at Stanford. Yesterday, New America Media 's Peter Schurmann posted a Q&E with Kirst on "Bringing Equity Back to California School Funding." In one characteristically candid exchange, Schurmann asks Kirst,at left, about education reform efforts and, particularly, the innovations offered with on-line learning.

Kirst: There have been predictions of technological overhauls in the classroom ever since radio began. When I first started my career in the federal government we were distributing tens of thousands of television sets, and we certainly thought that would be a big change and that all the better teachers would come into classrooms through television sets in the corner of the room. That never worked. 

When I left the state board presidency in 1982, we were at the cusp of the technological revolution and there were three computers at the back of a classroom. I thought, “Well, that’s the beginning.” I came back to state office in 2011, and went to visit schools: three computers in the back of a classroom. I was then told, and believed, that once we got handheld computers it would happen. I actually made speeches like that for 15 years. Still, no big impact. 

So the way I would summarize it is: Technology has met traditional classrooms and traditional classrooms win.