On Jan. 7, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed sweeping school reform legislation that many observers are heralding as historic and bold, providing parents a greater voice not only in choosing a school that best serves their children but also in petitioning school boards to fix persistently failing schools.
This legislation lets California compete for up to $700 million of the $4.3 billion in competitive grants available to states through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. State leaders filed the application in time for the Jan. 19 deadline.
The Race to the Top initiative, authorized by Congress in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is intended to provide states with incentives for future education improvements and to reward those that have demonstrated a history of improving student academic performance.
North Carolina also filed its Race to the Top application on time, but Tar Heel State educators made minimal changes in advance of the deadline. (See “North Carolina Stands Pat in Effort to Win ‘Race to the Top’ Grant,” CJ, January.) In a written statement, Superintendent of Public Education June Atkinson said the state law capping charter schools at 100 should not prevent North Carolina from receiving $400 million in funding from Washington. States receive more credit for past success in improving education and teacher effectiveness, she said, rather than enhancing school choice.
Golden State lawmakers acted with a greater sense of urgency. “We have answered President Obama’s call to make transformative and bold changes to turn around low-performing schools and shown that we can lead the way for the nation,” said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, head of the Senate Education Committee and a leading architect of the legislation, in a press release.
Romero lauded the new legislation for providing parents “a true voice in making choices for their children.”
The California Teachers Association opposed the legislation because of its open enrollment mandate — allowing students in a low-performing school to enroll in a public school anywhere in the state without regard to their parents’ place of residence — and the parent trigger mandate, empowering parents of students in a persistently low-achieving school to petition the school board to implement one of four specified turnaround strategies. Other options allow school boards to remove principals or even shut down schools.
The passage of such landmark education reform in California, a state where teacher unions have considerable legislative influence and lobbied strongly against these measures, has some North Carolinians speculating whether these types of reforms might happen here.
“This is real reform,” said Lyndalyn Kakadelis, Director of the North Carolina Education Alliance, in a phone interview and written statement for CJ, “and I will be interested in how it is implemented. Time will tell, but this is a great start.”
Unlike the No Child Left Behind legislation, which, for all its good intentions, came from the federal level, California’s reform comes from the state level, said Kakadelis, and “according to the Constitution, education is to be left to the state.”
North Carolina’s Race to the Top
As for North Carolina’s Race to the Top, Kakadelis and other advocates of school reform and parental choice seem far less hopeful that North Carolina lawmakers and education leaders are prepared to alter the status quo, despite the state’s poor high-school graduation rates and declining student academic achievement.
“Lawmakers across the country are experiencing ‘education reform fatigue’ because millions of dollars have been poured into state reforms that aren’t working. California, New York, and Florida are bellwether states, so this legislation could foreshadow what may be coming to other states,” said Kakadelis.
“School boards across North Carolina continue to struggle with the same issues as they did 15 years ago,” Kakadelis said, cited busing and the charter school cap as just two examples.
In a phone interview, Terry Stoops, education policy analyst for the John Locke Foundation, agreed with Kakadelis, saying he doesn’t see any lawmakers in North Carolina working on reforms like those just passed in California.
“California is taking the smart approach while North Carolina is taking the dumb approach on the Race to the Top,” Stoops said, pointing to recent reports that some states are actively trying to prevent North Carolina from getting these funds, in part because of the state’s long-standing defiance on lifting the charter school cap.
Atkinson discounted the need for reforms like those in California, crediting North Carolina’s existing innovative schools legislation as providing students and parents with choice and arguing that North Carolina already has a “statewide teacher evaluation system that does include student growth and achievement as a part of a teacher’s evaluation.”
Kakadelis disgreed, saying North Carolina has some choices at the high school level but very few at the elementary school level. Elementary school families who do not get onto a charter school waiting list and cannot afford to pay for private school have no choice.
The education establishment has proven year after year, Kakadelis said, that the “system is more important than the child and it does not want parents to have options outside of its control.”
North Carolina’s ABCs program has a critical flaw because the program rewards schools rather than teachers for performance, said Kakadelis. The highest performing teacher in a school receives the same bonus as the weakest or worst teacher in that same school. This system “drives weak and strong teachers to schools where the teachers know parents will supplement and make sure the student is learning during school hours,” she said.
Karen McMahan is a contributor to Carolina Journal.