Policy Update: California: Heavy Lifting Ahead

Vital Statistics
999	Public school districts
7,981	Public schools
5.6 million	K-12 enrollment
60.5%	Minority students
25%	Children in poverty
10.5%	Students with disabilities
$32.7 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

"We were unable to get a bill to hold schools accountable," says Democratic Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, who chaired the education committee in the legislature's lower house last year. "The first thing on the governor's agenda will be to get a bill on the table and signed."

After extensive debate, the state school board approved standards in October in science, history, and social sciences, giving the state a complete set of academic standards. Mathematics and language arts standards were adopted in 1997.

And, while applying the standards will be voluntary for school districts, mandatory state assessments are being prepared to gauge how well students learn the material.

Last year, shortly after the final standards package hit the streets, it was getting strong reviews from outside the state.

"They took a careful look at what was being done in other states and countries, and tried to take the best and then improve on it," says Matt Gandal, the director of standards and assessment for Achieve Inc., a nonprofit Cambridge, Mass., organization created by governors and business leaders to push for higher academic standards.

Adds Gandal: "You're already seeing people point to California as having one of the best sets of state standards."

As the state aligns its curriculum frameworks and assessments to match the standards, California students will continue to take the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, an off-the-shelf test that was administered there for the first time in the spring of 1998 in grades 2-11.

The test was championed by two-term Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who was barred by law from seeking another term in office in last fall's elections. It was controversial because it was administered in English to all students, including those with limited English skills.

California students, excluding those with limited proficiency in English, performed at or below the national average in most grades and categories on the Stanford-9. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin says the results "establish a baseline for how well our students are learning basic academic skills, and the scores indicate that California students are coming back."

"How can you reasonably hold people accountable based on those results?" asks Joan McRobbie, the spokeswoman for WestEd, a federally funded policy-research laboratory in San Francisco. "It's a norm-referenced test that's not aligned with state standards."

Along with Wilson, state legislators also spent much of last year toiling over education policy with implications for years to come.

As part of the outgoing governor's school accountability push, a law was enacted requiring districts to end social promotion, or the practice of moving students to the next grade before they're academically ready. The law, which takes effect this year, seeks to link promotion to state tests, although districts can set their own criteria. In a bow to local flexibility, teachers can override, with a written explanation, a retention decision.

"This is very big," Mazzoni says. "All districts must have a policy based on the premise that no student will pass to the next grade unless they are at or reasonably near grade level."

The student-accountability package included $105 million in new money for summer school, tutorials, and other remediation programs.

But some say the legislature's work on accountability will not be done until a companion package is passed that targets schools and teachers. "It's inappropriate to hold kids accountable for school systems which, sometimes, are not that good. We can't allow that," Mazzoni argues.

On the budget front for fiscal 1999, the legislators approved spending $250 million to help schools buy textbooks aligned with the new standards. Another $195 million in new spending was appropriated to lengthen the school year to 180 instructional days, up from a minimum of 172 days. And $1.5 billion was allotted to support class-size-reduction efforts in grades K-3 and in 9th grade, up from about $1 billion the year before.

The state government's 1999 budget raised state K-12 spending to $31.3 billion from $29.2 billion the previous year--a gain of nearly 7.2 percent.

Voters also got in on the policy action last year. In June, Californians approved Proposition 227, a state constitutional amendment that aimed to virtually eliminate bilingual education programs in the state. Under the new law, most public school students who are learning to speak English must be taught primarily in English.

After surviving legal challenges, the measure went into effect last fall under a cloud of confusion over what was acceptable instruction for limited-English-proficient pupils. In addition, thousands of parents sought waivers to keep their children in traditional bilingual classes.

"People are really struggling with it because it's so unclear," McRobbie of WestEd says. "There's no data yet on what's happening in the class."

California voters also turned a generous hand to the state's nearly 8,000 public schools by approving a $9.2 billion statewide education construction bond in November. Over the next four years, the bond will generate $6.7 billion, mostly in matching dollars, for K-12 schools. The remaining $2.5 billion will be set aside for higher education.

The elections also presaged a windfall for the state's youngest residents as voters passed a 50-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes to pay for local early-childhood-education and -welfare programs. The measure, which was championed by filmmaker Rob Reiner, is expected to raise up to $700 million a year.

Perhaps most significant, at least from a policy standpoint, was the election of California's first Democratic governor in 16 years. Gray Davis, who served as lieutenant governor under Wilson, handily defeated the state's Republican attorney general, Daniel E. Lungren.

The partisan shift is important, in large part, because both chambers of the legislature and the governorship are now in the hands of the same party. That could make it easier to write and pass legislation generally and to draft bills that are more to the liking of teachers' unions and most other education groups.

And observers expect less bickering between state schools chief Eastin and the Democratic governor. Eastin, a registered Democrat and former state lawmaker who was re-elected to the nonpartisan post in November, spent much of her first term ensnared in a power struggle with Wilson and the state board, which he appointed.

"There was just one big thing after another," Michael W. Kirst, the co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a university-based research consortium, says of the past year. "Districts want the state to stay quiet for a while. It's been just a tumultuous period."