Education Officials Urge Lawmakers to Support Education Reform Bill In Order To Make California Competitive in Race To The Top

CSBA Advises governor and legislature to pass AB 8 as first step of education reform

West Sacramento, Calif. – The California School Boards Association urges the state Senate to support the opportunity for California to compete in Race To The Top, by passing AB 5x 8 (Brownley), a bill that aligns California with Race To the Top federal guidelines and guarantees that 80 percent of the awarded grant be allocated directly to schools. This bill goes beyond the Senate alternative (SB 5x 1) by addressing critical compliance and reform issues that the Senate bill does not, including:

• Allocating 80 percent of the Race To The Top grant dollars directly to schools.
• Establishing a clear process for identifying the 5 percent of the persistently lowest performing schools.
• Ensuring the opportunity and funding for professional development in consistently low performing schools.
• Requiring a process for annual school administrator evaluations.
• Removing the charter school cap and meeting federal requirements for high-quality charters by ensuring that all charter schools are accountable for both academic and fiscal success.
• Addressing the need to guarantee the equitable distribution of teachers and administrators in high-poverty and high-minority schools.
• Establishing a process to identify and turn around persistently low performing schools.
• Ensuring that the required adoption of national common core standards will not water down California’s academic content standards.
• Requiring an evaluation of the Race To The Top process.

The governor has declared that AB 8 adds layers of bureaucracy to the charter school process, when in fact it does three simple things: (1) lifts the charter school cap (as requested by the governor), (2) requires the State Controller to include a charter school supplement to school district audit guidelines and (3) requires charter schools to be held to the same academic performance standards as non-charter public schools.

“It is discouraging and puzzling that the governor believes that his own principles of transparency, accountability and high standards for all students should not be applied to charter schools,” said CSBA President Frank Pugh.

"Race To The Top is an opportunity for California to further improve its education system in order to ensure equal, high quality education to all schoolchildren," said CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin. "The decisions made by the legislature today will enact laws that affect our children for years to come and we can’t take this process lightly. AB 5x 8 puts California in a position to be competitive in the Race To The Top competition in a way that is consistent with our state’s own values, vision and priorities for public education."

For more information about AB 5x 8, please contact Brittany McKannay at 916-669-3244.