Vantage Point: As seen from Washington
By:
CSBA President Jill Wynns
Published: April 1, 2012
Winter is when we go to Washington, D.C. The National School Boards Association’s Federal Relations Network meets; NSBA provides leadership training for state school boards association officers; and eight big-city California school districts lobby for urban concerns at the annual legislative meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools, an association of the nation’s largest school districts.
Last week my vantage point was in D.C., at the Council meeting. What I saw was the lack of fairness of our federal government’s support for our students in California.
The purpose of federal education programs is to provide additional resources for poor children, particularly Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is focused on concentrations of poverty. All Americans have an interest in the success of every student. The federal government rightly should contribute to leveling the playing field. It is in everyone’s best interests. The reauthorization of ESEA is now five years late, and, although the whole education community continues to advocate for congressional action, everyone admits that little progress is likely any time soon. Presidential politics has paralyzed the legislative branch.
When the Obama administration took over, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan instituted the Race to the Top program, requiring states to compete for funds to try to meet the statistically impossible goals of the No Child Left Behind iteration of ESEA.
Duncan particularly focused on closing the racial achievement gap, a long-term commitment of CSBA. California has submitted RTTT applications, even though conditions make it unlikely that we could receive funds. The main difficulty we face is that our CALPADS student data system is still not fully functional, while RTTT requires that states have a student information system that can track individual students and link their achievement, as measured by test scores, to individual teachers. In the current state budget, funds to continue CALPADS’ development were cut by Gov. Jerry Brown even though schools are beginning to see valuable data from CALPADS. We also have a problem with the ability to link student data to teachers, and real doubts about the usefulness and wisdom of doing so.
CSBA, NSBA and others have opposed the principle that competitive grants such as RTTT are a good way to fund states. Previously the federal government has used competitive grants to fund relatively small pilot programs and apply lessons learned from those to future program funding for all districts or states.
Many also point out that not all districts and states have equal capacity to write complex grant applications or, indeed, to implement the voluminous requirements. Is this why we oppose competitive grants?
No, we oppose them because they are wrong! It is unconscionable that the U.S. Department of Education judges some poor students are more worthy of federal support than others. Inherent in using competition is that there are winners and losers. We cannot allow others to decide that California’s children should be losers. We will fight bad, unfair funding schemes whenever they rear their ugly heads. We will be the voice for our students, for our state and for what is right.