Open enrollment OK’d for students in 1,000 schools
State Board also authorizes parent ‘trigger’ to require reforms in underachieving schools
Published: August 3, 2010
California’s State Board of Education approved emergency regulations last month to allow parents to apply to transfer their children from a list of 1,000 “open enrollment schools” to higher-performing schools in other districts, or to petition for fundamental reforms at some schools in their third year or beyond of Program Improvement.
The Office of Administrative Law approved the emergency regulations on open enrollment provisions Aug. 2. The OAL’s public comment period for the parental petitions was still open at press time. The State Board will consider regular Open Enrollment regulations Sept. 14.
Senate Bill 5X 4, approved by the state Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in January to bolster California’s chances for federal funds under the competitive Race to the Top program, authorized the open enrollment and parent petition provisions. Delaware and Tennessee received the only first-round RTTT funding last spring; California is a finalist for a second round of grants that will be awarded in the next month or so.
Open enrollment
As required by SB 5X 4, the State Board found that “the emergency regulations adopted are necessary to avoid serious harm to the public … especially for public school pupils attending Open Enrollment schools,” as the thousand schools on the list are now called.
Each school on the list will have to inform parents by Sept. 15 that it has been declared an “open enrollment” school; however, objections from CSBA and other groups and individuals persuaded the State Board to drop a proposed requirement that districts willing to accept the student transfers do so by Nov. 1 of this year. That provision will take effect in 2011 with the permanent regulations, if they are approved by the OAL.
Districts will be allowed to reject enrollment applications based on their capacity to serve the new students or adverse fiscal considerations.
Governance teams at some of those Open Enrollment schools may be hard-pressed to understand why their schools are on the list in the first place. It’s a point the State Board’s members struggled with themselves during a lengthy session July 15.
SB X5 4 established a formula for the state superintendent of public instruction to use in establishing the list of 1,000 underachieving schools, starting with the lowest-achieving schools on California’s Academic Performance Index. However, the law specifies that no district is to have more than 10 percent of its schools on the list, and charter schools and court, community and community day schools are exempt. Additionally, the law requires the ratio of elementary, middle and high schools on the list to match “the same ratio of elementary, middle, and high schools as existed in decile 1 in the 2008-09 school year”: 687 elementary schools, 165 middle schools and 148 high schools.
As a result, six schools with APIs over the current state target of 800 wound up on the list. “Ninety-five elementary schools are in the fifth decile— close to the state average; 33 are in the sixth decile, making them above average,” according to an analysis by Educated Guess blogger John Fensterwald. Meanwhile, schools with lower APIs were excluded under the law.
“That’s the very vexing problem in making the regulations match the legislation,” State Board President Ted Mitchell said during the board discussion. He said he would seek legislative remedies to modify the formula, which will be used to generate a new 1,000-school list every year once base API numbers for the previous school year are released each summer.
Parent ‘trigger’
The State Board also adopted emergency regulations to implement another provision of SB X5 4, one that’s come to be known as either the “parent trigger” or “parent empowerment.” It allows parents of children in up to 75schools with an API below 800 to petition the local educational agency’s governance team to implement one of the four interventions laid out in Race to the Top—interventions that have come to be referred to as turnaround, restart, closure or transformation.
Schools targeted by petitions signed by at least half of the eligible parents or legal guardians will have to either adopt the intervention the parents request or select another from among the specified options. In addition to parents of students currently attending the school, parents or guardians of children attending elementary “feeder schools” whose students matriculate a given middle or high school can sign petitions targeting the upper-level schools.
Schools that are already counted among the state’s “persistently lowest-achieving” 5 percent are exempt because they may be or already are targeted for one of those interventions under a beefed-up federal School Improvement Grant program. As with the Open Enrollment schools, controversy surrounds that list of 188 persistently lowest-achieving schools; the State Board considered SIG applications for many of those schools Aug. 2 but deferred action.
And also as with open enrollment, permanent regulations governing the parent trigger option will be refined by a work group to be established by State Board; CSBA is expected to participate.
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