Editor's note: ‘Unfinished Business,’ LCFF, and a postscript
By:
Brian TaylorSpring 2014
Ten years ago California Schools published “Unfinished Business,” a frank discussion of the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education 50 years after that landmark school desegregation ruling.
“At the end of the day, African-Americans and other minorities still lived very segregated lives, and attended inferior schools with inferior facilities, teachers and instructional materials,” Managing Editor Doug Herndon wrote in 2004. The problem persists a decade later, and six decades after the Brown decision itself; just Google “UCLA IDEA” to find the university’s unparalleled work documenting that continuing injustice.
California Schools staff writer Carol Brydolf updates the issue in “Sixty Years After Brown”: “The goal of fully integrating public schools—and American society—has proved elusive, and there is a growing recognition that simply sending students to the same schools isn’t enough to provide them with equal educational opportunities. Children who come to school hungry, stressed or sick and those who are learning English or lack permanent homes often struggle to succeed in school and find it difficult to thrive later in life.”
But now California has a new tool in its efforts to close the achievement gap, Brydolf reports: “California’s Local Control Funding Formula is generating great excitement among those who believe the school financing plan is a potentially powerful new weapon in the fight for educational equity.”
As CSBA Executive Director & CEO Vernon M. Billy notes in his Executive Director’s Report, this issue—including a guest commentary from Antioch Unified School District Superintendent Donald Gill, Ed.D.—focuses on LCFF as a tool in closing the achievement gap.
For “A Conversation with … Jannelle Kubinec”, staff writer Kristi Garrett interviewed a key consultant to the State Board of Education on LCFF. Kubinec says the funding formula vastly simplifies school finance in California, and goes on to answer a question she poses for herself: “How do we take this relatively simple formula and make it make sense?” For “Enriching the Lives of Students in Poverty”, frequent California Schools contributor Trinette Marquis-Hobbs researched proven ways to counter the effect of economic deprivation on learning. School boards, she observes, “have the political power to bring people—across departments, agencies and even disciplines—together and set the expectation for a culture of collaboration. Most importantly, they can focus their decision making on equity for all students and use their clout as elected officials to encourage these values throughout the community.” LCFF should help with that. The feature also benefits from excellent artwork by Ralph Butler, whose work has graced this magazine on many occasions.
One last ‘editor’s note’
“Sixty Years After Brown” harkens back to former Managing Editor Herndon’s “Unfinished Business” by republishing his timeline of key legal decisions pre- and post-Brown. CSBA Senior Graphic Designer Kerry Macklin updated the informative design element that CSBA Art Director Dan DeFoe originally laid out a decade earlier.
One last “editor’s note”: Like Herndon, I’m now moving on. I’ve enjoyed this job immensely, even if the past 8½ years have furrowed new lines into my brow and subtracted some hair from my head, but I have an opportunity to work in a different arena now. I’m grateful for the chance to leave with this especially strong issue of California Schools as my postscript.
And so, one last time: Thanks for reading!
Brian Taylor is the managing editor of California Schools.