It’s a new day for California schools
Published: September 1, 2013
Here we are into another school year—it’s exciting to see the buses and parents dropping their children off at school, eagerly anticipating what the future holds.
This year, more than ever, I share their sense of excitement and expectation. You see, I just became a grandparent of identical twin grandsons. As I hold each of them and see how frail and tiny they are, I am reminded of how dependent and helpless our children are when they enter life. So great are their needs for safety, nutrition and nurturing. And I wonder: What will California’s education system look like by the time my grandsons begin kindergarten in five years? What we are doing now is shaping that future.
There are so many challenges and opportunities facing us. First, we are trying desperately to understand and prepare for the Common Core standards. There are so many positive aspects to the new standards; I can’t wait to see how they change public education and make teaching more practical and applicable. I believe the Common Core will create enthusiastic students who are more engaged and prepared for college or career.
At the same time, we’re facing another big change in the Local Control Funding Formula. Boards will be held to higher standards of responsibility for the outcomes of their students.
For the first time, governance teams will have considerable flexibility in how state funding is spent at the local level. But along with that comes a new responsibility to document how we’re ensuring our English learners, low-income students and foster youth are getting the help they need to succeed academically. In this, parents, school staff and the students themselves will be our partners.
The LCFF requires boards to work closely with community stakeholders to set goals for each type of student. This will need to go well beyond listening to the comments of a vocal few. The real challenge will be finding ways to elicit meaningful input from those who are often overlooked.
But before we even start to reach out to our community partners, we as school boards have a lot of work to do learning about our students. We need to know how many English learners we have and what their reclassification rates are. Do we know which of our students are in foster care, how many times they’ve changed schools or districts and how many credits they’ve lost in the process? And what resources do we already have at our disposal to combat the effects of poverty?
The Local Control and Accountability Plans we develop along with our community partners will potentially be a powerful force for strengthening academic achievement for all our students. All local boards can start working on those plans now by studying the data, learning more about promising programs, and starting to have meaningful conversations with parents, teachers, and others in the community who care about our kids. Let’s not wait until the state deadline for submitting an LCAP next summer. Now is the time to begin planning for community outreach.
We all have questions—and qualms—about what LCFF is and how it will change the way our districts operate, and CSBA is here to help. I hope you’ll take advantage of all the resources that are accumulating at www.csba.org/LCFF: archived webinars, briefs, fact sheets and more to come—tools you need to make good decisions going forward. And you won’t want to miss the interactive LCFF briefings that are coming to a location near you.
So as you settle back into the school year, arm yourself with solid, reliable information about LCFF, and then do what every loving parent or grandparent does as they hold their newborn child: take a deep breath, and enjoy the possibilities. It’s a new day for California schools.