California Poised to Take Over Dozens of Insolvent School Districts

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

110 California school districts are at risk of insolvency, compared with 37 five years ago, according to the Bay Citizen. Ironically, the distressed districts, which face expensive state takeovers, are distressed precisely because the state has slashed $21 billion from public education funding over the last three years (combined with declining revenue from property taxes and increasing costs).

As federal stimulus funding dries up at the end of this school year, the number of districts going belly up is likely to grow. According to the Bay Citizen, many districts are draining their strategic reserve funds to survive another school year, which puts them at risk of going belly up the following year.

Almost 50% of California's most desperate school districts are in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has some of the highest property values in the state. The Bay Citizen looked at financial reports from the 2010-11 school year and found that 13 CA school districts received negative certifications from the state and were not expected to meet all of their financial obligations. Six of these districts were in the Bay Area. 97 other school districts were identified as at risk of failing to meet their financial obligations.

Under California law, school districts cannot file for bankruptcy. Rather, the state must take them over and appoint administrators to bolster their finances. Since the state has already made it clear that it has no desire to fund schools sufficiently, the only way to shore up struggling school districts is by cutting costs. This will likely cause massive layoffs, exacerbating the state’s already high unemployment rate of nearly 12%, or lead to furloughs and shortened school years, which will dramatically reduce teachers’ already low incomes. It could also lead to increased class sizes, reduced course offerings, school closures and other cuts that will negatively impact student safety and wellbeing.

Much of this nightmare scenario has been playing out for the last few years in school districts that were already on the state’s watch list prior to the financial meltdown. Hayward Unified School District, for example, slashed around $26 million from its operating costs by firing staff, increasing class sizes and cutting music programs for fifth graders. Teachers who weren’t fired will be forced to take three to seven furlough days this year. Despite these “sacrifices,” the district is still considered at-risk and is being watched by the state.

Back to School—Why Your Child is Failing

I was shopping for my son this week and found these ditties at Old Navy. These were shirts for young boys, age 6-12.

Fix Open Enrollment or Abolish It?

California’s Parent Trigger law has received a lot of media attention lately. However, this is not the only new rule that increases parents’ control over their children’s school. Last year, the California state legislature fast tracked through an Open Enrollment law that would allow students from the state’s lowest performing schools to transfer to a better school, even one outside their home district. Today John Fensterwald - Educated Guess wrote about this new rule in a blog posting, “Fixing Open Enrollment,” arguing that it is basically a good idea that was poorly planned and executed.

One of his criticisms is that there are too many exemptions. For example, the law excludes charter schools and limits Open Enrollment to only 10% of the schools in any district. As a result, some schools are being punished, despite having made test score gains, because they were the lowest performing school in an otherwise high performing district. According to Fensterwald, an amended version of the law, AB 47, would exempt schools with an API score above 700, as well as schools whose API scores increased by at least 50 points. AB 47 also requires that charter schools be included on the list.

Fensterwald argues that Open Enrollment can be a liberator for families trapped in low-achieving districts. However, parents must first succeed in finding and getting their children into a higher achieving school AND have the ability to get their child to that school every day. This will preclude many low income children who rely on public transit to get to school and anyone else who lives too far away from a “better” school. Furthermore, lower income, immigrant and minority families are less likely to have the time, know-how and self-confidence to play the system in the first place. Getting a transfer requires paper work and follow up, and sometimes also requires in-person meetings, appeals, and pestering.

Open Enrollment already exists within many districts in California. One consequence has been a flight of higher achieving and higher income students to the “better” schools within the district and, consequently, a concentrating of lower performing kids in the “bad” schools. San Francisco Unified, for example, has an Apartheid-like system with most of the higher performing schools on the west side, and the overwhelming bulk of lower performing schools on the east side.
The higher performing schools tend to be the most crowded and have the longest waiting lists.

It is also absolutely essential to understand that “good” and “bad” schools and districts are measures of familial wealth, and do not necessarily say anything about the quality of the teachers or academic programs. Schools and districts that high concentrations of poverty tend to have lower test scores. All that Open Enrollment schemes do is allow families to move their children to schools with wealthier students. They do not necessarily get better teachers or a better quality education. Thus, contrary to Fensterwald’s assertion, Open Enrollment may not liberate parents from anything more than the knowledge that their child is picking up nasty habits from those rabble kids on the other side of the tracks.

Arne Duncan: 80% of America’s Schools Are Failing

For once it appears that Ed Deformer in Chief, Arne Duncan, is saying something honest about Ed Deform: NCLB is an utter failure. On Wednesday, Duncan told Congress that over 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools could be labeled as failing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Duncan said that this statistic, based on an analysis of testing trends and the law’s pass-fail school rating system, was the latest evidence of the law’s shortcomings, and called for an overhaul of the law.

According to Duncan, 82% of schools could fail to meet their Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, compared with 37% last year. This would seem like an astonishing jump, except for the fact that not only do schools as a whole need to improve, but each sub-group within the school (e.g., special education, English language learners, low-income, Asian, African-American, Latino, etc.) must also make significant gains.

Even if failure rates remained flat at 37%, the law would still be a failure since its goal was to achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. In actuality, increasing numbers of schools have seen declining proficiency. Take California, for example, where 39% of elementary schools failed to meet their AYP in 2009, while 60% failed in 2010. Nationwide, the number of schools failing to meet their AYP has increased from 28% in the 2006-7 school year, to 37% last year.

Schools face sanctions if they are deemed failures for two or more years. After four consecutive years of failure, they can be forced to convert to charter schools or forced to fire their entire teaching staffs. After three years, they can be forced to hire private outside consulting firms or tutoring services for their students. After only two years, parents have the option of transferring their children to better schools in the area, a process that tends to be utilized mostly by the more economically privileged families, resulting in a worsening of stratification within school districts and exacerbating the downward spiral of test scores at the increasingly poor low income schools.

Indiana’s Failing Charter Schools

Indiana has 62 free, public charter schools, enrolling nearly 23,000 students. Nearly 40 of these schools are authorized by Ball State University. 23% of them are currently on probation by the university, 10% have either withdrawn their charter or had it revoked by the university, and 9 are on probation for failing to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB.