California education reform must be multi-faceted, support students and teachers

The teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, bolstered by vociferous support from parents, forced the 500,000-student L.A. Unified School District to agree to reduce some class sizes and hire more nurses and counselors. Teachers in Oakland are now following suit with similar demands.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom has commissioned a study of how charter schools affect public school funding, which is also a beef in the teacher labor unrest. A suite of bills pending in the Legislature would pretty much halt the progress of charters here.

Despite support from wealthy philanthropists who tout standardized testing, charter schools and the closing of low-performing schools, the school reform movement’s chosen candidate for governor — Antonio R. Villaraigosa — never came close. Their candidate for schools superintendent was also bested by a candidate backed by the California Teachers Association.

Remember the “parent trigger” law? It was going to shift the paradigm in California schools by giving parents whose kids attended low-performing schools unprecedented new power. Parents would be able to force various reforms at their child’s school by signing a petition — including changing it to a charter school.

When’s the last time you heard about that happening? Yeah, I can’t remember either.

The school reform movement isn’t dead, but it’s definitely taken a beating. It has itself to blame. Too many new initiatives were hailed as the great new thing and later turned out not to be so great.

At times, they were unfairly punitive. The combination of intense focus on tests, including forcing teachers to program their lessons around the tests, turned college students off of teaching careers. The charter movement’s general “blame the teacher” attitude also helped.

Ten years ago, President Obama was at the forefront of pressing for a range of unproven reforms, including unlimited charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to their students’ performance on tests. The latter eventually proved to be an ineffective way to help students learn.

When the Every Student Succeeds Act was making its way through Congress, I asked then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan, an ardent reform proponent, how he would keep those measures going under a new law that empowered states far more than the old No Child Left Behind Act.

“The state improvement plans will have to be approved by my office,” he said. “So we’ll make sure they’re strong ones.”

Duncan was soon gone. Early attempts by his successor, Betsy Devos, to tighten those state plans were squashed by congressmen in her own party. They pointed out that she was going farther than the law allowed.

The GOP turned toward state rights, and the Democratic Party turned toward a more teacher-friendly approach with little interest in high stakes testing or punishing low-performing schools. Democrats for Education Reform no longer has a California chapter. Last year, delegates to the Colorado Democratic State Assembly booed that state’s chapter head and formally called on the organization to take the word “Democrats” out of its name.

If only we could grab the pendulum of education fads and hold it in the middle long enough to try evidence-based programs. We could start them as pilots, grow them carefully, adjust as needed and give them time.

We’re not in a pendulum-grabbing moment, though, and the backlash against reform carries its own shortcomings.

Despite efforts to improve academic outcomes for low-income students of color, what we’ve learned more than anything else is that there are few answers. Terrific principals can have a major impact, but it’s not easy to clone them. Magnet schools have helped by providing programs that excite kids about learning. Yet there’s only so much schools can do about the deeper problems of health care, family instability, unsafe neighborhoods and lack of mental stimulation in the earliest years.

We’ve learned that charter schools can be a mixed bag. Many have been saving graces to families who were stuck in schools where no one seemed to be trying anymore. But they also have avoided taking many of the most challenging and expensive-to-educate students. They generally have the advantage of involved parents who bothered to sign their kids up in the first place. And when they reach a certain mass, they pull significant amounts of money from traditional public school districts.

We don’t have the option of failing to try. It’s not the kids’ fault they’re in a tough situation.

Our future depends on an educated populace. More education spending is needed, but it’s not the only problem. If it were, New York schools, which spent more than twice as much per student as California’s, would be glowing models of excellence.

No one likes to hear that a daily push on all fronts is our best shot, with continual assessments and adjustments, and attention to the individual needs of schools, teachers and students. It sounds boring. It takes time, patience, open minds and an understanding that there are no silver bullets.