Peter Schrag

Peter Schrag

The waivers that eight large California schoolhouse districts got this calendar week from U.South. Instruction Secretary Arne Duncan are yet another measure out of the ability of the federal law they tried to escape from.

The law has been cumbersome and stupid enough to prompt them — and many states — to seek better ways to pursue the same, or improve, goals. But the waivers are non the stop of this odyssey; they're barely the get-go.

The law, No Child Left Backside (NCLB), signed by President George W. Bush-league in 2002, was commendably designed to force local districts to pay as much attention to the instruction of poor, minority and immigrant kids equally they paid to all other children.

To practice that, it required schools receiving federal Championship I funds to become all major subgroups of students to proficiency in math and English — all of them — by 2014, and imposed an increasingly astringent ready of sometimes mindless sanctions on schools not on rails to that goal.

Just since it allowed states to prepare their own standards, it was as well an invitation to dumb down tests and curricula. It led in some states to cheating by teachers and administrators and to no end of public confusion when schools were rated first-class by state criteria and declining under the federal definitions.

It was therefore no wonder why nearly all states, and at present the eight big California districts (grouped together equally Core (California Office to Reform Didactics), tried to arts and crafts programs with what Duncan chosen "rigorous expectations" that would allow them to get out from under the federal requirements. In improver to Sacramento, CORE, which comprises some ane million students, includes the districts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, Oakland, Santa Ana, Fresno and Sanger.

Although 39 states got waivers from Duncan, California, which did not meet Duncan's demands, wasn't one of them. The biggest stumbling block was that teacher evaluations had to exist based in part on student examination scores.

And so the CORE districts created their ain "School Quality Improvement Organisation" (SQIS) which, in improver to bookish preparedness, "values multiple measures of student success in social/emotional evolution, every bit well every bit the significant importance of a school's culture and climate."

When y'all screen out the jargon, you terminate up with a broad set of criteria and accountability measures that include not simply test scores, but graduation rates, dropout rates, suspension and expulsion rates; the charge per unit at which English learners are redesignated English proficient; parent, student and instructor surveys; and some, like student grit and conclusion, that may defy all measurement.

Those criteria, as some of the superintendents of the CORE districts pointed out, are closely aligned with the new criteria in Gov. Jerry Brown's new Local Control Funding Formula and other new state laws — and with the broader national swing away from narrow exam-based numbers.

But there are lot of blanks left to fill in — indeed, the whole scheme and the remarks fabricated by the superintendents at two telephone press events this week give it the feel of a work in progress. The waiver is only for a year, inappreciably plenty time to put in place new accountability systems, much less approximate their viability.

More important, peradventure, is that all the evaluation plans, including the use of student test scores in judging teachers, have to be negotiated with local unions, few of which are warmly disposed toward this bargain.

California Teachers Clan President Dean Vogel called information technology "counterproductive and divisive." Scott Smith, president of the Sacramento Metropolis Teachers Clan, historically one of the most intransigent of all teachers unions, called information technology "a terrible distraction." It'due south not a good way to brainstorm.

Rick Miller, the executive managing director of CORE, says he fully expects the waivers to be extended. And there's e'er the risk, as Duncan said, that major revisions in the federal instruction law will make the whole issue moot. Simply given Washington'due south political climate, that's probably a vain hope.

And there are other questions. Again, who will rescue the kids in bad schools? Who can fix them? And while some contempo legal rulings loosened the contractual knots requiring all teacher layoffs to brainstorm with the most recent (and sometimes the all-time) hires, at that place's still no certainty that the viii CORE districts, or any others, will be able to staff the about difficult schools with outstanding teachers.

NCLB'south requirement that all schools exist taught by "highly qualified" teachers became a joke so long agone that it'due south hardly always mentioned anymore. In the meantime, it'due south become an open underground that the least experienced, least competent teachers tend to cluster and churn in the schools with the highest concentrations of poor and minority kids.

It'due south encouraging that eight big districts are working together in developing quality standards consistent with country requirements. But huge questions remain, not least, finally, questions nearly the further demands that federal bureaucrats — near of whom strongly oppose local waivers — are likely to brand as the locals fill in those blanks.

This commentary was first published in the Sacramento Bee.

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Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of "Paradise Lost: California's Feel, America'southward Future" and "California: America's High Stakes Experiment." His latest book is "Not Fit for Our Lodge: Immigration and Nativism in America" (University of California Press). He is a frequent contributor to the California Progress Written report.

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