Education Policy – The Role of School Boards

CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: This Special Episode of the Capitol Weekly Podcast was recorded live at Capitol Weekly’s Conference on Education Policy which was held in Sacramento on Tuesday, November 7, 2023

This is Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS

PANELISTS: Amy Christianson, California School Boards Association; Marshall Tuck, EdVoice; Richard Zeiger, Zeiger Strategies

Moderated by Dan Morain for Capitol Weekly

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

RICH EHISEN: Alright. Well, welcome to the second of our three panels today. This is on the role of school boards, those of you if you have children in school, you know school boards have a big impact on your life. Before we get started, I guess I should thank our sponsors. So we’re gonna start with the Tribal Alliance of Sovereign Indian Nations (TASIN), Western States Petroleum Association, KP Public Affairs, Perry Communications, Capitol Advocacy, Lucas Public Affairs, The Weideman Group, and the California Professional Firefighters. Thank you very much all of you for helping to make this kind of an event possible. Our esteemed panel is in place, so I’m gonna stop talking and let them get to it. I will introduce briefly Dan Morain, a longtime journalist here in this area, one of our great contributors, a great colleague, and I’m gonna let him take it from there, so thank you for being here and we are open for questions at the end as always.

DAN MORAIN: You bet, thank you. Thank you all for coming. So rather than do introductions, I figured that we would just start without opening statements, but I wanted to start with Amy, with the fundamental question, why do school boards matter?

AMY CHRISTIANSON: As an elected trustee for Butte County Office of Education going into my third term and being responsible for the training and oversight of that division at CSBA, I think school boards for me matter as they are the largest body of elected officials at the closest grassroots level to public education in providing governance and oversight and accountability for the over six million students in California.

“Children learn when they are believed in, when they feel relevant, when they are loved.” – Marshall Tuck

They represent districts from the large, from 700,000 students, to the smallest districts with 20 students, and they all have the same responsibility. They have the responsibility to set the direction. To identify policy and practices and bylaws that they follow based upon education code. They provide support to the superintendent and the professionals that operate the day-to-day functions of schools. They’re accountable and they’re the leading individuals that lead the communities, they provide community leadership and oversight to provide an opportunity for the public to engage in ensuring that local schools are implementing the values,  vision and needs of the students that are served in those individual communities, that’s why school boards matter.

DM: And, it’s where so many of us meet democracy. As parents, we tend to know our school board members maybe more than we know the city council. And yet we have instances this past year where the school boards, exercising their right to govern themselves, got… stepped into some pretty controversial areas related to transgender, related to discussions of Harvey Milk and such. Tell me what you think of that. Is that the school board’s – Chino Hills School Board or the Temecula School Board and I’m sure others – Is that what they should be doing?

AC: I’m not gonna focus on any one individual school board, I think for me, it’s school boards have a responsibility to govern based upon the policies and procedures and guidelines outlined in Ed Code, and that they have a responsibility to ensure that there is an equitable… education for all students, that there are guidelines for curriculum adoption, and if you follow those, then some of these conversations that districts have gotten into wouldn’t necessarily be at the place that they are at this moment in time.

There are practices in place for community to engage in the conversation of what is in the textbooks. There are opportunities for teachers to play a strong role in what’s in the textbooks. There is a place for board members to go through an adoption process. And then if we’re following the policies and the by-laws and the guidance that CSB has outlined in numerous documents and publications, that boards would not be in the place that they’re currently in. And that we have to remember that it’s a Local Control responsibility, and that we have to give the ability for boards to adopt textbooks that meet all of students’ needs, and we have to take that in consideration.

A Conference on Education Policy: Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS. PANELISTS: Amy Christianson, California School Boards Association; Marshall Tuck, EdVoice; Richard Zeiger, Zeiger Strategies. Moderated by Dan Morain. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

DM: So Marshall Tuck, EdVoice obviously has a voice here in Sacramento and at the local level as well. What’s your view of this issue that was raised in Assembly Bill 1078 this past year and also AB 1314 … a bill that was not heard, but obviously 1078 was and got through?

Marshall Tuck: First, thanks for having me here, Capitol Weekly. I appreciate y’all putting this conversation on the focus on our kids and their education, ’cause I’m a 20-year plus participant in trying to improve our public schools in the State, both as somebody whose led some school systems, has gotten involved in different levels of public policy and politics, and also as a parent of a sixth grade student, so I’ve been in that journey on multiple fronts. I think when you think about complicated issues in education, I try to start with the goal. And the goal is to make sure every child who is born in the State, I think born in this country, ideally over time, born in this world, is given the skills, the academic skills, the social-emotional skills, to be able to one day become adults, to have a shot at opportunity, and to be able to live the lives they wanna lead and also have the skills to be a part of a collective community and society.

“I’m old enough to remember when school boards not only spent the money they were given, but raised the money. They could actually increase taxes on properties on their own vote, simple majority vote of a school board, could raise property taxes” – Richard Zeiger

And I know that children learn when they are believed in, when they feel relevant, when they are loved. And I believe that any actions by local school boards in the case of the laws you mentioned, which are banning certain books potentially or excluding certain books from being included, when there are books that certain children see themselves in… it’s just not good for learning. We need to make sure our curriculum has our kids of all different shapes, sizes, and perspectives, and races and identities where they can see themselves in the curriculum. Because when you see yourself in the curriculum, it’s more likely you will learn and you’ll be excited out who you are and build that confidence you need to be successful.

So I think it’s important that… and it’s not many school districts in the State, but if there are times where a school district very locally is making a decision that would make a child not feel safe about their own identity or prevent a child from seeing their identity in our textbooks… I think the State need to step in… Public schools are in our Constitution, equal right to public education, so it is not just a local responsibility, it’s a state responsibility, and I was happy to see the state step up and take action in the cases that, in some cases, were not in support of what some of the local school districts decided and respectfully, I think that they made the right decision.

DM: So, Rich Zeiger, from your years in the working in the education field in the Department of Education, how would you expect the California Department of Education to handle such matters?

Richard Zeiger: Well, that’s a really interesting question. I think the California Department of Education has done what it should be doing, which is to act on behalf of state policy to take care of the curriculum, take care of the way kids are being educated.

I’d kinda like to go… You know, the role of school boards has changed markedly over the years, and I think it’s continuing to evolve, and I’d kind of like to go through a little of that ’cause I think it might help explain why we are where we are on some of these issues.

I’m old enough to remember when school boards not only spent the money they were given, but raised the money. They could actually increase taxes on properties on their own vote, simple majority vote of a school board, could raise property taxes and collect the money they needed to run their schools. That created, I think from a systemic point of view, the right kind of balance – that is the people that are raising the money are spending the money. And it creates the right tension over how you do that.

That all changed with Prop 13, which put a cap on property taxes and the State took over the funding of schools. That diminished the school board’s abilities because it couldn’t change easily, at least on its own, the amount of money it had to run its own schools. It became the decider, the allocator of the funds that they were given.

“The number of people that are actually intimately involved in this as an issue, the parent who is shocked to discover that their child is… wants to identify in a different gender at school and they don’t know about it… I think is a relatively small number of people that we’re talking about.” – Richard Zeiger

And the other thing to remember is that there’s a sort of a law of nature in governance that “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” It’s actually life in general, but if the state is giving away the money, giving the money, the state’s gonna wanna put conditions on how it’s spent. And so over the years, it has slowly increased its control over the school’s content, leaving a little bit less for local school boards to do.

A Conference on Education Policy: Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS. PANELISTS: Amy Christianson, California School Boards Association; Marshall Tuck, EdVoice; Richard Zeiger, Zeiger Strategies. Moderated by Dan Morain. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

And I agree with Amy, that these are a point of first contact that many citizens get with their government. Now, it’s not true everywhere. In LA, LA is such a big place, that you don’t know your school board member any more than you, than maybe you know your councilman, it might be even easier to know your councilman in LA. But in many of our school districts, we have 1000 school districts in the State. In many of our school districts that you know who those people are, they are your neighbors, they are your friends, they’re the friends of your friends.

And so, it is not surprising to me as we move along through this time that they get wrapped up in these kinds of political issues that are really, in many ways sort of external to the task that they’re assigned to perform.

These issues that we talked about in Temecula, and you know some of these others, these are people that are proposing solutions for a problem that has yet to be identified. I mean, I’m pretty confident about that. The number of people that are actually intimately involved in this as an issue, the parent who is shocked to discover that their child is… wants to identify in a different gender at school and they don’t know about it… I think is a relatively small number of people that we’re talking about.

But the issue becomes very large, and it’s part of what’s become kind of a nationalized politicization of the school board system, where..  school boards are supposed to be learning, concentrating on, “Okay, how do I make the best allocation of the resources I have to educate the kids that are in my district.” That in itself is a tough enough job. I would add that I think over time, that’s going to push again towards the state, the State’s gonna be setting more of the rules to the detriment of the local districts.

When the state adopted the Local Control Funding Formula. This was a Jerry Brown proposal, Jerry was a big believer that government should be at the local level as much as possible, and he insisted that that allocation of those new funds, which were designed to equalize education throughout the state. “We’re gonna give more money to this district ’cause it has tougher kids to educate, than we give to this district which has easier kids to educate.” So it was a state initiative to equalize things. He still insisted that when money was allocated, was done locally.

When Jerry left office, I think we’ve begun to see that erode. You’re starting to get more ‘Categorical’ programs brought back into the system, and… for those of you don’t know, Categorical says, “We’re gonna give you this much money and you gotta spend it on this program.” The one thing that the Department of Education does really well is track that money by the way, really good at that. Get money, give it to you for this, we make sure that you’ve got ’em. One of the few things they do really well. And there was also something of a change that came about with Prop 98, which removed from the Department of Education considerable amount of control over the system. And pushed that out into the county offices that Amy uses, that we have a long conversation about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

It makes me a little anxious ’cause it created this incredible bureaucracy in the middle of the system instead of at the top of the system. Anyway, that’s sort of the context, and I think it’s why… why school districts can get easily distracted by these issues. Because the amount of bandwidth they have to do the other things is minimized, and that creates openings for these kinds of… Well, I’ll call them “peripheral conversations” about the education system.

DM: So that’s interesting. So peripheral or not, the legislature passed 1078, AB 1078, the School Boards Association did not take a stand on that issue, but I’m sure it was the focus of great internal debate whether… What to do about it? Maybe you can provide a little insight as to how that decision to stay neutral on that bill came about.

AC: Actually, we opposed 1078.

DM: Oh, you opposed it. Okay. I’m sorry.

Amy Christianson: We opposed it. You know, it wasn’t personal. We worked with the author and we really wanted to talk about securing some amendments to it, because the bill had some unintended consequences that interfered with Local Control and responsibilities and may make it harder to address the actual textbooks insufficiency, so there are practices in place for textbooks that options, there is the Williams Act, which requires sufficiency to happen in August, September, and then boards have to have a resolution of the textbooks that are actually… That they have sufficient textbooks for all students, if not, they have to have a plan to actually provide them. The bill also… One other reason we opposed the bill, was that it wanted to label and put school board members names on the website for those districts that had insufficient textbooks and to call them out, which we felt was not an appropriate call out of those individuals.

“There’s a lot of conversation, a lot reported both on TV, and the papers about these issues, in Chino and Temecula, and not a lot of report about the fact that a third of low-income kids in the state can’t read at grade level” – Marshall Tuck

And lastly, the requirements that the governing board would have to get the approval of the State Board before they actually adopted a textbook, and we felt that that was stepping beyond the local control for what worked for the students. As I said earlier, we are a large state with a variety. You’ve got LA, as you mentioned, is very different from Palermo, California, it’s a very different unique set of population of students, and they have very different needs, and so local boards have the authority to then adopt texts that meet the requirements that are outlined, and 1078 stood against some of those core pieces. We did find agreement on some things, and so while we didn’t support completely, we did have some agreement on some other things, and we’re able to work with the author to amend to improve the bill.

DM: EdVoice did not get involved in that. Why not?

MT: First, newer to the job, so to be crystal clear the organization was about a year kind of dormant, so I took the job not too long ago. But I think both personally and I can say we, it’s after the fact, ’cause we weren’t there to support the legislation, and I think there are times where the state needs to step in. An education system is a balance, it’s a balance of state direction and expertise, it’s a balance of local engagement through a school board, through participating in your own school as you’re a parent or a citizen in the neighborhood, and that entire balance is focused, in my opinion, on making sure that that relationship between teachers and students, and counselors and students in classrooms and schools is as effective as possible. We have this big system, state, local, controlled district, it’s still pretty simple, which is how do we make sure children feel safe, comfortable, motivated, understood, loved, believed in in classrooms and how do we make sure the adults who are supporting them most directly – teachers, counselors, principals, have the ability in the room and the tools to successfully educate them, to build the right academic skills and build the right social-emotional skills.

And I think there are times where if a local… and the part of that balance of a local school district is making decisions, in this case, decisions to… take out certain books… In other cases, making decisions to not let children be comfortable with who they are and be comfortable at school with who they are with concerns of that being an issue outside of school with family, if those decisions are being made locally, that in my opinion, I think in our opinion, makes it very difficult for the state to deliver on one of its constitutional responsibility, which is equitable education, access to public education. And so I think in those cases the state needs to step in. So I was glad that they did.

And again, I know these are difficult issues, but they’re important. Because if a child is not feeling… If they are not feeling comfortable with who they are in a classroom, it is hard to learn algebra. And if a child doesn’t see themselves in a history book, and their journey, it’s pretty hard to get motivated and excited about history. Pretty hard to get motivated, excited about civics, and pretty hard to ultimately lead them to when they graduate, be people who are gonna participate in this democracy, in the way that can help us be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.

And so that’s where I think it is important. Not on all issues. I agree that we got local schools, you need to make certain decisions, but there are certain fundamental core decisions that need to be discussed, and so both I personally… and we support that legislation and hopefully we can find that right balance where local communities feel like they’re engaged, where the state is making sure everyone’s getting a quality education and hopefully have more discussion as a state in the media, ’cause there’s a lot of conversation, a lot reported both on TV, and the papers about these issues, in Chino and Temecula, and not a lot of report about the fact that a third of low-income kids in the state can’t read at grade level, and what are we doing urgently and aggressive about that.

So I think really focusing on the fundamental issues of the inequities in the state and the number of kids who are graduating public schools, not with those core academic skills to be able to really access opportunity. We’d like to see a lot more dialogue and focus from the media on those issues than some of the cultural issues, which I agree with Richard, are more one-offs versus throughout the entire system.

DM: Interesting. So in the past, EdVoice… the school boards have been focused of the battle over Charter Public Schools versus not Charter Public Schools. Certainly that played out hugely in Los Angeles Unified School District for races. What’s your view of that… Is that going to continue now that you’re at EdVoice, or will there be a shift, do you think?

MT: Shift for the organization or for the sector?

Dan Morain: Shift for the organization.

MT: So first I’d start with the Public Education California, it’s 90% district-run school, it’s 10% charter schools, and that’s our public school system. We have 600,000 kids in charter schools in the state, which is a big number. We have almost 5.4 million in district public school, so I think, again, my underlying fundamentals are, all kids deserve a quality public education. I think that most kids are in district schools, that’s where most of the focus should be, and I think that quality charter public schools have a role to play in our state, ’cause they’re a part of our state at this point in juncture, and what’s to me most important, regardless of the governing structure, regardless if it’s a district public school or charter public school, regards if the decision’s coming from a state or a school district, are we effectively teaching our children to believe in themselves? Are we effectively teaching our children to read?

A Conference on Education Policy: Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS. PANELISTS: Amy Christianson, California School Boards Association; Marshall Tuck, EdVoice; Richard Zeiger, Zeiger Strategies. Moderated by Dan Morain. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

Are we effectively teaching our children to have the foundational numeracy skills to be strong problem-solvers, and how do we make sure that the dialogue, both at the state level and at school board levels are focused there.

And the one thing I do wanna say, I understand that people have different opinions about some of these cultural issues, but there are other options in the state, there is a home school option, there is a private school option, I’m not saying that those are options that I take for my son, but the public school system funded by tax payers of the state. It needs to create a system that people feel welcome, supported and are educated. That’s why we pay our taxes to pay for it. So I strongly believe that we’ve got work to do, at both the state and local level and to improve that, whether it’s a district school or a charter school.

DM: Amy, how does that play out in your world, the sort of ongoing battle between Charter Public Schools and not Charter Public Schools.

“Prop 98 is the base, it’s the floor, we’re not at the ceiling, we need to look at alternative options” – Amy Christianson

AC: I think it’s less of a battle than we actually think it is. I think that it’s a 90, 10%, the 90% public education schools and 10% charter. As a board member, we authorized a couple of charter schools, and I will say that our goal as board members is to graduate students and prepare them to be career and college ready, and I think if we keep that as a focus of what we’re trying to do, whether it’s in a charter or whether it’s a public charter or a public school, then that’s the eye on the prize. We wanna prepare kids to be critical thinkers. We want to offer them an opportunity to get an education in environment that supports their individual needs. We authorize a charter school that focuses on college and career education and has a strong dual enrolment program with our community college where students graduate with classes that provide them a path to college. That’s a phenomenal opportunity, whether they go to a four-year college or whether they graduate in two years. So I think that we have that playing out throughout the entire state.

We have a couple of districts that are in the news, and I go back to the first panel and highlighting that if we focus more on what some of the schools are doing that are amazing, we would discover that public education is really providing high quality education to many students, and while there are still gaps, public education has been underfunded for years, and we can’t expect in the last 10 years with the implementation of LCFF and getting equity to the schools that need the resources to provide students, the programs that they need… and as they talked about earlier, we are still in the mid-range in the nation and we’re the fourth largest economy in the world. If we were actually funding education, I can imagine what we could potentially do. And so I don’t wanna pitch charters against public education, because they’re public charters, I think we need to work collectively with the eye on the prize that we wanna graduate students career and college ready with what they need to get there.

DM: Do you think there needs to be an expansion of Prop 98, do you need a… How do you get more money to public schools? I mean Prop 98… Last time I checked, the schools get 40% of the general fund budget, a lot of money.

AC: Prop 98 is the base, it’s the floor, we’re not at the ceiling, we need to look at alternative options, I do not wanna diminish other programs or make it a competition. Earlier in the panel, they talked about ‘winning at all cost’ or ‘the survival of the fittest,’ and I don’t wanna pit that, I think we need to look as a state and as a system and look at the transformation that we could potentially do to provide the adequate resources to truly educate and provide a comprehensive program for all students.

“We spent a billion dollars on charter schools that did not stay open more than two years.” – Richard Zeiger

DM: Rich, you have ideas?

RZ: Yeah, actually, I think Marshall may be shocked to hear that. I actually think that this dispute between charters and traditional public schools, it’s kind of yesterday’s conversation.

MT: I agree strongly with it.

RZ: May be the first time that he and I have agreed on almost anything in all this time. But first of all, the system has changed in terms of how you go about picking… establishing charter schools, it made a little more sense. In the early days, which is when I was at the department, it was kind of the Wild West, and you could start up charters all over the place, and the state and the federal government would give you big chunks of money. And they may or may not have been well done or even stayed in business. In fact, I did a study which, alas, got no publicity anywhere, we had a study done about how much we spend on Charter Schools, and we did a quick study and in like a four-year period, we spent a billion dollars – and remember this is 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago – It was real money then. I had a billion dollars, it was real money….

We spent a billion dollars on charter schools that did not stay open more than two years. So we were just flooding the zone with money for charters, and it turned out we were flooding into a lot of bad… We had this joke going that you could move from county to county, try to set up a charter school… Well, pretend you were setting up a charter school… get all these grant monies and then on opening day you could just go “oh, no kids, guess we’ll fold it up”… We move to the next county, and do the same thing again. That was, by the way, if your intent was correct, perfectly legal.

And so we’ve actually sort of changed the rules a little bit, so we’re keeping an eye on these things, and as a result, I think the charters were getting, or at least from a fiscal standpoint, better put together, and they are, I think, doing more to meet specific needs, such as Amy was talking about: we’re gonna set up a charter school that does this. It would be nice, from my point of view, if you could do that within the traditional districts, but it’s often hard, it’s often hard to make those kinds of changes, and so having an alternative way of doing that is I think useful, and I think this conversation is kind of stabilized at the level it’s at, and they’re more interesting conversations in a…

DM: Well, that of course raises a question, if charter schools is yesterday’s battle… Good. What’s today’s? From EdVoice’s point of view?

MT: Unfortunately…

DM: And maybe it’s not a battle…

MT: I think the three of us agree that it’s just not a top issue, and I think the issue today is unfortunately the same as the issue yesterday. We have a state that does not work for most low-income kids that are disproportionately black and Latino.

“To me, the battle of tomorrow, unfortunately, is the same battle of yesterday, which is how do we get this state truly focused on educating all children and ensuring that all kids have opportunity.” – Marshall Tuck

That’s… If you look on any metric, you look at the data 20 years ago, you look at the data today on proficiency rates for English, you have massive gaps between higher income and lower income kids, you have massive gas between Whites and Asians and Latinos and Blacks, and that has been consistent for a long period of time. You look… Most recent state test data, 66% of kids who are not identified as economic disadvantaged are at grade level English and only 35% of kids identified as lower income are at grade level English. Similar for math, 54% higher income, 20… I think it’s 22% lower income.

If you look at graduation rates in terms of college prep graduation rates, you see similar gaps, 65% to 34%. And these are not new gaps, these gaps have been consistent for a long period of time, so since I’ve been in this work since 2002, my focus has not in governance or state or local, or district or charter, it’s pretty straight forward. We have a state that’s two Californias, this state has the best jobs in the world, this incredible economy that’s only open to some and our public education system collectively, we all… and I’ve been working on… We’ve all been working on it for a long time. We have more to do because we need to teach our kids how to read effectively and have strong analytical skills and strong civic skills and have a chance at a shot, so that to me is the fundamentals…

Now, how you break that down, I think we’ve made progress on expanding to TK For All, I think kids need to start earlier, and most wealthier kids, they pay for… Families, they pay for their kids to have Pre-K at age two, three and four. And so we need to get that for all kids in the state, I mean, to focus on early literacy, we know actually how to teach kids how to read much more effectively today than we did 15 years ago, yet we’re not doing that in all classrooms. That needs to change. We need to make sure that our highest poverty schools, which has been a consistent problem for decades, have consistent quality teachers in front of our kids. You have much higher rates of absenteeism, much higher rates of turnover, much higher rates of unqualified teachers in our highest poverty schools compared to our higher income schools.

So to me, the battle of tomorrow, unfortunately, is the same battle of yesterday, which is how do we get this state truly focused on educating all children and ensuring that all kids have opportunity. And that means a direct focus on lifting up children from low income communities that are disproportionately Latino and Black.

DM: Well, so Amy, this is your burden, how do you?… Talk about a few steps.

AC: I think it’s more important now than ever for local boards to set the direction to really engage the communities for what they want for their students, to look at the individual data with their school board, with their superintendent and staff of analyzing who are the students we’re serving and what do we need to do to ensure, through the partnerships with the county offices of education, through organizations like CCE, to look at continuous improvement for all students, so setting that local direction.

The next piece is, I think, is establishing the structure. So by that I mean establishing policies and practices that govern the board of how they move forward and how they make decisions and make the public aware of that, so that we can truly engage in the democracy at the grass level, so we can invite parents in to have the conversation, understanding that there’s a law and a process to uphold, but that we want to have their decision and their support and engagement in educating their students, Because parents are first and foremost, their child’s at first educator, and we have to honor and respect that and engage them in the process.

We also need to provide support as a board to the superintendents that are doing the hard work, and the teachers that are doing the hard work day after day, showing up to provide these students with not necessarily all the funding that they need… Funding is still an issue and we need to address that, we need to advocate not only at the state level, but at the federal level for adequate funding for our schools and for as we heard earlier for our teachers and educators, including para-educators.

And that we have to do this by sharing the accountability, talking about the things that are working, there are schools and districts that are high poverty that are having success. We need to share those successes and we need to provide that information so that we learn from one another, education often happens in silos, and we looked at it as a competition years ago when we had the report cards, that they were pitting one district against the other, which one’s better, and where can students go, that’s gone. We have LCFF, we have the ability to support schools and districts to learn from one another, to implement those best practices and teaching practices. Because the way you teach a classroom with high EL students to read is very different than you teach a different subset of students, and we have to address that and provide teachers the professional development they need to meet those individual students’ needs.

And lastly, we need to demonstrate leadership. We need to stand firm and united as a board to talk to our… To talk to the public, to talk to these individuals that elected us and to let them know what’s happening in the schools, both the good and the things that are challenges. And to make it very transparent, as we do when we meet once or twice a month in a public forum to do our business. And we need to continue doing that and we need to partner with the media and press to actually support us in educating some of those pieces, not just the only things that we wanna call out, but the things that are actually working well. Like the amazing career tech education programs that are going on, the major partnerships with community colleges – California students that graduate can receive two years free education in a community college. And many people don’t understand that. We’ve worked really hard for a TK 14 program in the state, the Cradle to Career. We have to stand on that and partner even harder now together to implement and make that happen.

DM: So, one of the points you made is you have to partner with the press. Well, back when dinosaurs roamed and I first started in journalism, there were those of us who covered school boards. I think that that’s becoming rare. School boards are kind of one of the last things that local local papers cover, but not always, and I see it in my local paper, I don’t see stories about the school board. So how do you deal with that? Or do you deal with that or does it just make it so much easier that you don’t have a young reporter asking you annoying questions.

AC: Well, I’ll age myself, I also roamed the earth with those dinosaurs when there was actually, was an education when reporters actually came to board meetings. I think that what we see is if you look, there are county offices of education required, they actually put out report cards, districts put out report cards. There’s a requirement in the LCFF to actually engage public and to educate them, there’s parent reports that go out in parent-friendly terms in multiple languages. I think we need to continue doing that and that we need to host… many districts or counties host forums for education, to educate and engage their partners. And I think that we need to continue doing the grassroots piece of educating, as well as go back to some of the times that we partner with Capitol Weekly and other publications like EdSource and EdVoice to actually get the message out there.

DM: Well, certainly EdVoice is doing a… Has done a very good job, but I don’t know, Rich, what’s your take on this? I mean as an old news person yourself.

RZ: As both a journalist and a state bureaucrat, not at the same time, I might add. Well, I do think that there’s an incredible shortage of coverage of school districts. And that’s as much a factor of what’s happened to newspapers over the years as anything else.

Any newspaper of any size and even smaller used to have an education beat reporter. And I think if you look out there now, you can count probably on one hand, the number of people who are actually devoted to covering education. So that has as resources amongst newspapers in the country have diminished, I think that coverage has gone away.

But I hate to… I wanna drag this conversation back ’cause I’m a systems sort of guy. And one of the problems that we have is we’re pretty good, and I think we’d all agree, on identifying where the problems are and what we need to do and all the things, all changes we need to make to get things better. The problem I think we have in California is how do you do it?

A Conference on Education Policy: Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS. Question from Christina Laster. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

And part of that is that the system itself is so fragmented. Amy talks about school boards coming up and meeting the challenge, but school boards can’t create the resources to meet those challenges. So you get stuck from the very beginning, and then so you have to move to the state level to create the resources, but then people want, if they’re gonna give you more resources, now they want oversight.

So you think about the Local Control Funding Formula where we’ve created this whole system where we’re going to evaluate through LCAPs, we’re gonna evaluate all of these things and we thought that this would help drive the conversation to the local school board. I think over the years, the development of LCAP has turned into a bureaucratic routine.

DM: Tell me what LCAP is?

RZ: LCAP is the Local Control…

AC: Accountability.

RZ: Accountability Plan. So each… You got this chunk, big chunk of new money from the state and you were supposed to develop a plan that showed how you were going to be meeting the needs of the very students we keep talking about, right? The low income kids that are having a difficult time getting going, you’re supposed to drive towards that.

And we set up this entire system, big part moved to the County Office of Education to police that and it was supposed to foster this conversation, increase conversation with school boards. And I don’t… You can tell me if you think that that’s true… I think it’s become another bookkeeping task that districts have to perform at a large expense that occasionally has some interesting conversations perhaps. Okay, so we can get some disagreement on that subject, but it’s very difficult when you are creating something from the top to get it to be fully invested in at the bottom. Each school and each district’s gonna wanna do it differently. I was at the department when we did the first year of this, and I’ve never told anybody about this: it was a mess.

AC: I agree. For sure.

RZ: Yeah, it was totally a mess and you don’t… I don’t think any of the county offices know. We had maybe a dozen counties that our department decided, “you’ve gone through this process and it stinks, it does not meet the tenor of the law.” And they wanted me to send out letters, I was the chief deputy then, send out letters to each of these counties saying, “You failed.”

And I’m sitting here going, okay, first year on this, right? We wanna send out letters saying counties don’t know how to do this? We wanna send that letter out? We just adopted this plan, we’ve pushed an unheard of amount of money into the hands of districts to deal with low income kids as we should have done many years before and suddenly we’re gonna send out letters and… So we didn’t.

“California’s the size of a country, there are countries that do this research and there’s… But we don’t, we don’t do that. We collect all this data, but we don’t do an analysis of it.” Richard Zeiger

The truth of the matter is we stopped and went back to those counties and said, “Let’s sit down with you and help you do it.” One of the problems with that is because of the way the system is set up, the state didn’t have the resources to go to the counties and do that. Nobody wants to give the State Department of Education any money. There is something to be said if you’re dealing with systemic problems across the state to having some top down work done on that. And we in California, eschew that, we do not do that, we think that that’s somehow bad and it creates to my mind, inefficiencies and waste.

So that you’ve got counties, county offices, some of them are great, and some of them are miserable, and some of them become better and some of them become worse, and there’s you lack this sort of level of consistency. The other thing you don’t get is a process for deciding allocation of resources from a more centralized standpoint, except for the big school board across the street. The only group we’ve got that makes those decisions is the big school board across the street, and that makes everything this incredibly awful political process that we have to go through.

And education systems thrive when we have a general consensus about where we need to be moving and everybody keeps moving that way. Everybody keeps moving year after year. We need more money to drive the system? Okay, let’s keep coming up with more money to drive the system. You need to hire better teachers? We talked about, you talked about that a little earlier – okay, how are we gonna make that happen? We were talking about salaries for teachers, salaries are set by local school districts. What does that do? School districts don’t have resources, they can’t pay them more, right? State thinks they should be paid more, state’s gotta come up with money to do it. Does that mean you need to set salaries for teachers at the state level? Maybe, right?

The argument seems to be made. Jerry Brown was argued that everything should be better at the local level and there’s some [garbled] that? That’s not right, much as I love Jerry Brown and much as I think he’s an incredibly smart human being, the right answer to that question is things should be done where they should be done. Some things should be done at the local level, some things have to be done at other levels and that we do not as a state put any money into, or almost no money, into figuring these answers out.

Okay, I got money to invest, do I create a new fourth grade? Do I cut the size of classrooms from 30 kids to 15 kids? These are trade-offs. What are the answers to the question? Have we done the research? There are… California’s the size of a country, there are countries that do this research and there’s… But we don’t, we don’t do that. We collect all this data, but we don’t do an analysis of it.

Now, Marshall and his group comes along, finds one that they find interesting, they pull out some data, they make an analysis. There are a couple of academic institutions that do, but there’s no relationship between the people actually, in theory who should be charged with making the decisions, and the research that they collect and should be using for that. So I think some of these systemic things make it really difficult for us to make the kind of progress that everybody agrees we wanna make.

DM: And Amy, what do you think about this notion that Rich is talking about?

AC: I think we’ve come a long way, I think that the first year I was involved in education was, I’ve been involved in education for years and I saw the onset of LCFF and it was difficult. There was a lot of plans that came in that were not approved, that were not supportive. And it was partially because in the past, it was that compliance mindset: We’re gonna give it to CDE, we’re gonna check a box and we’re gonna take the money and spend it and we’re gonna do what we said we’re gonna do. Which is that checks and balance, which CDE is really good at knowing where the money goes.

And so for me, LCFF has transformed over the last 10 years that you have the communities engaging. And I’ve been involved in this work at a local level where community members have come in, parents, English, non-English speaking parents, have joined in and had a conversation about what is right for their students. Parents have come in and talked about the services and provisions, and the LCFF is around three areas, the LCAP has the conditions of learning. So the things that students need to meet their needs, it has engagement, it requires parent and student engagement, it wants the schools to listen to what students needs to be successful. And lastly, it has achievement, it wants achievement for all students, it looks at college and career, it looks at the facilities, it looks at access to courses. It recognizes those districts at a local level, they have to be accountable in eight different areas in these plans to ensure that they’re meeting every single demographic and student that is identified in the LCFF.

Every school district in the state of California receives a base amount, those that have higher concentration of students receive supplemental and concentration dollars. And again, each district then has to be accountable for plans for their individual schools in a collective means to show how they’re gonna report progress over time for those students. So for me, there is some systemic pieces happening. There is transformation happening, you have agencies as they talked about earlier, CCEE, California Center for Educational Excellence, which is taking this research and working with districts to do root cause analysis and to do extensive data look at what’s happening and how it’s being implemented to improve our system.

That’s only been 10 years. We’re talking about decades of this, the billions of dollars being allowed to start a charter school when there was no accountability of where that money was going and they open and they close as quick. We now have AB 1505 and other pieces that are in place that school boards are responsible for ensuring that this happens for the students at the local level. Again, as I said, LA and schools in Orange County are very different than a school in Butte County or in Redding, California, or in McFarland, where there’s amazing things happening for the students and it’s individualized to what those students need and it’s facilitated by board members who are governing under the Ed Code and the policies that have been in set. So I agree to disagree.

RZ Okay, there are certainly bright spots.

DM: We should open it up to audience questions and Rich, you wanna…

RZ: I just… I think the CCEE is a really interesting.

DM: “CC..?”

RZ: CCEE, The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence is a really interesting thing, and also one of the things that I happened to be around when we were putting this together. With the idea is that you finally have some place whose task it is to work with schools and districts to help them improve. It’s nothing we’d ever have at the state level, it’s just sort of extraordinary.

And I have some arguments with the way the thing was set up once again, because of Prop 98, it was not a state agency. Well, it’s a… yeah, and it’s under, technically under the control of a county office, because we have to route the Prop 98 money through a county office to do that, because the Prop 98 said you can’t give it to the State Department of Education. So you route that money through there.

And so we create all these agencies that ought to be logically somehow linked together. And so when Amy starts out her conversation, it’s all about how we have to work with each other and how we have to pull all these… that’s an extra burden. That is maybe not the best use of the system is to force this kind of a collaboration that is better or worse, depending on who’s collaborating at any given moment into the system. And so I have a little bit different view about how to… I’m not, I think, and you can ask Mr. Thurmond about what he thinks when he gets here.

I’m not sure the Department of Education, there’s any hope for the Department of Education anymore, and I don’t know what we’re doing with it in California. It just it counts dollars and it’s pretty good at that, but there are a lot of state agencies that can count dollars. I don’t know that you need something called the Department of Education to do it. Or that at the very least you should maybe not elect a superintendent and have the governor appoint the superintendent of public instruction so that the governor becomes invested in the actual operation. So…

DM: Well, that’s a whole other conversation.

RZ: It is, indeed.

DM: Is there… Are there questions…

RZ: But it also protects…

DM: …from the audience?

RE: And really quick, we have a hand here. And just really quick, if you looked in your program, you’ll notice the names Delaine Eastin and Roger Niello were supposed to be on this panel. THINGS HAPPEN – and so they are not here, you’ve noticed Rich Zeiger does not look anything like Roger Niello or Delaine Eastin. Thanks, Rich, for stepping in at the last minute and loaning all your expertise here, we really appreciate that. I saw a hand go up right here. Let’s start here.

LILY STARLING: Hi, thank you so much. My name is Lily Starling, I’m the political organizer for SEIU 1021 in the North Valley, my turf goes from Sacramento, Napa, Solano and up to Redding. And I wanted to start by saying, I am surprised to hear that anyone thinks the charter school question is settled and I invite you to come to the California Democratic Convention in a few days, because we’ve still continued to have very explosive fights about that.

“You can’t separate literacy from identity and confidence, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work that way.” – Marshall Tuck

But yeah, I agree some amazing things are happening in Redding, one of them is that a board of education member turned out a bunch of members of the public to say that LGBTQ kids should be put in a different school so they don’t infect the normal kids.

And this is my question, if we’re leaving it up to communities to dictate where they wanna fall in terms of the culture wars, which is another term I reject, it’s human rights issues. Can we really guarantee that these students that are being targeted can learn reading, writing and arithmetic, which is the right-wing dog whistle that’s being used by Moms for Liberty type candidates, to say that none of this stuff should be addressed in the curriculum and we should only focus on these basic skills. I don’t see those two things as something that can be separated and I’m wondering what you think about that.

DM: So there’s a reference to Moms for Liberty, this is a conservative organization that’s, well, beyond conservative organization… that is advocating for… you wanna explain it?

LS: Yeah, they’re basically just trying to return school boards and school districts to a very, very conservative state, using hate rhetoric and they are very well organized and they are taking over school boards.

DM: Yeah, I’m not sure it’s conservative, but…

LS: It’s ultra right-wing is how I would describe it.

DM: Anyway, your views on this?

MT: As I said earlier, I think we agree. I think the state absolutely needs to engage and I’m glad they have so far and needs to do it with focus and I agree with you entirely. If you were a child sitting in a fifth grade classroom or in an eighth grade classroom or an 11th grade classroom and you don’t feel included and you don’t feel that the school is believing in you and caring about you, regardless of what your identity is… If you don’t see yourself in the curriculum, then you’re not gonna learn that well.

So I’m with you, you can’t separate literacy from identity and confidence, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work that way. And so I have been pretty consistent, like I think the state needs to step into these areas, and I think Rich’s point is a very good one. There is a balance between local engagement, I think local control is too strong, but like local engagement and state engagement. And there are certain issues in this case without question, if we’re trying to harm kids, there’s no local input, the state steps in and makes sure kids have a safe place to be. And on a side note, I think we all weren’t saying that the charter school issue is settled, it’s much less than it was yesterday, hopefully we’re all moving on, I think it was the conversation here.

A Conference on Education Policy: Panel 2 – THE ROLE OF SCHOOL BOARDS. PANELISTS: Amy Christianson, California School Boards Association; Marshall Tuck, EdVoice; Richard Zeiger, Zeiger Strategies. Moderated by Dan Morain. Photo by Scott Duncan, Capitol Weekly

DM: Okay. Is there another question?

RE: Right over here, right over here.

CHRISTINA LASTER: Hello. Hi, I am Christina Laster and I have a question about allocation of resources and the equitable allocation of resources. And so I continue to hear the term “low income,” but we’ve noticed over the past year that local area median income has shifted dynamically. And so if I’m a family of three with $25,000, that’s very low, extremely low, but then if I live in the County of Orange County, Los Angeles, San Francisco… you can be anywhere between $80,000 and $120,000 and be considered low income. And so what does that conversation look like at the local level, where people are having very real and different experiences, but we’re saying low income, right? And how are we accounting for the equitable allocation of resources at the local level for those different and varying experiences?

DM: Amy or Rich or anybody?

RZ: Amy, maybe you want to tackle this a little better, one of the things that California’s program, the local control program and the allocation of resources is not done like the federal program. It’s not tied to an individual student, it’s tied… that is, I give dollars for this kid because of this kid and their criteria, and that money needs to be sort of spent on that kid. It’s not done that way. It’s allocated as a group and there the state uses placeholders to determine these things. So it was, as I recall, was a free and reduced lunch program, if you qualified for the free and reduced lunch program, and of course we don’t require anything from free and reduced lunches anymore. But there is a federal requirement, if somebody meets that program, that kid is called low income.

So whatever the Feds say that is, that’s what we call low income. And there are other ones, English language learners there and foster kids are the two other main groups that we call. So it is a rough, and I would say rough is a good description, it’s a rough descriptor of the kid we’re trying to reach. And then the decision of how to do the allocations is left to the local school school.

AC: So and the technical term is socioeconomically disadvantaged, and there is the metric and a scale of which it is. And we’re… It’s being reconfigured at this moment because of no longer the requirement, California being unique and providing free breakfast and lunch to all, there’s not as many families who are actually completing the federal paperwork. And so that is becoming a challenge, but that is something that the Department of Education works with districts to determine those metrics and needs, as well as foster youth and homeless.

RZ: The question is, is that a good way to do it? It’s a little, that’s hard, I don’t know… it’s easy. Comparatively, it’s easy, it doesn’t require a lot of paperwork. So like figuring out the size of your family and the location that you’re living in, as opposed to just total income level, that’s a much more complicated… Are we gonna ask everybody? Are we gonna require each kid to have their parents fill out a form? And it’s just bureaucratically, do you miss things because of that? You do. So it’s a trade-off. And I don’t know… The good answer to those kinds of things is it escapes me, I really don’t know.

MT: There are some school districts that are doing more targeted.. So there’s an initial cut score they’re looking at, kind of deeper rates of transiency in communities, deeper rates of poverty, deeper rates of crime. So there actually are, like in LA, they’ve come up with a thing called SENI, where they’re using a number of different other factors, in addition to just the straight cut score of low income. And I think it’s something that kind of reaches points systemically. The state should every couple of years be looking at is our current definition for economically disadvantaged the right decision ’cause that… It’s ’cause so much is driven by that, that’s an issue that, and ideally if we are systemically strategic, we’d be coming back to that every few years and saying, is this the right definition? What districts have come up with new formulas that are working even better to truly target those kids of greatest need? And then how do you potentially pass state policy to make that happen in other school districts?

AC: And that’s where the role of a board member comes in in the local and the state advocacy, is that board members participate in educating. And it’s a role that CSBA plays is to gather all the voices. 5000 elected school board members in the state of California. Again, the uniqueness of each happening and bringing up the pain points that are similar in the same, and how do we then address them collectively?

DM: Is there a question over here? Any other question?

RE: Did you have a question? Okay. Yes, we have a question right here.

PETER ELLIOT: Hi, Peter Elliott. So I have a question. There’s a few factors recently that maybe could get cut in terms of budget related. So recently the state projected that K-12 enrollment will be going down by a substantial amount over the next 10 years, maybe 700,000. While the LCFF kind of locks in a certain amount, is this… Could you like disavow me of the notion that this might free up some more funding to be spent on an individual student? Like is this not a cause for better outcomes over the next 10 years in terms of how much is gonna… I’m definitely a layman as far as the LCFF goes.

DM: So fewer kids mean better schools?

AC: Yeah, with fewer kids… No, with fewer kids, it actually means less money because currently California’s system is ADA based, which is an average daily attendance base. So it means with students being actually enrolled in attending school, then you receive the money. So with declining enrollment means schools will technically receive less money.

MT: Unless we change the laws, ’cause the laws are based on us as voters, right? So if we know the state needs more funding for public schools, we should get working and get organized sooner rather than later to make sure that when enrollment goes down, we don’t decrease funding, we actually work towards getting to what our kids deserve, which is more funding today. But that requires us all to politically engage. Otherwise, to Amy’s point, it’ll… Well, the way we’ve done it is ADA, so less money for the system versus, no, let’s take this chance, we have less kids, but let’s actually do more for those kids that are in the system and same overall dollars. So we got some political work to do.

DM: Yeah, well, so our time is about up. The… I guess the overriding point of… if we could sum this up is that, school board’s role is to focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. And that to the extent that has happened in San Francisco and maybe is happening in Chino Hills and Redding and Temecula, that when school boards get off that mission, that’s when things go off the rails, maybe. Anyway, I thank you all. Rich and Amy and Marshall, thank you all for taking the time to join Capitol Weekly and this panel.

MT: Yeah, and thank you all for coming, we appreciate all the folks in this room working for our kids. So thank you for coming.

DM: Good, thank you.

RE: And for everybody here in the room, the lunches are back here…

Thanks to our Conference on Education Policy sponsors: THE TRIBAL ALLIANCE OF SOVEREIGN INDIAN NATIONS, WESTERN STATES PETROLEUM ASSOCIATION, KP PUBLIC AFFAIRS, PERRY COMMUNICATIONS, CAPITOL ADVOCACY, LUCAS PUBLIC AFFAIRS, THE WEIDEMAN GROUP and CALIFORNIA PROFESSIONAL FIREFIGHTERS