After becoming governor the second time in 2011, Jerry Brown proposed a major overhaul of how California finances public education.<\/p>\n
The 1978 passage of\u00a0Proposition 13, an iconic tax limitation measure, had largely shifted school finance from local property taxes to the state. A decade later, voters passed\u00a0Proposition 98, which dictated how state support would be calculated.<\/p>\n
Money was allocated to local\u00a0schools\u00a0on the basis of attendance, so much for each pupil, but there were also \u201ccategorical aids\u201d \u2014 funds to finance specific educational programs.<\/p>\n
It was a confusing mish-mash, fueling annual battles over how much of the state budget would be devoted to schools and how it would be divvied up.<\/p>\n
Brown 2.0 proposed to do away with most categorical aids and modify the enrollment-based distribution, giving more money to school systems with large numbers of poor and English-learner students who tended to lag behind in academic skills.<\/p>\n
About 60% of the state\u2019s nearly 6 million public school students fell into the targeted category. In theory, increasing financial support for them would close, or at least narrow, what was dubbed an achievement gap.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Local Control Funding Formula, its official name, faced demands from educational reform groups that it be closely monitored to ensure the extra money was spent on the students it was meant to help and to gauge whether it did, indeed, narrow the gap.<\/p>\n
However, Brown resisted, saying he trusted local education officials to spend the money wisely, buttressed by\u00a0plans written with input from parents and other local groups.<\/p>\n
A decade ago, the oversight squabble finally resulted in the state Board of Education\u2019s\u00a0creation of a \u201cdashboard\u201d that contains not only academic achievement data but multiple measures of non-academic factors.<\/p>\n
However, as CalMatters soon discovered as it dove deeply into the system, the\u00a0other factors often masked academic failings, making some school systems appear to be succeeding despite poor results on academic tests. Moreover, the dashboard itself is very difficult for parents and other laypersons to understand.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, based at Arizona State University, gave California\u2019s dashboard a \u201cD\u201d in a\u00a0study of educational transparency.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,\u201d Morgan Polikoff, a USC\u00a0professor who worked on the report, told CalMatters. \u201cHow do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the criticism, officialdom continued to tout the dashboard as an accountability tool. However, we Californians at long last may have a way to decipher the otherwise opaque dashboard, crafted by\u00a0GO Public Schools, a Sacramento-based nonprofit organization that promotes better educational outcomes.<\/p>\n
Its\u00a0California School Dashboard Guide\u00a0provides understandable explanations of the dashboard\u2019s ratings, both overall for the state\u2019s 30 largest school districts and in detail for three districts. The three \u2014\u00a0Fresno Unified,\u00a0West Contra Costa Unified\u00a0and\u00a0Oakland Unified\u00a0\u2014 have large numbers of the at-risk students targeted by the Local Control Funding Formula.<\/p>\n
\u201cTogether, the guides show that growth is happening in districts of different sizes and contexts \u2014 but progress is uneven, and gaps remain wide,\u201d the organization said as it released the guide on Monday. \u201cAcross regions, the data arrives at a moment when many districts are making difficult financial and staffing decisions. The results raise pressing questions about how constrained resources, strategic choices, and system conditions are shaping student outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uneven progress is a polite way of saying that not only does California\u2019s achievement gap persist, but the state\u2019s academic outcomes\u00a0still fall behind those of other states\u00a0in national testing. The GO Public Schools guide at least gives us a better understanding of those shortcomings.<\/p>\n
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After becoming governor the second time in 2011, Jerry Brown proposed a major overhaul of how California finances…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[7,400,4730,181,100,975,2082,13,121,123,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-192926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-politics","10":"tag-k-12-education","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-opinion","14":"tag-opinion-columnists","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-sacramento","17":"tag-sacramento-headlines","18":"tag-sacramento-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}