Education Week - December 10, 2014 - 18

California Districts Begin to Feel New Aid Formula's Impact
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14
lish-language-learner curriculum
materials to make sure they were
aligned to the Common Core State
Standards. Nearly a third of the
school's 1,200 students are English-language
learners.
This school year, she's trying to use
her district's accountability plan and
additional funds to address those,
and other, academic issues.
During one October lesson at Irene
B. West, Fabienne Fowler was instructing
3rd graders who were the
lowest performers on California's
English-language proficiency test
for English-learners. Ms. Fowler,
the school's testing coordinator for
English-learners, asked the students
what it meant to visualize what they
were reading and if they agreed or
disagreed with what others in the
class said.
"When we visualize as we read,
we're going to think of or imagine a
picture in our mind. A picture is just
like a movie, right? Except the movie
has moving pictures," Ms. Fowler
told the class.
The additional funds from the new
funding formula made it possible for
Ms. Murphy to hire Ms. Fowler this
school year, and also to equip her
classroom with new materials, ranging
from an overhead projector to updated
common-core aligned materials
for English-learners.
"We really refined our practice
throughout the school, but 3rd grade
I think has gotten the most training,"
Ms. Murphy said.
Connected Goals
There's good reason for that. Ms.
Fowler's work is a small part of a
major theme in the district's accountability
plan, in which Elk Grove aims
to increase the share of all students
demonstrating proficiency in reading
in grades 1-3 by 5 percent by 2017.
Donna Cherry, an associate
superintendent in Elk Grove,
said the district's "on-grade level
reading" goal translated into $1
million this year in new districtwide
expenditures that, in turn, relate to
HOW THE MONEY
FLOWS
The 2013 law creating
California's Local Control
Funding Formula for
state school aid was
made possible in part by
Proposition 30, a tax increase
approved by voters in 2012.
It provides added funding to
all districts over an eightyear
period, and will be fully
implemented in the 2020-21
school year. Under the law,
the state's base per-pupil
funding levels by grade span
in 2020-21 will be:
another district accountability goal:
gradually increasing the share of
English-learners who improve by
one level of English proficiency on
the state exam from 59 percent in
2014-15 to 63 percent in 2016-17.
And when it comes to commoncore
implementation, a top state
priority, teachers will receive an
additional three days of professional
development this year to improve
reading instruction aligned to the
standards.
"The English-language development,
common core, early literacy, our
math training, should all go hand-inhand,"
said Ms. Cherry.
In addition to the more intense
outreach to community groups, Elk
Grove also tried to include parents in
strengthening academic instruction.
For example, the district is providing
tutorials to help parents understand
the standards and how they affect
children's lessons and homework.
Updated budget projections released
last month by the California
Legislative Analyst's Office show that
$2 billion in unexpected, additional
state tax revenue in fiscal 2015 could
be made available to public schools as
well as community colleges. But Ms.
Cherry pointed out that under the
formula, after adjusting for inflation,
her district's base per-pupil aid is
slated to be the same in 2020-21 as it
was in 2007-08, before the Great Recession
triggered cuts to K-12. (The
formula, when fully implemented, is
designed to guarantee that level of
funding restoration to districts.)
Ms. Cherry said the relatively long
timeline for the three-year local accountability
plans, which can be adjusted
annually, helps the district's
planning. "It's more than a one-year
picture," she said.
Mr. Kirst said the new finance
system should push K-12 advocacy
groups to shift their focus away from
influencing legislation and policy in
Sacramento, and instead strengthen
their presence in and knowledge of
various districts.
"We need much more bottom-up,
grass-roots politics. In some ways,
there's a theory of democracy here:
The more people you get involved locally,
the more you get diverse voices
locally, and the more that will work,"
Mr. Kirst said.
Shelly Masur, a member of the
school board for the Redwood City
district, said for her 9,000-student
district (where 50 percent of the
students are English-learners and
70 percent come from low-income
backgrounds), that new emphasis on
grass-roots outreach translated into
very specific steps.
Involving Parents
For example, in addition to reaching
out to traditional parent groups,
the district called, emailed, and
texted each parent where the relevant
contact information was available.
Altogether, she said, about 2,000
of some 5,000 parents responded in
some way to the district's outreach.
She considers that a strong response
rate, but says there's still a
learning curve for her districts' parents,
who have long felt that there
are "have" and "have not" schools in
Redwood City. Reducing class size, for
example, is a top priority for community
members, she said.
"It's a very different process to be
truly advising the district on how it
spends its money if you're not in a
place where you [have] a sense of how
the district has spent its money over
X number of years, or if you're not
thinking about the whole district,"
Ms. Masur said.
At Redwood City's Garfield Elementary
School in Menlo Park,
where all students are classified
as socioeconomically disadvantaged
and 91 percent are Englishlearners,
according to recent state
accountability data, the district's
accountability-plan goal of having
one computing device for every
three students is translating into
new Google Chromebooks that
travel from classroom to classroom.
They serve two purposes: improving
literacy instruction, and providing
devices the school will use to
take state assessments aligned to
the common-core standards.
Jennifer Williams' class of 30
4th graders is using them to write
journal entries and work on reading
projects, while simultaneously
improving their grammar and typing
skills. "They don't have access
to computers," she said of many
students at the school.
The school's principal, Michelle
Griffith, said technology is just one
area the school is trying to rebuild
after recent budget cuts stripped
away a variety of services. Garfield
has reinstituted summer school,
a reaction to a parent survey that
found increased summer programming
to be a top priority. Additional
reading interventions during the
regular school year are being made
possible by $140,000 in new funds.
"The dramatic change is that it
is a completely different way to allocate
funds" in a more structured
and detailed way, Ms. Griffith said.
The Redwood City district has
tried to increase the reach of new
funds with support from organizations
it already had relationships
with, from Pivot Learning
Partners, a San Francisco-based
K-12 consulting firm, and
Startup:Education, a nonprofit
group founded by Facebook ceo
Mark Zuckerberg that helps improve
schools' Internet infrastructure,
among other priorities.
But many rural districts can't tap
into those kinds of robust, community-based
organizations, said Carrie
Hahnel, the director of research
and policy analysis at the Education
Trust-West, an advocacy group
in Oakland. "There are districts
where there is no local advocacy,"
she said.
Advocates' Anxiety
Speaking to the state school board
last month, before the final rules
for local accountability plans were
approved, lawyer John Affeldt expressed
his concerns about districts'
inability to demonstrate strong and
detailed spending and action plans
across all eight state priorities. "No
[plan] that I've reviewed this year
did that," said Mr. Affeldt, a managing
attorney at Public Advocates,
a nonprofit law firm and advocacy
organization in San Francisco.
In many cases, especially for
charter schools worried about having
their charters reauthorized,
districts created modest goals or
used relatively vague language
to describe their actions, said Ms.
Hahnel.
And the state's light touch when
it comes to measuring districts'
progress and intervention programs
strikes some advocates as abdicating
a key oversight role.
"There is no formal review of the
plans to make sure that districts
are meeting them. There are no
clear performance standards across
the state yet," Ms. Hahnel said. "I
think it's a misnomer that the state
keeps calling them accountability
plans."
There's a wide range of reactions
among community members to
how districts are handling both the
new formula and the mandate for
greater outreach on accountability.
At an October meeting of local pta
representatives at the San Mateo
County office of education (which
covers Redwood City and several
other districts), Keiko Smith, a community
schools liasion for the 17th
District pta in San Mateo County,
called the new approach a "great
idea" and praised the increased outreach
to parents of English-language
learners. She said, however, that
early implementation of the new
system has been inevitably rocky.
Jill Fair, the president of the Burlingame
district pta council, said
parents are still adjusting to the new
language in the formula and accountability
plan, noting, "There's a lot of
education-ese."
Van Nguyen-Do, the president of
the San Mateo-Foster City Council
of ptas, said that missing just one
of the school board meetings on
accountability could put parents
behind.
"Who holds the district accountable?
How far as a parent can you take it?"
Ms. Nguyen-Do asked. "All these questions
are not just process questions,
but they're very substantive. Because
a lot of times the process makes the
substance in this case."
In addition to the base amount, the formula is intended to funnel additional money to districts
and charter schools based on how many students they have in particular categories, such as
low-income students, English-language learners, and students in foster care.
SUPPLEMENTAL GRANT
All districts and charter schools will
receive an additional 20 percent of the
state's base per-pupil funding amount for each
low-income student, English-language learner,
and student in foster care that it enrolls.
CONCENTRATION GRANT
K-3
SOURCES: California Legislative Analyst's Office; Education Week
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 10, 2014 | www.edweek.org
4-6
GRADES
7-8
9-12
For a district or charter school in which
at least 55 percent of total enrollment
consists of the three categories of students
specified above, the state will provide an
additional 50 percent of the base per-pupil
funding level for each student above that
55-percent threshold.
LOCAL CONTROL ACCOUNTABILITY PLANS
Districts and charter schools must show how
schools will address eight state priorities:
* Assignment and full credentialing of teachers
* Implementation of academic standards,
including the Common Core State Standards
* Parental involvement
* Pupil achievement (state standardized tests,
college- and career-readiness measures, and
English-learner-reclassification rates, among
other measures)
* Pupil engagement
* School climate
* Access to broad courses of study
* Student outcomes (ACT and SAT scores, and
measures of success in subjects such as
physical education and the arts)
$6,845
$6,947
$7,154
$8,289

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Education Week - December 10, 2014

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