Education Week - October 2, 2013 - 25

New Data Demands in Calif. Seen as Onerous by Districts
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how the new money is spent.
California’s education department
says it is working diligently
to respond to districts’ concerns and
recognizes the challenge of new data
requirements and the impact of the
state’s new “local-control funding
formula” (LCFF), which was approved
by lawmakers in June and is being
phased in over seven years. But uncertainty
remains about exactly how
districts will respond.
“Any time that you’re switching
the amounts or types of data that
districts have to collect, it’s going to
be challenging for them,” said Brennan
McMahon, a senior associate at
the Washington-based Data Quality
Campaign, which advocates for more
effective use of K-12 data by states.
More Money, More Info
California first notified districts
in May about a new requirement
from the state’s longitudinal data
system, known as CALPADS, that students
be individually identified in
the database for various purposes,
including their eligibility for free or
reduced-price meals, or FARMS, and
their disaggregation by subgroups
used under the federal No Child
Left Behind Act, said Erin Gabel,
the government affairs director for
the California department.
The subsequent passage of the
new funding formula this year (with
the support of Democratic Gov. Jerry
Brown) also required districts to direct
more individual information on
students into CALPADS. Under that formula,
in order to help socioeconomically
disadvantaged students, districts
with high concentrations of “needy”
students will receive correspondingly
higher amounts of “targeted” funding,
up to roughly $3,600 per student by
2020 for districts with large percentages
of students eligible for subsidized
meals, English-language learners, and
students in foster care.
The department issued more
guidance in August to help districts
understand new reporting requirements,
Ms. Gabel said. But the
change highlights the gap that exists
between what the state wants
and what districts had been providing
to the federal government. Some
schools, she said, hadn’t updated
their count of FARMS-eligible students
in more than a decade.
“The department has a responsibility
to communicate with the field better
during this transition,” she said.
“It has been a challenging transition
at the local level.”
A Knowledge Gap?
But some districts have reacted
to the evolving environment with
dismay. Their accounts of the new
requirements, and what the department
says, differ in crucial ways.
For example, Edgar Zazueta, the
chief of government affairs for Los
Angeles Unified district, where 71
percent of students are FARMS-eligible,
said his system was caught
completely off-guard when informed
that the district could no longer use
a process known as direct certification
to identify FARMS-eligible students
at Provision 2 schools. These
schools have at least 80 percent
of students eligible for subsidized
meals, and only have to update
their percentage of those eligible
students every four years.
Under U.S. Department of Agricul-
ture regulations, direct certification
allows schools to match students’ enrollment
information with families
who participate in federal benefits
programs, such as the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program, or
SNAP. This allows districts to quickly
gather students’ subsidized-meal
data without duplicating the efforts
of welfare offices. About 380,000 students
attend Provision 2 schools in
the Los Angeles district.
The demand for gathering the
information family by family was
extremely problematic for Los Angeles
not only because of the district’s
size, but the number of families
where there are undocumented immigrants,
low levels of English proficiency,
and an unfamiliarity with
such paperwork, Mr. Zazueta said.
“It’s not just an urban issue. Any
place where you have high concentrations
of poverty, I think this is
going to be a legitimate issue,” Mr.
Zazueta said.
But Ms. Gabel said that to her
knowledge, the department never
removed the option of direct certification
for determining FARMS eligibility
at those schools. In fact, she noted
that it’s a more efficient process than
gathering information directly from
families. (Mr. Zazueta cited as his
source the School Services of California,
an information and advocacy
service for districts.)
There was also a major concern
about time. Ruth Quinto, the chief
financial officer for the Fresno Uni-
fied district, which has 79 Provision
2 schools enrolling 55,000 students
out of about 75,000 students total,
said that initially, this new data on a
student-by-student basis was due to
the state Oct. 2. This was an unrealistic
time frame that revealed problems
with how the state funding formula
was actually being applied to districts.
“Frankly, there are so many aspects
of the LCFF that are yet to be determined,”
Ms. Quinto said.
Yet again, Ms. Gabel said that district
officials misunderstood the actual
timeline. The individual-level FARMS
data is actually due on Dec. 13, 2013,
she said. In addition, the amendment
window in which districts can subsequently
correct that kind of data in
the state system has been extended
from Feb. 7 to March 21, 2014.
Greater Urgency
Some California districts, she said,
are used to collecting this kind of individual
data every year. The department
is urging legislators and the
governor’s office to ensure that districts
are held harmless for any data
collection challenges that occur in the
2013-14 school year and in the future.
Ms. Quinto said that without pressure
from districts, the state would
not have backtracked on those issues,
but Ms. Gabel attributed the districts’
reactions to misunderstandings that
have been clarified.
Fresno has plans in place to try to
reach families whose students’ FARMS
eligibility isn’t captured by direct certification,
she said, but the new funding
system makes it more likely the
district could miss out on per-pupil
funding that it’s entitled to if some of
those families are unresponsive.
In the 2011-12 school year, 86 percent
of California students deemed
FARMS-eligible were identified
A group of friends share their
meal as more than 1,000
students swarm the school
cafeteria for lunch at
Francisco Bravo Medical
Magnet High School, in Los
Angeles. In implementing
its K-12 finance overhaul,
California is requiring districts
to change how they report
data on individual students,
particularly those eligible for
the free and reduced-price
lunch program.
through direct certification, according
to a Mathematica report published in
2012. But counting every student as
eligible is now crucially important,
given the state funding formula’s emphasis
on low-income students.
“Now I really need to identify all of
those families,” Ms. Quinto said.
Lingering Uncertainty
“
The department
has a responsibility
to communicate
with the field better
during this
transition. It has
been a challenging
transition at the
local level.”
ERIN GABEL
California Department
Of Education
Even the forms for families not participating
in direct certification have
caused concerns. The form the state
provided to districts to obtain information
from those households was only
an initial suggestion, Ms. Gabel said.
“They need a resource right now,”
she said of districts.
In Ms. Quinto’s view, however,
the suggested form is intimidating
to some parents. She said the form
provided for districts to use seeks
adults’ Social Security information.
The department said it is working
on finalized forms that in fact don’t
require that information—the only
key information required would be
the household’s size, gross household
income, basic demographic information
on a student, and a parent or
guardian’s signature.
Fresno has developed its own
form to better fit its community, Ms.
Quinto said, but the district isn’t sure
if the state will approve its use.
State support for districts during
the first two years of major changes
in data requirements is crucial, said
Ms. McMahon from the Data Quality
Campaign. This individualized
data, in turn, is important because
in the long run, she noted, state officials
and the public will want to
know if the state funding formula
is living up to the predictions from
supporters: “There also needs to be a
better understanding: Is it working?
Is it helping?”
EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2013 | www.edweek.org | 25
Jamie Rector for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - October 2, 2013

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