Education, protests & freedom of speech are the ties that bind our republic

Students are the future torchbearers of liberty

I hope I got your attention…

By the time you read this, the November 2018 election will be history and the outcomes of Election Day will have been debated and analyzed by every political pundit and pollster. This analysis, such as it were, is welcomed by political junkies and policy wonks across the political spectrum. But underneath all this analysis (or noise) is the fact that Election Day reflects several fundamental underpinnings of our democracy (democratic republic) on which we must continue to educate students if we truly believe in our founding documents and value the duties bequeathed to every citizen.

This year, in addition to our column regulars, Deb Dudley and Luan Burman Rivera, we are welcoming new consultants to the column. Consultants Sepideh Yeoh and Steve Ladd were recently introduced in columns earlier this year. This issue introduces Arati Nagaraj, a board member of the Saratoga Union School District since 2010. She is a Governance Consultant with CSBA’s Governance Consulting Services, developing customized board development workshops for governance teams.

Protecting existing school funding while fighting for Full and Fair Funding

ull and Fair Funding is crucial for student success, and research continues to demonstrate that increasing funding to education makes an important and lasting impact on students, particularly for students in high-need and low-income schools¹. Nonetheless, despite boasting the fifth-largest economy in the world and the highest gross domestic product of any state, California sits near the bottom nationally in nearly every significant measure of school funding and school staffing. Even with improvements to funding levels in recent years, California remains well behind most of the country. Adjusted for cost of living, California ranks just 41st in per-pupil funding.

California school funding is further limited by Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, which in part prohibits school districts from raising local property tax rates, forcing California schools to rely more on state funding than schools in other states. As a result, schools in California suffer disproportionally from underinvestment from the state.

A 2015 CSBA report on education funding, California’s Challenge: Adequately Funding Education in the 21st Century, found that K-12 education in the state was underfunded by $22 billion to $42 billion². The recently published Getting Down to Facts II report found that an additional $22.1 billion would have been necessary to ensure all students had the opportunity to meet the state’s education goals in the 2016–17 school year³.

California education is deeply in need of additional resources.

Shattering inequities: One school’s story

ico-Union is one of the most socioeconomically challenged neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles. More than 44,000 people live in a 1.67-square-mile area, making it one of the highest density places to live in the county. Sixty-five percent of the residents are Latino and immigrant, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Pico-Union is in the top 17 percent for number of violent crimes in L.A. Seven percent of residents have a four-year college degree and 66 percent did not complete high school.

In the midst of this challenged neighborhood sits Hoover Street Elementary School. It is ranked No. 1 in achievement compared to other schools with similar demographics in California (EdResults, 2017). Hoover is in the top 30 percent of all schools in the state for achievement and has been identified as a model of excellence in educating students, especially English learners. With this success in mind, California Department of Education officials, as well as community members and business people from across the state, have visited this impressive school.

Hoover is a K-5 neighborhood public school of about 800. Although several charter schools are nearby, Hoover still has a waiting list of students. Each morning, students enter by walking beneath an overpass that reads, “The door to college opens here.” At every assembly, students shout proudly, “Believe it, achieve it!” The school front is almost entirely covered in achievement banners earned over the past seven years.

A small district achieves big success in STEM

ucerne Valley Unified School District sits at the base of the San Bernardino National Forest in the Mojave Desert. A small, rural district consisting of an elementary school and a middle/high school, Lucerne Valley USD serves about 750 students who come from the surrounding 600 square miles. Due to declining enrollment and other financial constraints, resources are sometimes spread thin, and the district struggled to provide top-quality STEM — or science, technology, engineering and math — programs. That all changed when students at Lucerne Valley Elementary School began the 2018–19 school year with a new, state-of-the-art STEM lab, also called a SmartLab by the district. But how did they do it?

With advocacy from the school board team and support from the community — including contributions from longtime supporter the Mitsubishi Cement Corporation Educational Foundation — the district funded the lab. The board of trustees voted to award the contract to Creative Learning Systems, which has a 30-year history of developing labs that put technology in the hands of students and engage them with personalized, project-based learning.

“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t currently exist,” said Lucerne Valley USD trustee Tom Courtney. “We must be competitive with the rest of the world when it comes to engineering, technology and science. We are giving our students a fair shake to be competitive in a worldwide global system.”

An urgent need to improve charter school governance

quality public school for every child remains a vision that every district strives to achieve, and access to a great public education remains the most important driver for students to achieve their potential. This vision is exactly why California leaders have an obligation to closely evaluate and rethink charter schools, how they are overseen and their impact on our public school system.

In September 2018, CSBA released Uncharted Waters: Recommendations for Prioritizing Student Achievement and Effective Governance in California’s Charter Schools as the culmination of the work of the CSBA Charter Schools Task Force, which began exploring these issues two years ago.

This report presents key policy, advocacy and support recommendations related to charter schools and includes a vision on four focus areas of critical importance: quality expectations, equitable access and equity, governance and transparency, and elevating and replicating what works in public education.

The will to protect our students and end school violence is strong, but it will take a movement of courageous and proactive school leaders stepping up and leading the shift to create a more positive school culture. Bridg-it was created, designed and constantly being tweaked to support this movement.

This year alone, total spending on school safety nationwide is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and for good reason. In the first 21 weeks of 2018, we saw on average one school shooting per week where someone was hurt or killed. The safety climate in schools is worse when taking into consideration daily bullying and online bullying, identity threats, sexual misconduct, and other forms of violence.

A study analyzing the results of the California Healthy Kids Survey found that schools with unsafe learning environments face major financial losses. California school districts receive funding based on the average number of students in the classroom and absenteeism cuts into that funding. Approximately 10.4% of secondary school students in California reported missing school because they were bullied or felt unsafe, costing the state an estimated $276 million in one year.

Define the Goals and the Design Criteria:

he 2018 legislative year, like all others, carried with it several critical bills with significant implications for K-12 education in California — all of which you can read more about in CSBA’s “What’s New for 2019” report at 
www.csba.org/whatsnewfor2019 and on CSBA’s blog (blog.csba.org).

As the session was drawing to a close in mid-August, this year’s waters felt relatively calm as compared to previous years, with no real signs of cataclysmic waves on the horizon.

Well, that didn’t last long.

The final days of the session were marked by the re-emergence of Senate Bill 328 (Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge), the school start time bill, which had been dormant on the Assembly Floor since failing passage in September 2017, when it came up 15 votes shy of the 41 needed for passage.

mma Turner is a trustee of the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District in east San Diego, a TK-8 district with about 12,300 students. Turner is particularly proud of the work the district does in its Literacy Academy, Arts Academy and STEAM Academy. She has been involved in CSBA since her second year as a board member in 2007.

Tell us a little about your background including your own K-12 education and professional experience.

I’m a lifelong learner, and that is unusual because I didn’t have a smooth start in education. I began K-12 in a deficit; I didn’t have the support at home to help me with my education and I didn’t have the support at school either. I soon learned that I would have to assimilate to fit in, or not get what I needed out of the system. I finished high school and one year of college and decided to join the Navy, where I could also finish my education. I was learning skills in the Navy while I was also getting my degree.