Top Takeaways
- Getting Down to Facts, organized by SCALE Initiative at Stanford, involved 112 researchers who wrote 55 technical reports.
- The reports cover multilingual earners, facilities funding, early childhood education, high school course-taking, data needs, and other subjects.
- Researchers concluded that the intended balance of local control, in which the state provides clear guidance for districts to make wise decisions, has gone awry.
Stanford University on Thursday released a sweeping research project that takes a 360-degree, immersive look at all aspects and operations of public education in California, from preschool through high school, from special education to teacher certification, enrollment decline to high school redesign.
Called “Getting Down to Facts,” the research project comes at what Stanford education professor and project director Susanna Loeb calls “an inflection point” for California education. In a 40-page summary of 55 technical reports and 22 research briefs, Loeb writes that the findings arrive amid major shifts: the election of a new governor and state superintendent of instruction, the retreat of the federal government’s oversight and education-funding responsibilities, and the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the classroom and the workplace. Together, she said, these changes require the schools to respond to new conditions.
Getting Down to Facts is “designed to help Californians understand the condition of the state’s education system and the policy choices needed to improve it.
While the project details financial pressures facing districts, Loeb said that “California’s goals for students have grown broader and more ambitious, and the state is better positioned than before to pursue them.”
Overall, state funding is at record levels with billions invested in transitional kindergarten, after-school programs, the establishment of thousands of community schools, and early literacy reforms, as foundations for the future. And as a result of investments in teacher recruitment, like the Golden State Teaching Grant program, the latest data shows that the number of newly credentialed teachers is the highest in a decade.
But an overriding theme of Getting Down to Facts is that school performance remains widely uneven, and the state lacks the ability to bring to scale examples of excellence in districts once they’re identified.
Loeb and the studies repeatedly cite “a lack of coherence” that is draining energy and holding back improvement. That term translates into paperwork burdens for administrators, unclear guidance over curriculum, and insufficient instruction for teachers. It’s been accompanied by inconsistent levels of support from the state Department of Education, county offices, and other agencies over how to improve. Multiple new initiatives by Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators who created the state’s kludgy system over decades sent mixed messages on priorities.
In her summary paper, Loeb breaks down the dilemma as an ABC of challenges:
A for alignment and accountability
“Governance structures are fragmented, and policies have proliferated over time, often creating disconnected, contradictory, and burdensome guidance to schools,” Loeb wrote.
Responsibilities for overseeing and helping school improvement are divided among agencies, with no clear authority over who answers to whom. These include the State Board of Education, the state education department, and the Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a small agency that works to help poorly performing districts. County offices of education are assigned a primary role, yet they vary in ability to provide effective assistance, the report said.
The state established the California School Dashboard and districts’ Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs) to measure school performance and hold districts accountable for setting and meeting multiple goals. But researchers’ surveys found that principals and superintendents largely ignore the multi-colored dashboards, which many parents find indecipherable, and view LCAPs as burdensome and complicated.
An analysis of 7,000 LCAPs – the first using AI – found that only 7.9% of the districts’ goals for improving test scores, attendance, graduation rates, and other areas included a quantifiable target, and many appeared to be cut-and-paste goals common among districts.
“The Dashboard and LCAP do not, in practice, play the role of helping districts undertake strategic, long-term planning,” researchers concluded.
B for balance between state guidance and local control
In 2012, the Legislature created the Local Control Funding Formula, which, as the name implies, emphasized giving districts more autonomy. “The motivating belief was that more equitable funding, combined with local discretion over spending, would allow districts to respond more effectively to student needs,” Loeb wrote.
Fourteen years later, the balance is skewed, researchers found, with little guidance and lots of burdens that “leave districts to fend for themselves while requiring extensive planning and compliance monitoring.”
Researcher surveys of district administrators found that they spend roughly 19 or 20 hours – more than two days every week – on compliance tasks, from writing LCAPS to filling out reports on state grants and regulations. Other requirements, such as regulating schools’ daily-minute requirements, hinder efforts to redesign schedules and integrate experiential learning.