The California Way: Placing Equity at the Center of Policy and Practice

• In Event: Toward a Civil Rights Education Finance Research Agenda

Abstract

Several studies of education reform in the U.S. have documented and analyzed the factors that have contributed to the failure of past efforts to further equity goals. For example, Barton and Coley (2011) use a broad assessment of federal education and social policy to explain why progress in reducing racial/socio-economic disparities has slowed down in the last thirty years as the government adopted a narrow focus on raising academic standards and increasing accountability on schools, while simultaneously moving away from the types of social policies that were utilized in the 1970s to alleviate poverty (e.g. housing subsidies, youth employment, etc.). More recently, Mehta (2013) has attributed the lack of progress to the ongoing contestation for control of school systems waged between elected officials, educators and unions who run and work for them.

While these and other explanations may be helpful for extracting lessons that can inform future policy initiatives, in this presentation, we draw upon the relevant literature to explore three inter-related obstacles that are particularly likely to impact the implementation of California’s new Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). These potential obstacles include: 1) the need to re-design systems of accountability away from a top-down system of mandates and directives from higher levels of authority in the expectation of local compliance, to the incorporation of input from key local stakeholders; 2) the need to shift the focus of policy from one that emphasizes compliance with state mandates and regulations, to one that addresses the need for capacity building to ensure that schools and districts have ample support; and 3) the tension between centralized and local autonomy in decision-making.

We draw connections from these obstacles to analysis of interviews conducted with senior leadership from county offices of education (COE) representing half the state’s K-12 students to better understand their perspectives on implementation of LCFF. We find that a majority of COE embrace the goals of LCFF and have high expectations for LCFF in reducing educational inequality. However, COE officials also recognize a number of shortcomings to how the law has been implemented based on their experience over the last four years including: 1) policy ambiguity; 2) a lack of state investment in the infrastructure needed to implement LCFF effectively; 3) local capacity differences; and 4) the limited ability of districts to pursue intervention strategies targeted for high-need students. We also compare findings from interviews with COE to the interview responses of 75 staff from organized youth organizations to ascertain how and where low-income communities have tried to shape their local district’s LCFF priorities. We identify strong differences in how county offices and youth perceive student influence on LCFF decisions. Finally, we offer recommendations for policymakers in how to utilize these findings to engage education stakeholders and further the goals of LCFF. These findings and this presentation contributes to scholarship in the education policy literature on how to utilize school finance and school governance to further school improvement.

Authors

• Joseph Peter Bishop, University of California - Los Angeles

• Pedro A. Noguera, University of California, Los Angeles