The Possible in California's School Funding Formula and Accountability Plan: Participation Frames by an Intermediary Organization

• In Event: 41.030 - The Politics of Neoliberal Educational Policies and Equal Educational Opportunity: Empirical and Conceptual Examinations

Abstract

California’s 2013 revamp of the school funding formula and accountability plan was a significant departure from existing notions of school finance and accountability. The school funding formula, known as the Local Control Funding Formula or LCFF, redistributed funding to favor districts with high populations of students with high needs (Wolf & Sands, 2016). The accompanying Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) replaced accountability metrics as defined by standardized tests with a range of indicators and goals determined by an inclusive public planning process that engaged parents, students, and local community members (Menefee-Libey & Kerchner, 2015).
The LCFF/LCAP’s was hailed as an effort to shift the system toward educational equity. Yet as policy moves from creation to implementation, intended policy goals are often re-constructed in new and surprising ways by actors on the ground (Coburn, 2001; Lipsky, 2010; Yanow, 1996). The LCFF/LCAP enters the education landscape at a time where parents’ roles as consumers and producers of education are broadening (Barnes & Prior, 2009). However, Smyth (2009) argues that the resurgence of community engagement and capacity efforts may in fact be a move by the state to shift the burden of responsibility for negative social, political, and economic effects of neoliberal policy to the neighborhood level. Thus, the context that shapes how actors understand and engage with the LCFF/LCAP policy (Seddon, 1996) holds multiple, potentially contradictory messages about community engagement and empowerment.
Because the LCFF is relatively new, empirical articles studying its implementation are relatively limited. In Vazquez-Helig and colleagues’ (2014) statutory analysis of the law, they highlighted concerns of the possible co-optation of local stakeholders given its complexity. A recent evaluation of the LCFF/LCAP found that district officials were unclear about the purpose of the LCAP and were turning to outside organizations to help make sense, support, and sometimes lead, in the LCAP’s community engagement requirements (Wolf & Sands, 2016). Existing research on outside organizations (also known as intermediary organizations) that work with central offices and schools describes how they translate and interpret policy to shape priorities of schools and districts (Coburn, 2005; Honig, 2004). These mediation activities are not neutral; rather “their patterns of selection, emphasis, interpretation, and exclusion (Carragee & Roefs, 2004: p.2)” of policy messages are shaped and guided by an organization’s implicit (Trujillo, 2014) and explicit (Apple & Pedroni, 2005) ideological stances.
In this paper, I investigate the frames used by an intermediary organization that has taken the task of “translating” the LCFF/LCAP for districts and the general public. Specifically, I offer an analysis of participation by exploring how an intermediary organization frames 1) the type of community participants, 2) the terms of participation, and 3) the outcomes which participation is intended to serve. I contextualize the participation frames within broader discourses of community engagement and empowerment to elucidate the ways in which implementation may be bolstering or hindering the LCFF/LCAP’s intention to interrupt institutionalized notions of educational finance, governance, and accountability.

Author

• Seenae Chong, University of California - Berkeley