Sacramento Bee

Dan Walters: Big talk, few fixes for schools

By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PST Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Were words alone – sheer verbiage – powerful enough to fix California's huge and hugely troubled education system, the problem would have been resolved years ago.

Scarcely a week passes without some new policy conference, legislative hearing, academic study, blue ribbon commission or other verbal venue devoted to analyzing California's educational conundrum and proposing solutions.

This year has been especially productive – if that's the correct term – beginning with a weighty, 23-part study of California's 6 million-student public school system financed by some well-meaning foundations and overseen by Stanford University. It said many things, but was short on definitive conclusions.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed that 2008 would be the "year of education" – presuming, apparently, that he would be successful in his vow that 2007 would be the year that California's health care crisis was resolved. And he appointed a Committee on Education Excellence, headed by renowned educator Ted Mitchell, to draft his own school reform program.

Not to be outdone, as it were, a Mountain View-based educational think tank called EdSource sponsored a conference in Sacramento last month at which 47 papers on fixing California schools were presented.
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of schools, opened a two-day "Achievement Gap Summit" that drew some 4,000 educators to Sacramento, focusing on the chronic gaps between white and Asian American students on one hand and Latino and African American kids on the other, and promising to add a few million more words to an already staggering inventory.

In anticipation of O'Connell's event, two University of California-affiliated think tanks released a massive report last week that charts the achievement gap and suggests reasons for its persistence, regardless of income levels, including a disparity of educational resources.
More words are on the way, because Schwarzenegger's commission has completed its draft report, although the governor is sitting on it. Mitchell, however, gave a preview to the EdSource conference last month, including a proposed overhaul of school financing that would do away with many of the "categorical aids" that supposedly target money to specific learning problems and refocus the money on the most troublesome schools and kids.

"We are looking at ways to reduce categorical programs," Mitchell said, according to Education Week. "We are looking very hard at weighting systems around the country."

If this account of educational verbiage sounds a little jaded, it's because California's schools, at least as measured by such things as test scores and high school dropout rates, have been deteriorating for several decades despite countless studies and programs that were supposed to fix things.

We – via our politicians and education leaders – flit from nostrum to panacea, from smaller class sizes to high school exit exams, while refusing to broach such taboo subjects as union contracts that make it difficult to assign the most experienced teachers to the most difficult schools and students. The educational establishment, meanwhile, monotonously chants that any academic improvement must begin with massive increases in school financing that, in the absence of some immense tax increase, are not in the cards.

While those participating in O'Connell's conference and other forums float what-if? scenarios, the more immediate reality is that the state budget faces at least a $10 billion deficit next year and the school community is bracing for a potential cutback in its constitutional floor of financing from Sacramento. In light of that, the "year of education" may be postponed indefinitely.