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California’s goal has been a dramatic one of making higher education available to one and all. The reality, however, reveals a system that favors the rich and the few.
—Susan E. Brown, from The Zip Code Route into UC
Not content with traditional answers to public problems, Californians have applied creative and innovative tools to supplement the traditional policy structures. These innovations are both praised and condemned, depending on which communities of interest one resides in. California’s willingness to experiment and its reputation as a trend-setter have made the state a leader for the rest of the nation in several key policy areas. Education is one of these policy areas. The 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which promised a heavily subsidized public university education to all students, represents California policy innovation at its best.
In statewide polls, Californians continue to identify education as one of the most important issues facing the state.1 This should come as no surprise, considering that California is home to the nation’s largest public school system, serving 5.7 million students. Public schools are the nexus of all community issues and concerns: civic responsibility, cultural literacy, tolerance, job skills, economic growth, and crime are all related to the state’s educational system. In addition, schools provide the initial point of access to civic institutions and political bureaucracy. This is true for children, as well as for adults with children. As a consequence, schools have become the battleground for civic discourse. This has been abundantly illustrated over the past several years with school busing in the 1970s, Proposition 13 (1978), and a trio of more recent ballot initiatives: Proposition 187 (1994), Proposition 209 (1996), and Proposition 227 (1998).
Public education provides a critical service to any society. Basic literacy—including the ability to read, write, perform quantitative functions, and critically assess the world around us—is a necessity in any complex society. This is especially true in California. With one of the world’s largest economies, California’s economic and political success has been based on a skilled workforce. Manufacturing industries and skilled agriculture dominated California’s growth years from the 1940s to 1970s. The basic skills taught in California’s primary schools, the vocational skills taught in California’s secondary schools, and the professional skills taught in California’s colleges and universities gave California’s industrial sector a highly skilled labor pool at no direct cost.
California’s public K–12 institutions are administered in autonomous school districts around the state, with oversight coming through the office of the state superintendent of public instruction. The state superintendent has limited authority to see that individual school districts comply with state and federal mandates. Local districts are charged with administering school policy as well as day-to-day operations. School districts are run by locally elected school boards, thus bringing together local—and often provincial—concerns in conflict with state and federal concerns.
The clash between local and state concerns is often harsh. This is explained, in part, by the relative inexperience of local district boards. School boards are typically the first point of entry to politics. Board members are generally inexperienced but highly motivated. State and federal legislators and staff, on the other hand, tend to be politically well seasoned, but somewhat cynical. This creates serious tension in communicating across institutional lines, and makes partnerships between state agencies and local boards difficult. State agencies tend to view local districts as inefficient, ideological, and marginally competent. Local districts tend to view state agencies as inefficient, coercive, and self-motivated.
The K–12 school boards are autonomous, on the one hand, but remain dependent on state and federal resources on the other. While both the federal and California constitutions recognize the need to respect local control, larger questions have come to dominate federal–state–local relationships. Desegregation, anti-racism and anti-sexism policies, affirmative action, and special education all represent federal interests, while curriculum issues represent state interests. Local issues tend to focus on class size, crime, and cost, and on occasion, provide a forum for ideologically driven reform. Since federal and state agencies maintain the power of the purse, and the state asserts the right of fiscal and managerial oversight, local districts are often in resentful compliance. At best, the policy structure driving K–12 education policy is combative and confusing.
California’s public institutions of higher education are defined by the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education (1960). The Master Plan was unique in defining the most comprehensive system of public colleges and universities in the nation. The plan devised a three-tiered system of community colleges, state universities, and research universities. According to the plan, any California resident who desired a college education would have a place in the system. The top 10 percent of California high-school seniors would be eligible for the 10-campus University of California (UC) system; although not necessarily their campus of choice. The top one-third of high-school students would be eligible for the California State University (CSU), and everyone, regardless of GPA, would be eligible to attend their local community college. This system revolutionized higher education by democratizing college attendance. Unlike students at traditional universities around the country, typical CSU students were first in their families to attend a university. The result: Blue-collar workers who built California’s industrial economy in the 1940s and 1950s were able to educate their children to compete in the increasingly skilled economy of the 1960s and 1970s, and beyond. California’s economic success in the 1990s is directly linked to the three-tiered system of higher education.2
The challenges facing both K–12 and postsecondary institutions are similar: declining investment in education, overcrowding, an increasing proportion of underpre-pared students, increasing racial and cultural tensions, increasing violence in communities and schools, declining community support, and—not surprisingly—a consequential drop in student performance. The emerging policy questions focus on these issues. How can schools do more with less? Will higher standards—and testing to those standards—create higher performance? Is violence in the community seeping into schools, or is juvenile crime causing violence in the community? Does community support follow school performance, or does school performance follow community support? Regardless of how people feel about public schools, there is little question that the vexing problems facing the state’s school system will only become more severe.
The primary tool of educational policy is budgetary allotment. While economic conservatives have long held that “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it,” one can certainly exacerbate problems by withdrawing appropriate financial support. The state’s per-student spending is below where it was a generation ago. In 2005, California ranked 29th among the states in per-student expenditure and 8th among the 10 largest states. California spends $739 less per student than the national average.3 Several factors lead to an even greater disparity among urban districts. Schools are traditionally funded by local communities through property taxes. Since different communities have different property values, tax revenues vary widely. Similarly, supplemental economic support from a local school’s community varies according to the neighborhood’s median income. This has created systemic inequities in the delivery of education.
California’s educational funding woes are impacted by two significant events. First, in Serrano v. Priest (1972), the state supreme court held that an educational system financed by disparate property tax revenues was by definition contrary to the equal protection clause. This placed an extra burden on the state legislature to reduce disparities through state funding. Proposition 13 (1978) reduced property tax revenues by 57 percent, forcing counties to deeply cut services. This placed an even greater burden on the state to provide replacement dollars. Whereas the state provided 30 percent of educational funding in 1972, by the mid-1990s the state was responsible for 60 percent.
As a consequence of shrinking property tax revenues and greater reliance on state dollars, K–12 educational funding has become extremely vulnerable. As the state has confronted increasing pressure for scarce resources, school funding has declined. When the state’s long boom began to wane in the mid-1970s, educational dollars dropped precipitously. By 1988 the proportion of general fund dollars committed to K–12 education fell to a low of 37 percent. This period of decline paved the way for the success of Proposition 98 (1988), which required a minimum 40 percent general fund commitment.
With over 5.7 million students in California’s K-12 system, the difficulties facing public education have not gone unnoticed by policymakers. Unfortunately, differing political ideologies and divided government have often kept the state from developing corrective policies. The most significant educational policy to emerge was the Educational Reform Act of 1983 (SB 813). This bill emerged during a brief period of congeniality between then State Superintendent of Public Education Bill Honig—a Democrat with strong support from teachers’ unions—and Republican Governor George Deukmejian. SB 813 required increased standards for high-school graduation; more basic subject requirements in math, English, science, and foreign language; and additional hours of instruction over the year. The bill also required increased statewide testing, higher teacher salaries, and the California Basic Educational Skills Test (C-BEST) as a qualifying entrance exam for teachers.
Although these get-tough approaches have achieved some success, the overall quality of public schools continues to decline. The reforms of 1983 were not enough to keep up with decreasing per-student expenditures, overcrowding, and increasing dropout rates. Further reform came in 1991, with the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), a testing program that asked students to read various literature selections and respond to them. The intent was to get students personally involved in reading and writing by relating the material to events in their personal lives. CLAS sparked contentious debate by conservatives and the religious right. Since CLAS presented students with stories representing the diversity of California families and encouraged independent thought, critics argued that the program was anti-family, pro-homosexuality, intrusive into family privacy, and based on wishy-washy pedagogy. The bill to reauthorize CLAS was vetoed by Governor Wilson in 1994.
By 1993, the school voucher movement succeeded in getting a privatization initiative on the ballot. The voucher plan would have given California parents a set amount of money to spend on their children’s education, whether in public or private institutions. The voucher issue added fuel to the contentious education debate by implying that public schools will never improve and that the only rational response was mass exodus. Proponents argued that this competition for public funding would force public schools to improve, while critics argued that vouchers would simply subsidize private schools at the expense of public schools, further eviscerating the public school expenditures.
There is a policy paradox at play. While self-described school reformers continue to call for higher standards, tighter discipline, and more narrow academic curricula, California’s emerging demographics suggest that bilingual education, greater remedial instruction, and cultural breadth is, in fact, more appropriate. It is estimated that 1.4 million students in California have limited English skills.4 Fully one-third of California students speak a primary language other than English, with one-fifth speaking little or no English at all. A recent response to this situation was Proposition 227, sponsored by Silicon Valley businessman Ron Unz, banning bilingual education in public schools. Voters approved the “English for the Children” initiative overwhelmingly in 1998. It is expected that California will continue to diversify and that language minorities will continue to present challenges to educators.
In recent years, the education reform agenda has been preoccupied with the managerial values of effectiveness and accountability. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), which set strict accountability standards, is the most prominent example, but that law was not the first effort in California. A state-level accountability initiative was intended to accomplish essentially the same thing: tracking achievement with a new Academic Performance Index beginning in 1999, but the main difference is that it rewarded schools for improvement rather than punishing them for failing to meet standards.5 NCLB represented the most sweeping change to the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a law that originally expanded the federal role in education by providing funding to school districts, regardless of location or need. NCLB further expanded the federal role in education by requiring public schools to document outcomes. In order to measure progress, the law defined measures of effort—such as requiring that all teachers be credentialed in the subjects they teach— as well as outcomes, which are measured with scores on standardized tests.
In the year following the law’s passage, more than 3,000 California schools were classified as “needing improvement.” Many of these schools were located in urban areas (see Table 13.1). This classification caused parents to attempt to transfer their children to other more highly ranked schools. Schools that continued to fall short of the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets faced sanctions. They were required to provide special tutoring services and tougher corrective actions, including the dismissal of “poorly performing” staff and lengthening the school year. Schools failing to meet the federal standards after five consecutive years could be shut down, reconstituted as charter schools, or have their management taken over by private firms.
TABLE 13.1 PERCENTAGE OF SCHOOLS FAILING TO MEET FEDERAL PHASE I TARGETS, BY DISTRICT
| DISTRICt | % |
| Fresno | 73 |
| Santa Ana | 69 |
| San Jose | 68 |
| Oakland | 63 |
| San Francisco | 61 |
| Los Angeles | 50 |
| Sacramento | 49 |
| San Diego | 45 |
| Long Beach | 24 |
Application of NCLB has been fraught with problems in other states, but California has faced special challenges with the law. Critics complain that the law imposes an unfair burden on California, due to the diversity of the schools in the largest state. Schools are required to divide student populations into subgroups, including ethnic groups numbering 100 or more, and test each of these subgroups. Homogenous schools have an easier time complying with the law because they have fewer targets to meet. Another complication is that federal funds for implementation of required improvements have been held up. Even though NCLB required federal financial assistance to help public schools meet the federal mandates, the federal government has not provided the funding promised for tutoring programs in underperforming schools. In addition, the law requires teachers to pass proficiency tests in every subject they teach, regardless of training and experience. Even teachers with doctorates suddenly were classified as unqualified to teach their subjects under federal guidelines.6
At best, public policy can be understood as a public action directed at resolving some public problem. Education policies, however, tend to encompass far more values and ideologies than other policy areas. Since public education provides a structure for social reproduction and basic civic education to all members of society, it is, by definition, an extremely politicized arena. The following examples illustrate the tensions inherent in education policy.
Different school districts around the state confront different types of problems and have provided different types of responses. The following case studies explore the rise of the religious right in the Vista Unified School District in northern San Diego County, the economic collapse of a school district in the northeast San Francisco Bay Area, and the movement to reform the huge Los Angeles Unified School District.
Vista, in suburban San Diego County, is 35 miles north of San Diego and 90 miles south of Los Angeles. Its web page boasts:
… Vista has a perfect mild Mediterranean climate. Over 92,192 residents enjoy a wide range of year-round outdoor activities in a setting of gentle rolling hills and pleasant rural surroundings. With more than 25 educational institutions for Vista youth, and a business park home to over 800 companies, it is no wonder Vista has been named one of the “50 Fabulous Places to Raise Your Family.”7
Vista’s population of 92,000 is 64 percent white, 39 percent Latino, 4 percent black, and just under 4 percent Asian. The median house value is $443,000, and the median family income is $49,200.8 Incorporated in 1963, Vista is an archetypal bedroom suburb.
Controversy arose in January 1992, when this sleepy town elected a school board with a three-member conservative Christian majority. The new board enacted several policies that many feared would inject a conservative Christian agenda into the classroom. In May the board sent to committee a policy that would allow the discussion of “scientific evidence” that would challenge dominant scientific theories of evolution and encourage “appropriate discussions of divine creation, ultimate purposes, or ultimate causes (the ‘why’)” in social studies and English classes.9 Later that summer, in a 2–3 vote, the board passed a policy stating that “scientific evidence that challenges any theory in science should be presented” in science classes and that “no theory of science shall be taught dogmatically and no student shall be compelled to believe or accept any theory presented in the curriculum.”10 This policy was widely seen as an attack on the statewide curriculum on evolution and an attempt to open the door to the teaching of creationism.
The Vista debate exacerbated tensions between local ideologues and the state Board of Education. Since the state tends to avoid these kinds of conflicts, state officials left it to community members and the ACLU to file suit should the Vista Unified School District actually put creationism on the curriculum. Because Vista is a bedroom suburb with 86 percent of the working population leaving town daily for work, few residents follow school board decisions closely. Ultimately, it became a contest between the Christian right, led by the Institute for Creation Research, and concerned parents mobilized by Larry Lovell, a local marine biologist. As the fundamentalist flavor of the debate emerged, many Vista parents became involved, effectively ending the fight. The conservatives lost the board in the following election.
The Vista case is important in illustrating the complex relationship between the various levels of government. The local district has autonomy, up to a point. But state and local governments are loath to intervene in local political skirmishes. Ultimately, the Vista experience worked just the way democratic theory suggests it should: robust discourse at the local level, culminating with open elections.
The Richmond case illustrates a fundamentally different aspect of education policy and state-local relations. Richmond is an extremely diverse urban city in the east San Francisco Bay Area, 10 miles north of Oakland. Chartered in 1909, Richmond’s population of 103,400 is 29 percent black, 35 percent white, 15 percent Asian, and 34 percent Latino. The median household income is $44,210, median age of residents is 33.9, and median housing unit value is $171,900.11 The West Contra Costa Unified School District (as the Richmond District is now called) serves some 35,000 students, speaking 70 different languages in 5 north East Bay cities.12 In the 1990s Richmond Unified School District experienced severe financial distress after years of continuing financial problems. This case is of interest not because of the fiscal crisis but because of the state–local relationship that emerged.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at least 20 school districts in California were facing financial collapse. It was common for the state to bail out ailing districts. But by 1991 Governor Wilson refused to sign any legislation bailing out Richmond unless the district granted the state broad managerial authority.13 Without state assistance, the district would have to close schools for summer vacation six weeks early. The Richmond district was an interesting choice for a showdown. First, the district is predominantly black. Second, although Richmond had a history of financial trouble, its innovative enrichment programs had achieved national acclaim for resolving many of the problems that plague urban districts. As the standoff between the governor and the state dragged on, Contra Costa County’s Superior Court ordered the state to do whatever was necessary to ensure that the Richmond Unified School District remain open. In the end the state loaned the Richmond district $19 million.14
In its oversight role, the state maintains the right to audit school district finances. In auditing Richmond, the state controller’s office uncovered serious problems, including an inability to properly track debts and payments. The audit found that 7 of the 12 district accounting department employees were working in substitute roles, with little or no training. In summarizing the Richmond situation, a spokesman for the controller’s office commented, “Richmond is a worst-case example of what happens when a school board does not meet its fiscal responsibility. There is no remedy for deficit financing in a district of finite means than to go broke eventually.”15 The district ultimately went into receivership, with a court-appointed trustee. In 1993, the Richmond Unified School District was reorganized into the West Contra Costa Unified School District.
The relationship between the state and Richmond illustrates the fiscal responsibility the state asserts over local districts. Unlike the ideological and curricular issues involved in the Vista case, when financial questions emerge the state is likely to act quickly and affirmatively. While the state allowed Vista to resolve its own programmatic and constitutional dilemmas, the leash was tightened around Richmond much more quickly. Different areas of education policy rely on different types of partnerships among local, state, and federal agencies. In this way, there may be fundamentally different levels of autonomy and control simultaneously present in state-local relations.
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the second largest school district in the nation. Its 727,000 K–12 students and 138,000 adult students are drawn from 708 square miles in Los Angeles County. LAUSD now employs a total of 77,754 people including 37,026 teachers.16 Clearly, the district has exploded since it was originally chartered in 1853 and covered only 28 square miles. LAUSD is one of the nation’s most diverse districts: 72 percent Latino, 12 percent black, 9 percent white, 4 percent Asian, 2 percent Filipino, and less than 1 percent Pacific Islander and Native American.17 The district has serious problems: Only 45 percent of high school freshmen graduate after four years. For Latinos, who constitute the majority of LAUSD students, the completion rate is just 39 percent. This staggering dropout rate caused Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to announce, “We can’t be a great global city if we lose half of our workforce before they graduate from high school.”18
Over the last two decades there have been several movements to reform LAUSD, either by breaking it up or by centralizing power. These initiatives have pulled the district in opposite directions. The shear vastness of the bureaucracy makes the district cumbersome and slow to respond. Some critics, including recent mayoral candidates Steve Soboroff and Bob Hertzberg, have argued that the district is too large to properly serve students and that the central administration is nonre-sponsive to parents. Further, these critics argue that smaller districts would allow students to attend classes closer to home. Between 1995 and the present, movements to break up the district have emerged in vastly different areas of the city, from core city neighborhoods to the suburbs.19 The most salient demands for breaking up the district have emerged from the largely white, affluent corridor between Encino and Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley. Not surprisingly, this was precisely the same area that was also calling for secession from the City of Los Angeles.
Angelenos, particularly affluent suburban Angelenos, are dissatisfied and angry. Many feel that they are not getting their fair share from downtown, that their concerns are not taken seriously, and that the education of their children—correctly seen as a local issue—has been hijacked by bureaucrats sitting in gray buildings an hour’s drive away. High visibility mishaps—such as the development of the ill-fated $200 million Belmont High site and the school board’s attempt to dislodge then Superintendent Ruben Zacarias—highlight the problems facing the district. The Belmont High School site was to be the LAUSD’s signature school site. Costing upwards of $200 million, the construction was plagued by mismanagement, not the least of which was approval of the site itself, which is contaminated with toxic pollution, making the school uninhabitable without significant mitigation. Zacarias was hired to resolve many of these problems but was pushed out by a new school board majority—backed by the mayor. The board could not fire Zacarias, so instead it hired a district CEO, who would have direct control of the district. This essentially removed any day-to-day authority from the superintendent. The move to undermine Zacarias was also seen as an insult to the district’s Latino majority. Critics argued that Zacarias was not given sufficient time to fix the problems he was hired to fix, and they argued that if he were white rather than Latino he would have been replaced in a much more low-profile, respectful way. Zacarias eventually was replaced as Superintendent by former Colorado Governor Roy Romer, who served until after Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005.
Villaraigosa took office with school reform high on his agenda, following a campaign in which poorly performing schools topped the list of voters’ concerns.20 Following the lead of such mayors as Chicago’s Richard Daley and New York’s Michael Bloomberg, Villaraigosa tried to take control of his city’s public schools. Using his resources as a former speaker of the assembly, he bypassed the voters and the local school board and accomplished his goal through legislation. His Sacramento allies, including new Speaker Fabian Nunez and Governor Schwarzenegger, enacted legislation to create a Council of Mayors, representing all 28 cities served by LAUSD. The school board’s power is weakened under the plan, while more accountability rests with the superintendent, whose office is strengthened. The Council of Mayors has budgetary authority over the district and has the power to review the board’s choice of Superintendent, although that did not stop the Board of Education from appointing its own choice for the new superintendent, David Brewer, while Villaraigosa was away on a trade mission in Asia.21 Voting in the Council of Mayors is proportional to the size of the cities, so the Mayor of Los Angeles dominates with 80 percent of the vote. Villaraigosa’s plan began a six-year trial period in 2006.
The LAUSD conflict is fundamentally an issue of control. Will schools be controlled locally, by city hall, or by a large regional district? If LAUSD is broken up into smaller districts, will parents have more control or will the smaller districts simply be more vulnerable to ideological meddling? Will breaking up the district break the back of the 32,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA)? Will it make teachers more accountable to local parents? These questions reflect the classic concerns of local politics. Unlike both the Vista case and the Richmond case, the LAUSD issue is exclusively local. Because day-to-day education policy is necessarily a local issue, the structure of the local district is beyond the direct reach of the state.
| The Zip Code Route into UC | Susan E. Brown |
California’s system of higher education has been celebrated as the nation’s model system, providing equal access to the American dream. But a look at who’s admitted to the prestigious University of California campuses shows that ZIP code may be as critical as grade point averages in determining who gets in and who stays out.
This is how the system works. The top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school graduates are eligible for the University of California; the top 33.5 percent are eligible for the state universities; for everyone else there is open access to community colleges with the option, after two years, of transferring into a four-year institution.
California’s goal has been a dramatic one of making higher education available to one and all. The reality, however, reveals a system that favors the rich and the few. The list of the feeder high schools that send more than one hundred students each to UC reads like a social register. It includes Beverly Hills, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, Rolling Hills, Palisades, and in the San Fernando Valley, Granada Hills, Birmingham, and Taft. With the exception of San Francisco’s Lowell and University High Schools, the UC feeders are in predominately, if not exclusively, white, affluent, enclaves. Not surprisingly, the mean family income for freshman at UC Berkeley last fall was nearly sixty thousand dollars, well above the national average.
Both the California Master Plan and Education Code are structured in such a way that students not ordinarily eligible for a state university may be able to transfer after two years at a community college. But, to the extent that transfer from a community college to UC works at all, it works primarily for the select, the affluent—and principally the white—community college. The top ten community college feeder campuses to UC for Fall 1986 were mainly in affluent residential communities: Santa Monica (252 transfers), Diablo Valley (241), Santa Barbara (227), Orange Coast (207), Cabrillo (151), El Camino (143), De Anza (139), San Diego Mesa (138), American River (132), and Saddleback (132).
By contrast, consider Fresno City College, which serves large numbers of minority students from a predominately agricultural region. Only one black and four Latinos (out of a student body of thirteen thousand) transferred to UC in 1986. Imperial Valley Community College, serving a similar student body, sent only three Latinos to UC campuses out of a freshman class of 1,341 that year. At predominately black Compton College, only two blacks transferred to UC campuses in 1986.
Statewide, the 106 community colleges in California sent a total of 189 blacks and 485 Latinos to the eight UC campuses, an average of six minority students from each college. Yet approximately 80 percent of underrepresented minorities who enter college in the state begin their studies in a community college.
While it is surely important to maintain high standards, the goal of a tax-based state educational system should be the development of talents and skills from all socio-economic groups. Public education by its very nature must reflect the entire population that supports it. What California has, instead, is a perfectly correlated system of family income to educational benefits—that is, the wealthiest are rewarded with access to the University of California; middle-income students end up at the California State University; low-income students begin and end their higher education at community colleges.
One possible solution to the perpetuation of a hereditary elite is to expand eligibility to UC and CSU to the top 12.5 percent and top 33.5 percent of students at every high school. There is nothing in state law or the California Master Plan to prevent this more egalitarian approach. Without such a remedy, California will merely continue to favor students from those schools with honors courses, enriched curriculums, well-equipped science laboratories, and optimal learning conditions.
Shouldn’t a serious student at an inner-city school who graduates in the top 10 percent of his or her class have the same access to the benefits of California’s postsecondary system as his or her counterpart in an exclusive private or magnet public school? If not, we should recognize that we are rewarding accidents of birth and that our current system of admissions to the University of California is, in truth, determined by ZIP code.
Editor’s note: Though this piece appeared in 1989, the observations are still largely accurate. In addition, this predates the raucous debate around affirmative action in 1996. The recommendation of assessing performance on a campus-by-campus basis rather than statewide is being explored in several quarters.
Source: Sonia Maasik and Jack Soloman, eds., California Dreams and Realities, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). Originally published in 1989 by Pacific News Service. Reprinted by permission.
This chapter has explored the policy framework surrounding California’s public education system. Education policy is a function of local decision making within a framework defined by the state and heavily influenced by the federal government. Further influence is ensured through funding agencies that require specific actions and policies in exchange for grant dollars. While the state maintains fairly tight control over postsecondary education (community colleges, the California State Universities, and University of California campuses), K–12 education remains fundamentally a local issue. The federal government is responsible for assuring equality of access; the state is responsible for establishing curricular priorities and financial oversight; and local K–12 districts are primarily responsible for short- and long-term policies affecting their students. The case studies illustrate how different districts pursue different challenges, emphasizing the idiosyncratic nature of education policy.
1. See, for example, Nick Anderson, “Davis Promises Fast Start on Sweeping Education Agenda,” Los Angeles Times (November 5, 1998): S1.
2. For more history of the Master Plan for Higher Education, see Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
3. National Education Association, Rankings & Estimates, 2005, www.morganquitno.com/ed5samp1.pdf.
4. Maria L. LaGanga, “Bilingual Ed Initiative Wins Easily,” Los Angeles Times (June 3, 1998): A1.
5. B. Mantel, “No Child Left Behind.” Congressional Quarterly Researcher 15 (May 27, 2005): 469–492.
6. Samuel Freedman, “Despite a Doctorate and Top Students, Unable to Teach,” New York Times (October 11, 2006): B8.
7. Vista Chamber of Commerce, Vista: Acclaimed as “A Dynamic Beauty,” http://vistachamber.org/community_info/city_of_vista.htm.
8. Vista Chamber of Commerce, Vista: Acclaimed as “A Dynamic Beauty,” http://vistachamber.org/community_info/city_of_vista.htm.
9. Peter West, “California Board Defers Action on Religious Tenets in Science Classes,” Education Week on the Web (June 2, 1993), www.edweek.org.
10. Peter West, “New Tactic Used to Push Teaching Creation Theory,” Education Week on the Web (September 8, 1993), www.edweek.org.
11. “City of Richmond Population Profile” (February 7, 2007), www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentView.aspx?DID=301&DL=1.
12. West Contra Costa Unified School District, About WCCUSD—Quick Facts, www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/about/quickfacts.shtml.
13. Peter Schmidt, “Judge Halts Plan to Close Schools in California District,” Education Week on the Web (May 8, 1991), www.edweek.org.
14. Peter Schmidt, “State Auditors in California Discover ‘Serious’ Flaws in Troubled District’s Financial-Management,” Education Week on the Web (May 22, 1991), www.edweek.org.
15. Peter Schmidt, “Judge Halts Plan.”
16. Los Angeles Unified School District, 2006–2007 Fingertip Facts, http://notebook.lausd.net/ pls/ptl/docs/PAGE/CA_LAUSD/LAUSDNET/OFFICES/COMMUNICATIONS/.
17. Ibid.
18. “The Mayor Takes Charge,” Economist (April 29, 2006): 31–32.
19. Peter Schmidt, “L.A. Breakup Plans Gather Head of Steam,” Education Week on the Web (October 25, 1995), www.edweek.org.
20. Patrick McGreevy and Richard Fausset, “Mayor Reasserts Bid to Take Over L.A. Schools,” Los Angeles Times (October 7, 2005): A29.
21. Duke Helfand and Howard Blume, “Mayor, Next Supt. Pledge Cooperation,” Los Angeles Times (October 26, 2006): B1.