What's Wrong With Our Schools

At a press conference this afternoon, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to avoid too much discussion of the enormous cost of reforming California's education system, and instead focus on a series of recommendations on overhauling the state's school bureaucracy. Those recommendations in the 1,700-page report are structural and could dramatically shake up how California runs its schools.

The report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Institute for Research on Education Policy & Practice concludes that "the structural problems are so deep-seated that more funding and small, incremental interventions are unlikely to make a difference unless matched with a commitment to wholesale reform."

Read the a brief summary from the researchers after the jump. In general: California's school funding formula is unfair and allocates money haphazardly; principals need more flexibility and less paperwork; it should be easier to fire poor-performing teachers; and the state needs a way to better track student performance. Schwarzenegger's press conference is scheduled for 2 p.m.

The studies were designed to provide policy-makers and other education stakeholders with a baseline understanding of how California’s schools are financed and governed — from how education is delivered and assessed in the classroom to how effectively resources are allocated. Among the key findings:

• The current finance system is deeply flawed and contributes to the problem. Funding gaps across districts are substantial and haphazard, with no regard to costs, student needs or meeting state goals. There is no coherent rationale for why schools serving similar student populations in similar locations receive different funding amounts.
• California’s education system is not making the most effective use of its current resources. This is true across a broad range of categories, from the irrational and ineffective distribution of resources across districts and schools to how staff time is allocated and the lack of transparency and evaluation.
• California’s schools are likely to need more resources to meet student-achievement goals, but, to have an impact, increased funding must go hand-in-hand with reforms. New investments in education are likely to benefit students only if they are accompanied by significant and systemic reforms directed at fixing our schools’ troubled finance and governance system.
• Highly prescriptive finance and governance policies thwart local schools and districts in their efforts to meet the needs of their students and promote higher achievement. When asked about which changes would be most important to help them improve outcomes for students, principals ranked less paperwork requirements and more flexibility in allocating resources as more important than most other factors.
• Current teacher policies do not let state and local administrators make the best use of the pool of potential teachers or adequately support current teachers. Teachers are essential to student success, but current policies related to hiring, training, retaining and dismissing teachers are not designed to optimize student learning or the quality of the teacher workforce. One factor that emerged most consistently across studies as inhibiting local leadership was the difficulty in dismissing ineffective teachers. However, principals and superintendents indicate that they would only seek to remove a small number of teachers — two or fewer in most schools — if they had the actual authority to do so.
• California must do a better job of tracking educational data and sharing knowledge. We lag behind other states in collecting useful information on students’ learning, teachers and the effectiveness of educational programs and operations. Moreover, reforms have not been designed in ways that allow California’s citizens and policy-makers to learn from experience about how to best design and implement policy. Basic data on such things as the learning patterns of students across grades and programs are currently absent. These data are essential for measuring progress and developing reforms, and any reform without investing in better data is unlikely to succeed.