Educators meet to analyze government policy

 

With the proposed California state budget cuts for education looming on the horizon for the next fiscal year and State Superintendent Jack O’Connell insisting that California should be increasing its investment in education, not cutting back, 150 educators from Santa Barbara County met at the University of California at Santa Barbara Jan. 11 to discuss how to better shape policy to achieve success in education.

“The connection between the economy and education is apparent and catching up with us,” said Delaine Eastin, distinguished professor of Educational Leadership at Mills College in Oakland. She was California Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1994 to 2002.

 

“California’s investment in its children is the lowest per capita in the nation. At a time when we are focused on the economy, we need to realize the connection between it and education in this state.

“Children are the future of this republic. The children we are educating today will determine the fate of an America we will never live long enough to see. Therefore, it’s time for us to clean up government and stop letting policymakers make policy that doesn’t work in education.”

She said legislators and governors need “courage, vision and heart” to enact effective policy and legislation.

 

U.S. Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, told the group that the “single most important factor in the quality of a child’s experience in school is the teacher.” She said that she is working to bring good policy and good politics together, to work on ways to partner more effectively.

“Idea factories don’t need quick fixes as much as a partnership that creates policy that works,” she said.

Russell W. Rumberger, a professor at UCSB’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, showed graphs and research about a program he instigated to slow the high rate of high school dropouts in California.

 

In 2006 there were more high school dropouts in the state than in any of the 10 prior years. He said the new state exit examinations implemented last spring added 20,000 students to the dropout list this past year because students could not pass the tests.

His program, which is still evolving, works to determine, as early as 9th grade, students who are at risk, then facilitate interventions to help these children finish school.

“For every dollar invested in children,” he pointed out, “the return has been shown to be between $2 and $4 financially to the state.” He added that children who attend preschool are less likely to drop out of high school and statistics show they graduate from college in higher numbers than children who do not have any preschool experience.

 

The second panel discussion focused on how research is done and the problems with collecting data that can show real results and be used for analysis. Rebecca Zwick and John T. Yun, both professors at Gevirtz, gave details about the state credentialing criteria and how it needs to change to be more effective.

“If what goes on in the classroom cannot be related to policy, it doesn’t make any difference how good we might think the policy is,” Yun insisted.

“The teacher curriculum responds to state and federal guidelines, but sometimes those guidelines don’t really allow learning in the classroom,” he said. “All policy is a leap of faith because there are no guarantees that they will produce results.

 

“Policymakers assume the policy will work and it isn’t necessarily the case – what’s happening in the classroom needs to be evaluated and analyzed and so far we’re receiving lots of data, but it is the wrong kind of data and we aren’t able to make the proper analysis to see if the policy is really working and producing results.”

He discussed two such policies, the Quality Education Investment Act and Supplemental Educational Services, and said both were funded by California state legislators, but no money has been spent to see whether or not they actually work.

 

Dr. Kathy Boomer, superintendent of Goleta School District, and Paul Cordeiro, superintendent of Carpinteria School District, discussed what policies are working in the classrooms at their respective schools and how data is collected there.

Boomer said the “marginalization of practitioners is extreme” and that she has found it her responsibility to “explain and justify what’s working and how to make it look like we’re doing what we should be doing and still get positive results.”

Cordeiro said writing is the principal focus in his district and that students are required to spend a minimum of 20 minutes each day writing. He explained that just knowing conversational English isn’t enough and that a thorough understanding of English, as it relates to the sciences and math, is imperative for success in college. He added that learning to write English properly will instill this skill and he is determined that students in his district meet this standard before graduation.

 

“Given the reality of the demographics in our area, we needed to do something that would advance these kids. They need to understand what they read in a more sophisticated way. We felt that writing made that connection,” he said.

The final speaker was Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of sociology and adjunct professor of Public Policy, Information Technology and Women’s Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She focused on the racial achievement gap that has been found in many large cities nationally and a fact that was recently brought up by O’Connell, the state superintendent, last August after California state STAR test results were released.

She reviewed how research has shown that diversity in public schools provides a better learning experience for students but that parents and the way districts are formed have thwarted educators’ efforts to bring diversity to public schools.

 

For example, she said in 1968 more than 80 percent of students in most public schools were white. In 2003, only slightly more than half of the students in public schools were white. This is not because there are fewer white students, she pointed out, but because white parents have put their children in private schools or moved to all-white districts.

Of the four races studied (black, white, Hispanic and Asian), “very few parents wanted their children to attend schools in which their children were a minority race,” she said. Many, in fact, would move to areas with higher concentrations of their race and enroll their children in schools that did not have good assessment scores, just to keep their children going to school with peers of similar backgrounds.

 

She said the goal of educators should be to influence government to create policy that would allow more diversity in all districts because the returns would be greater if children were exposed to this learning environment.

She cited a project conducted at UCLA that focused on assessment results of schools in a Los Angeles district that tried to create more diversity in its school populations. While the results were sometimes undermined by parents taking their children out of these public schools – for private or even home schooling — overall the results were promising and test scores improved.

She showed graphs and charts that explained how the number of white students in schools made a major difference in assessment results and test scores. The graphs showed that where there were more white students, test results improved for all races in those schools. She said educators explained that this improvement came about because diversity added to the learning atmosphere for all the students.