Kirst op-ed: Sizing up the CA Governor's Committee on Education Excellence report

Commentary: Mike Kirst sizes up Excellence Committee report

January 6, 2008
San Jose Mercury News
John Fensterwald's Educated Guess blog: The struggle to reform California's public schools

John Fensterwald: I provided Stanford education professor emeritus Michael Kirst a copy of the report by the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence and asked him to share his thoughts on it. Kirst, a past chairman of the State School Board, is co-author this year of the study "Getting Beyond the Facts: Reforming California School Finance."

by Michael W. Kirst

The Governor’s Committee on Education Excellence produced a blueprint for overhauling California education from preschool to grade 12. It should be the first place the public goes to understand what is wrong and how to improve the system. It is clear, compelling, and specific.

But it advocates coherent, comprehensive state legislation in a year of large deficits and leftover legislative priorities from 2007 including health care and water. The report warns correctly that "cherry-picking their proposals could make the current intolerable situation worse." The state Legislative Analyst has projected billions of new dollars available for education in the next five years, in part caused by declining enrollment, so the reforms can be phased in as the economy recovers.

How would the master teachers be selected and trained? How much would it cost for master teachers' increased pay and replacements for the master teachers who are not teaching children?

The report is a harsh indictment of the current state education system rather than students and educators. Among the criticisms are a system riddled with inefficiencies, hobbled with red tape, and impossible to understand. State policies are tolerant of failure, lack assistance and rewards for educators, and leave everybody and nobody in charge. More funding is needed, but not until numerous systemic flaws are remedied.

The report has many outstanding recommendations in its five major areas... strengthening teaching and leadership, school funding, governance, data, and preschool. For example, the state role maintains its focus upon high student test scores, but the Committee wants much more local control of how to attain these outcomes. Now the state specifies not only what students should attain, but also how to do it through a 100,000-section education code and 85 earmarked programs.

State deregulation of districts and school procedures, accompanied by state rewards and sanctions for student progress, is a major theme. The Committee supports more state funding but allocates it to individual schools based on the number of needy pupils without the Byzantine complexity of current state funding formulas.

The preschool agenda is ambitious including increasing kindergarten from half days to full days and providing new high-quality learning standards. A new state data system would encompass preschool through college. Now California can only report results at the school level but not for each teacher or pupil as they move up the grades.

A key issue is whether the Committee package will improve classroom instruction significantly. In many ways everything else is necessary but not sufficient for enabling teachers to continuously improve their instructional effectiveness. The Committee's ideas need more refinement.

The key recommendation is intensive professional development in each teacher’s classroom delivered through master and mentor teachers who provide regular coaching for the needs of each teacher. No state has developed this kind of assistance for hundreds of thousands of teachers. How would the master teachers be selected and trained? How much would it cost for master teachers’ increased pay and replacements for the master teachers who are not teaching children? Perhaps the state should experiment with these concepts before going to statewide scale.

The Committee encourages deregulation of teacher training by breaking up the education school monopoly. This is reasonable, but there is no developed system for making sure the new teacher-training entrants are any more effective than those that complete education schools.

Overall, the Committee's diagnosis of the state systems' problems are on target, and the recommendations would go a long way toward solving them. But in the past, state politicians treat these kinds of reports like a Chinese menu and select a few unrelated items for consideration. The report makes clear this needs to be an interlocking coherent policy reform.