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A Stanford professor’s high-stakes plan to save California schools (profile of Michael Kirst)

June 4, 2016
CALmatters
Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education at Stanford and president of California's board of education, has successfully pushed the state to adopt a new local control funding formula that aims to channel more funds to the neediest school districts while increasing their autonomy to manage their schools.
By 
Judy Lin

One by one, dozens of blacks and Latinos lined up behind a microphone placed before the state school board appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Spanish-speaking mothers pleaded for the 10-member panel to evaluate schools based on parent involvement because they have felt unwelcome at their children’s schools. African-American students asked the state to compile school suspension and absenteeism rates because those problems cause students to fall behind on schoolwork, feel alienated by teachers and struggle to find their self worth.

“Please, we just want to make sure that it is a defining factor in the way you measure the success of schools,” George Green, a Sacramento high school student, said at the meeting in March.

How the state will close a staggering academic performance gap between students from poor communities and those in wealthier pockets that is nearly the worst in America rests disproportionately on State Board of Education President Michael Kirst. The 76-year-old retired Stanford University professor has served four decades as one of Brown’s closest advisors and witnessed how difficult it is to improve classroom learning.

Together, he and the governor have devised a dramatic transformation of the nation’s largest public school system that calls for dismantling decades of centralized state reporting and promoting teacher autonomy. It’s an experiment of California proportions that even its key architect doesn’t know how it will play out for millions of disadvantaged children.

“Even though this is my 52nd year in educational policy,” Kirst said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

California’s push for local control is anchored in a principle the governor calls subsidiarity, the idea that teachers, principals and local school administrators are better equipped to deal with classroom problems than state lawmakers or government bureaucrats. Having witnessed various education reform efforts of the past half century, Kirst and Brown have come to be dismissive of educational fads and discouraging about the state’s ability to fix the problems.

"If the parent screwed up things, and if the principal's no good, if the principal can't lead, if the superintendent isn't very good, if the local school board isn't so good, what makes you think that the Legislature can fix it," Brown said at a Los Angeles dinner in May.

Read the entire story on the CALmatters website. If you're interested in learning more about Michael Kirst's education policy views, the Stanford-based think tank, Policy Analysis for California Education, has a video interview with him from 2014. Kirst's and Gov. Jerry Brown's embrace of an approach to education that departs from the rest of the nation is detailed in this story in Education Week.

For additional background on school accountability, please see this news release about a report from Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

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