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Stephen D. Sugarman

California goes to court for education reform

Peter H. Hanley May 25, 2012

At every crossroads toward the future, it’s been said, tradition will post 10,000 people to guard the past. For frustrated Californians that see the need for significant change in the education system, a major number of those guardians are found in California’s Democratic-controlled legislature and the California Teachers Association (CTA), which is the state’s largest political contributor. Unfortunately, the problems are not new. I wrote at length on the terrible effects of California’s teacher employment laws and practices back in 2005, attacking tenure, seniority, and the evaluation and compensation systems as damaging to students. The depth of dysfunction in California has been documented repeatedly, perhaps most thoroughly in the 2007 “Getting Down to Facts” report, issued by Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice.

One of the key conclusions of the report, based on 22 separate studies it commissioned, was this: Current teacher policies do not let state and local administrators make the best use of the pool of potential teachers nor adequately support current teachers.

Five years later and with virtually no changes to teacher employment, compensation, dismissal, or tenure laws or practices – and no hope of any legislation passing – California’s reformers are following in the steps of great civil rights movements and seeking relief from the courts. In October 2011, a group of families, with support from EdVoice, sued the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to force compliance with a mostly ignored California law known as the Stull Act, which mandates among other things that teacher evaluations occur regularly and that they include student performance data.

Even the current LAUSD superintendent admitted in his deposition that “the current system doesn’t best serve adults or students” and does not focus on “the whole part of an education, and that is how students do.” Now the Democratic mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has jumped in on the side of the families, filing a friend-of-the court brief insisting on change and noting that LAUSD only evaluated 40 percent of tenured teachers and 70 percent of non-tenured teachers. Moreover, the district’s own task force found “only a tenuous link between evaluations and improved teaching and learning.”

Last month, my colleague at the American Center for School Choice, Steve Sugarman, analyzed the current Reed vs. State of California case that is, at least so far, defeating the “last in, first out” hiring practices that the CTA advocates and most school districts adopt. This policy leads to disproportionate firing of teachers in schools that serve poor neighborhoods and operate in difficult urban areas because the seniority policies of unions and districts place the newly hired teachers at these schools. Thus the trial court found the practice unconstitutionally deprives students of an equal education.

Just last week, lawyers filed on behalf of eight teenage students across the state a third attack on the teaching status quo that demonstrably damages kids.

May 25, 2012 1 comment

Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Jack Coons School Choice

Acceptable American Inequality

Adam Emerson November 11, 2011

Adam Emerson

David Brooks addresses a fictional foreign tourist in today’s New York Times by presenting a guidemap to acceptable and unacceptable American inequality. “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other,” Brooks writes, and I’m reminded of a passage in Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson’s book, “Saving Schools,” which addressed the fiscal equity movement of the 1970s. Peterson tries to help the reader understand why the equity movement ultimately ran up against entrenched interests, highlighting specifically the challenges redefinED hosts John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman faced when championing the Serrano case in California and the Rodriguez case in Texas. Coons, Sugarman and others had conceived a powerful idea, Peterson writes:

Equal protection before the law implies that all school districts within a state should have the same fiscal capacity. But that idea came up against the basic fact that those with more money want to spend more on their children’s education, just as they want to spend more on housing, transportation, and all the other good things in life. To be told that their child’s school shall have no more resources than any other school in the state runs counter to the desire of virtually all educated, prosperous parents to see their own children given every educational advantage. Fiscal equity was divisive.

The evidence that Coons and Sugarman had unearthed struck at the inequalities in spending between rich districts and poor districts, and it led the pair on a four-decade long mission to champion the cause of school choice. A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” Has the opposition to choice led to another form of acceptable American inequality?

November 11, 2011 0 comment

Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Jack Coons Parent Empowerment School Choice

A new era, and a new partner, for redefinED

Special to redefinED October 11, 2011

Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center’s chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.

Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:

The education of the child is a fundamental responsibility of the family
Enabling parents to choose the school that will best help them to fulfill this responsibility will strengthen families, schools, and communities

The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.

Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.

Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.

The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.

Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.

October 11, 2011 0 comment

Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice School Choice

School choice and the case for equity

Adam Emerson July 22, 2011

Adam Emerson

Over at Dropout Nation, RiShawn Biddle has explored how school choice activists, particularly those on the left, can re-energize the legal case for equity in education spending. He writes, “If choice activists and civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union successfully take up such moves, it would lead to another round of school choice efforts that would provide more poor and minority children with opportunities to get the high-quality education they deserve.”

Biddle has done more than any journalist to highlight the egregious symptoms of what he calls zip code education, notably pointing to the criminal prosecution of a homeless mother in Connecticut and a low-income parent in Ohio who sent their children to schools outside their assigned districts. He sees relief in the very state constitutional provisions that give most choice advocates heartburn: the idea that states must provide uniform systems of public schools. The language differs depending on the state, but the same barriers exist for voucher or charter school expansions. Or do they?

“Practices that have led to zip code education, including the concept of zoned schools, are essentially unconstitutional; and thus, inter-district choice of the kind encouraged by otherwise foes of choice such as Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation would be allowable,” Biddle writes.

Before readers roll their eyes, they should know there is precedence in Biddle’s contention, namely in two of the most stalwart advocates for equity, John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman of the University of California at Berkeley. Coons and Sugarman first struck at the inequalities in school spending between rich districts and poor districts in the 40-year-old California case known as Serrano v. Priest. The case led the California Supreme Court in 1971 to establish the concept of “fiscal neutrality,” which recognized that the quality of a child’s education should not be a function of a district’s wealth or poverty. The way to equalize education for rich and poor, Coons and Sugarman eventually argued, was to enact a system of choice.

A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” And, notably, this comes from a progressive voice that Biddle believes is critical to this enterprise. While it’s unlikely that any grassroots or parent-led effort can soon convince the ACLU to drop its opposition to the choice policies that Biddle and Coons would promote, Biddle is right to argue that it will take a left-of-center effort to quarterback this challenge.

July 22, 2011 0 comment