About this site I am currently a Governing Board Member of the San Carlos School District, elected November 2007 and again in November 2011. I created this site to keep in touch with folks who want to know more about what is happening in the District and what it's like to be a Trustee.
Please note that ANY OPINION EXPRESSED HERE IS PURELY PERSONAL AND DOES NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT OFFICIAL POSITIONS OR POLICY OF THE SAN CARLOS SCHOOL DISTRICT NOR THE OPINION OF ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES ON THE BOARD.
I encourage everyone to visit the District web site as well as attend School Board meetings.
Note that I reserve the right to edit, reject, or delete posts based on spelling, grammar, readability, or my judgment of what is appropriate discourse. |
A few days ago, the Governor released the first version of his proposed 2012-2013 budget. It will cut nearly $5 billion to public education if the voters reject the Governor’s plan to raise taxes in the fall (which will require a ballot initiative because 2/3 of the legislature will never vote for it). This is a smaller shortfall than in prior years, but still would cause significant pain to public schools. Although details are still unclear, even if his proposed tax measure were to pass, it would largely mean paying back money currently owed to public schools (e.g. Prop 98 increases that were not funded over the last few years) — it would hardly be a windfall for public education, but maybe would just get us to a point of fiscal stability.
The Governor’s proposed budget is based on a number of principles as it relates to K-12 education:
- Creating a new “weighted pupil funding” formula to simplify the current complicated and inequitable funding system — in principle, this makes a lot of sense, but the devil is in the details. It’s unclear if this would only affect Revenue Limit districts or all school districts. I think it’s good policy to give greater funding to low-income students and English learners, but it’s impossible now to measure how would this affect San Carlos. I think there’s a general principle to “hold harmless” school districts (i.e. don’t reduce anyone’s funding), but again details haven’t been worked out.
- Return more flexibility to the local level — this is something that school districts have been asking for a long time. Again, details haven’t been worked out, but this could likely include wiping out many categorical funding and mandates, but give more control to local school boards on how to best spend their money locally. There is also the notion of stricter accountability based on multiple measures of performance.
- Some flexibility around transitional kindergarten — the Governor is proposing that the new “transitional kindergarten” program, scheduled to start this Fall, be optional for school districts. SCSD is well on its way to planning for its Transitional K, so it’s unclear what the pros and cons would be of eliminating it. This will surely be a topic of an upcoming board meeting so we can understand the implications, financially and otherwise.
- Tax measure on the ballot — Gov. Brown announced earlier that he’ll seek a initiative on the November ballot to increase taxes. Although school districts would certainly benefit from a more stable state revenue source, it is unclear if such a measure could pass (and it probably wouldn’t be fiscally prudent to budget in anticipation of such a measure passing). If anything, there’s a risk that multiple seemingly similar measures will be on the ballot (all with slightly different approaches to raising money and to “reforms”) that they’ll effectively cancel each other out — voters who would otherwise support such a measure will only vote for one or two of them, leaving none with enough support. We’ll have to see how this plays out.
Silicon Valley Education Foundation had a few interesting articles that summarized the Governor’s proposals and the issues: Districts get power, if not cash, in Gov’s budget and Switch to weighted funding, local control.
I predict there will be many ups and down over the next twelve months, even though our 2012-2013 budget needs to be finalized within six months. We will have to budget in June based on some (probably conservative) assumptions as to how the state financing will turn out. I guess it would have been too much to ask for a smooth ride this year!
Over the last few days, I attended the annual CSBA Annual Education Conference, which is the main event for school board members around the state. This year the event was in San Diego (but back in San Francisco for 2012). Like previous CSBA conferences, one of the more frustrating parts is not being able to attend all of the sessions you want (and I think the conference organizers schedule too much non-session time, and if they wanted, could find ways to schedule more “content”). However, it is still a great conference for the learning, the inspiration, and the connection to other trustees throughout the state.
Also like previous years, CSBA delivers excellent keynote speakers. (CSBA claims it will be posting recording of the keynotes and have them available until December 31, but as I write this they are not posted yet. I recommend taking the time to watch them — you will be inspired!). The first day’s keynote was from Jamie Vollmer, a public education advocate and origin of the famous “blueberry story” (I highly recommend reading this if you haven’t heard of it). Mr. Vollmer spoke both about how existing “reformers” are mostly off the mark and that blaming educators and school board members is both false and dismisses the obligation of the larger community in supporting our children. One of my favorite comments he made was that the further a policy maker is from the students he/she is making policy about, the stupider the decision is. This is very consistent with a growing trend of understanding that giving local school board more resources and more flexibility as actually a big part of the solution. He also spent some time explaining how society has crammed more requirements into our public schools over the last century while roughly not allowing us to change the way schools are run. This led to one of the big takeaways of his talk, which de facto became one of the themes of the entire conference:
- Don’t make time the constant — Public education has been structured the same way Jefferson envisioned it, which was to “rake the genius from the rubbish.” Since that was the goal is the 18th and 19th centuries, schools weren’t designed to have every kid reach their potential. School was designed around a fixed time period, and achievement became the variable. Today we have a different mission, and the mission requires that we make achievement the fixed goal while making time the variable. But how do we do that given the structure that we’ve inherited?
This was a perfect segue to the following day’s keynote from Salman Khan, who most of you are already familiar with as the founder of the Khan Academy, which is essentially creating a free, online based curriculum already being used by students (and parents) around the country to supplement their learning. Although it would be impossible to do his talk justice in a blog post, he is effectively creating a curriculum that would potentially enable true differentiation and “inverted learning” — topics we’ve been discussing around “21st Century Learning.” Students could work at their own pace, ensuring that they master a subject before going on to next, and teachers (and other students) can “coach” them through the application of that knowledge and can track their results through real-time formative assessments. Taken to its logical extreme, it calls into question the whole notion of grades and individual classrooms. (To be clear, I am not necessarily advocating such an extreme change, but it’s a valuable intellectual exercise to understand how we think about reshaping the structure of public schools). It’s also crucial to discuss how can we create that time — since it would now be the variable — to support all kids as needed. The really good news here is that he is starting to understand how his content can integrate into a school’s curriculum and just not be a supplemental resource. He is developing the reporting and feedback systems needed for teachers, and he is aligning his content with the upcoming Common Core Standards. His pilot program in Los Altos by most measures appears to be very successful, and those of us from San Carlos at the conference were anxious to start working with Khan in a formal way. Besides doing a pilot program with a number of our teachers and classrooms, we can use Khan for student-led projects (maybe kids could use Khan as a resource for a ROPES project to learn a particular skill?) or maybe even use it as the foundation of a revised GATE program. Very exciting stuff, and the timing is perfect with our upcoming community conversations on 21st Century Learning.
As you can imagine, technology solutions played a prominent role at the conference. The emergence of the electronic textbook was being promoted both by the traditional publishers as well as the “disintermediators” like Khan. It is hard to predict how this will play out, but of course something we need to discuss this year. Also like last year, there were a number of sessions about alternative teacher evaluation and pay systems, a topic I am particularly interested in. We are now starting to see more concrete examples of such systems even in California, and I look forward to having these conversations. Lastly, another theme from the event was facilities — going green, sustainable buildings, etc. The trade show was full of vendors providing solar services, providing lower-cost, modular buildings, and other solutions for smarter facilities. Also perfect timing for us as we look to build a new school.
Notable absent from the event was the heavy focus on our continually dire financial situation. Maybe everyone has just accepted it as the “new normal,” and we’ve all taken the painful cuts. But maybe we’re all starting to realize how we can take control locally and make needed changes in spite of the horrible hand we’ve been dealt by the state. And there is some hope for new measures to fix the structural problems with our state education finance system. Jamie Vollmer called it education’s “most hopeful time,” and other speakers called it the “best of times.” Although the latter is perhaps an exaggeration, it really may be one of the more “hopeful” times because we’re at the confluence of the necessity and opportunity to finally address structural issues in our education system that have largely remained unchanged since the time of Jefferson. We can’t boil the ocean, but I am hopeful that the themes from this year’s CSBA conference will set the tone and drive the conversation for what concrete things we can accomplish in San Carlos over the next couple of years.
At Thursday night’s board meeting, we had an extremely interesting and meaty discussion about homework throughout the district. I was very pleased with the discussion, as it was open, honest, important, complicated, and a perfect demonstration that issues are not often as black and white as they may seem.
The district has had a long-held homework policy that sets out both the purpose of homework as well as the time guidelines for total homework per night for each student depending on grade level. Generally speaking, most people believe the policy itself is very solid; the main topic of this meeting was whether, and how, we are adhering consistently to that policy across classrooms and schools.
The administrative team did an excellent job presenting the challenges adhering to a homework policy and the areas where the district has fallen short. A number of parents made public comment that they believed that the policy wasn’t being implemented consistently and that their children were suffering under the stress of too much homework and being set up for failure. Interestingly, we also often hear from parents that homework is very light, and their children aren’t challenged enough. It’s impossible to get around the fact that all children are different, and every family has a different approach to homework, including how much they support (or believe they should support) their children in this effort. None of this is to say that the families who brought up issues Thursday night don’t have valid concerns — Dr. Baker began by saying that there are significant improvements we need to make in helping teachers both coordinate homework assignments (particularly in the middle school) as well as to “differentiate” assignments among children to make homework both reasonable and meaningful.
To be clear, I believe homework is important. As our Superintendent noted, it creates a link between the home and school, develops good study habits, helps prepare kids for high school and beyond, reinforces material learned, and also gives parents a window (and potential participation point) into their child’s school work. Of course, you can search the Internet and find all kinds of conflicting “research” on the subject — this is the nature of education as a social science — the cycles of research will often contradict the ones before. Due to this, I have always advocated using our best judgment and seeking a “balanced” approach. I do believe homework has incredible value (for many of the reasons described above) and that it is part of our job to challenge every kid to grow and stretch their intellect, but I also recognize that we need to ensure that kids do not get burned out and frustrated by the volume of work and also have time to “be a kid.”
This is why last night’s discussion around “homework differentiation” is the one that fascinated me the most. As most parents of multiple children have experienced, kids are different. Even with the same parents, same teachers, and same homework assignments, what takes one kid 10 minutes to complete can take another kid 60 minutes. This could be due to how each student conceptually understands the material; it could be related to how thoroughly they view the assignment, or it could be based on many other factors related to way the student thinks and learns. If a school does not differentiate homework, it’s essentially forced to hit the ball “in the middle of the fairway,” meaning make it work on “average.” This approach may leave everyone upset, with half the families thinking there is too much homework and half thinking there is too little. In many ways, this is what we’ve done historically. Dr. Baker recognized that differentiating homework is key to addressing this problem, and this would likely involve more project-based assignments and certainly more professional development for, and collaboration among, teachers. Although we’ve made significant strides in this area over the last few years, there is still a lot of work to do.
One of the administration’s goals is to assess our progress here by May or June, and the board discussed how we can measure this. It certainly became clear that there is no single metric of success in meeting the goals of the homework policy — it will come from multiple measures, including assessments from parents, teachers, and the students themselves.
Lastly, I brought up the idea that homework should be an integral part of our upcoming “21st Century Learning” discussions, as there may be ways to think of homework in a totally different way, such as “inverted learning” (have the kids do schoolwork at home, but homework at school) or have technology–based adaptive homework and/or assessments. Given my caveat above about the fluidity of social science research, I would hesitate jumping in to one methodology overnight, but I think we’ll have the ability to pilot some new ideas in the coming year.
In any case, I appreciate everyone who participated in the meeting, as it was an important and relevant topic, and of course directed related to our mission of always improving teaching and learning.
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