In a last-minute reprieve for some districts that have not yet spent all their federal stimulus money – the U.S. Department of Education announced setting back the liquidation deadline on states to March, 2013.

Thus, districts will officially have until the end of the year, Dec. 31, to liquidate any remaining funds provided under American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from six key programs:

State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

Special Education Grants

Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies

Education Technology State Grants

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Part B, Section 619

Education for Homeless Children and Youth

Questions over spending deadlines have been swirling for weeks, largely because a number of local educational agencies still have big balances in some of the grant programs authorized by Congress under the ARRA legislation.

The California State Auditor, for instance, reported earlier this month that tens of millions of federal stimulus dollars were at risk of reverting to the U.S. treasury because schools might not be able to spend the money fast enough.

The California Department of Education has said for months that ARRA grant funds have a liquidation deadline of Dec. 31, 2011.

Because states had been given the same date for liquidating the funding – until this week’s announcement – the CDE wanted districts to expend all of their ARRA money by Sept. 30 to ensure repayments from the state.

Now that states have been given an additional year and three months to process the books – CDE officials are saying that districts can now use the last months of the year to finalize their liquidation plans.

The CDE said that Sept. 30, 2011 has become the last date that LEAs must “obligate” their ARRA monies. The term is intended in this case to mean the last date that services are performed by an employee or the date that an LEA makes a binding written commitment with a contractor.

Amendments to legislation aimed at cleaning up the state’s controversial Open Enrollment program would provide some relief to high-performing schools that had been unintentionally ensnarled.

But as currently written, AB 47 would still prohibit any district from having more than 10 percent of its schools qualify for Open Enrollment.

That cap has been a sore point with administrators because it requires some chronic underachieving schools to be skipped in one district that has reached its limit – in favor of higher-performing schools in another district still under the limit.

In an effort to help resolve that problem, AB 47 also includes an exemption for any school that has scored 700 or more on the Academic Performance Index or showed a 50 point gain in the last two years.

In other words, in order to qualify for Open Enrollment under the new bill, a school would need to have an API score lower than 700 for two consecutive years and also have not increased its score by 50 points in the current year or the prior year.

“The one thing with this reform that you will know for sure is that they are truly low performing schools,” said Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, the bill’s author.

AB 47 has also been amended to eliminate the exemption for charter schools. But the bill would now exclude from the Open Enrollment program special education schools run through County Offices of Education and state-run special education schools.

The bill also strikes down the requirement that the list must consist of 1,000 schools, a provision that “was driving the state to continue identifying schools higher and higher up the performance ladder until they reached their numeric quota,” said Huffman.

“It’s that sort of formula-driven process that I think led to the anomalous results,” he said.

The Open Enrollment Act was rushed through the Legislature in an attempt to score points with the Obama administration during last year’s Race to the Top competition, which California ultimately lost.

The law allows parents to transfer their kids out of low performing schools into a better performing districts if the school qualifies on a list of 1,000 ‘low performers’ based on the Academic Performance Index.

Due to the cap on the number of schools a district can have on the list, scores of high performing schools were forced to send letters out to parents that their child’s school was tagged as a low performer, a move that was called “demoralizing” by the superintendent of a small district.  

As the Legislature now debates how to fix the law, other developments have occurred that many educators are taking as a positive sign.

Because members of the California State Board of Education have been reluctant to get stuck in the controversy, many high performing districts have been exempted from the list.

Last February, the board refrained for the second time from taking action on 41official requests to be exempted from the law. Under the Education Code, relief waivers that are not acted on for two meetings following their submittal to the board are automatically granted.

A second batch of 55 waivers were not acted on at the board’s March meeting, and staff have indicated that the board does not intend to take up the remaining waivers at this month’s meeting, either. If that is the case, the waivers will again be automatically granted.

AB 36 by Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno, would bring California tax and unemployment insurance law into conformance with the federal health care reform legislation which provided an exemption for the additional benefits from being counted as part of their parent’s income.

Supporters argue that currently, California employers face the complex and sometimes uneven task of determining the fair market value for health care coverage provided adult children as provided under federal law.

Further, many taxpayers have been surprised to learn that the adult child benefit can trigger additional tax liability.

The bill has support from a wide range of business groups including the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Federation of Labor as well as a number of school districts and statewide school organizations.

The governor’s signature makes the bill’s provisions take effect immediately – just ahead of the April 15 tax deadline.

Similar legislation was proposed last fall and failed to win passage largely over the cost to the state.

To read AB 36, click here:

http://leginfo.ca.gov/bilinfo.html

Gov. Jerry Brown’s seven appointees to the California State Board of Education stepped over their first hurdle toward confirmation Wednesday with passage through the Senate Rules Committee, but obstacles remain with potential Republican opposition to members Michael Kirst and Patricia Rucker.

The appointees each require two-thirds support from the Senate itself, a vote that might happen in the coming days.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Republicans said they had reservations on confirming both Rucker, who works as a lobbyist with the California Teachers Association, and board president Kirst, who served on the board under Brown’s first term as governor.

“There are still some things we need to have resolved, and we believe we’ll get there,” said Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar.

Observers have noted that Republicans may be withholding their support for Rucker and Kirst in order to leverage a political deal for something else. There is GOP-backed legislation and other pending appointees for state panels they would like to see pass, sources have indicated.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Rucker was asked directly about the potential conflict of interest with her affiliation to the teacher’s union, and responded that it was a nonissue.

“I believe that in the time I have spent on the board this year, I have demonstrated very ably my ability to separate my obligations to the work that I do for CTA to the obligations I have to the education community at large,” she said.

Rucker added that the law requires her to recuse herself only from board decisions that would financially impact her employer, not ones related to education policy. 

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said that he would like the upper house to vote on all seven appointees early next week, well before legislative session ends on Sept. 9. 

In addition to Kirst and Rucker, Brown’s appointees are:

Carl Cohn, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and superintendent of Long Beach Unified from 1992 until 2002 and credited for initiating many of the reforms and successes the district has become internationally recognized for and well known as a critic of Sacramento.

Trish Williams is the former executive director of EdSource, a nonpartisan education policy group.

James Ramos, is chairman of the San Manuel Band of Indians based in San Bernardino and a key supporter of both the former state’s new schools chief and newly elected SPI Tom Torlakson;

Aida Molina, director of academic improvement and accountability for the Bakersfield city schools.

Ilene W. Straus, assistant superintendent for Educational Services at Beverly Hills Unified and a former director of Secondary Education for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and the Chief Educational Officer and Principal of Santa Monica High School from 2002 to 2006.

Operators of alternative charter schools including online and independent study programs are challenging a report released last week that called out non-classroom instruction as being among the lowest performers statewide.

In an effort to strength the academic standards that charter schools are held, the California Charter Schools Association embarked over a year ago on building a sophisticated accountability tool for measuring charter school performance that uses a regressive-based predictive modeling to filter out non-school effects on the students.

But critics also note that the tool also relies heavily on the Academic Performance Index.

The association’s first report on how charters stack up, issued to wide media coverage last week, found that charters are more likely to be among the state’s highest performing schools but also likely to be among the lowest achievers too.

It identified non-classroom based charters as being more likely in the lowest performing category.

Supporters of the alternative programs said the association’s analysis is flawed largely because of its reliance on the API and the inability to account for the common problems posed by students that tend to end up in such alternative programs like independent study or online learning.

“While I think there does need to be scrutiny – this sort of indiscriminate flame-throw approach is very damaging,” said Eric Premack, director of the Charter Schools Development Center, an advocacy group that represents both classroom-based and non-classroom based charters.

“What it says to the current and prospective charter schools is that you should market your school carefully so you don’t end up with one of the bimodal populations that will drag your test scores down,” he said. “We have some powerful anecdotal evidence that it is already occurring.”

Myrna Castrejon, senior vice president of Achievement and Performance Management at the charter association, defended the analysis as being both fair and valid – but also conceded limitations, too.

“I think it is absolutely fair to apply this model to those schools that have a stable student enrollment,” she said. “It is absolutely not appropriate to use it for schools that have an unstable student population because they are by definition dropout-recovery.”

She argued that non-classroom based schools do not always serve an unstable student population and while that caveat may have been missed by many readers of the report – it was disclosed.

That said, Castrejon acknowledged that the model is not perfect.

“We know there are limitations to what we have,” she said. “But as charters, we haven’t had the transparency, the rigor and the measures to hold our end of the bargain and it’s time we keep our promises.”

Non-classroom based schools are defined in the state Education Code as schools where less than 80 percent of the instruction time is offered at the school site where the instruction is overseen by a certified teacher.

That definition covers a lot of ground – including home schools, independent study, online programs and schools that offer so-called ‘personalized learning.’

Supporters point out that as a category within the charter movement, these schools provide among the most creative and cutting-edge approach that tends to inform and benefit the entire school system.

Jeff Rice, founder and director of the Association of Personalized Learning Schools and Services – which includes more than 40 member schools – said the core problem with the charter evaluation tool is its reliance on the API. He points out that the growth model presumes that a student population will move from grade to grade in a manner that allows uniform testing.

“That’s great if you’ve got a traditional classroom-based model where the same students move together to the next grade in the same school,” he said. “That’s 180 degrees from what happens in a non-classroom based school.

“That’s because non-classroom based charter schools – especially personalized learning – attract kids who have become disengaged and failed from traditional schools,” he said. “In many cases, it’s the majority of the students.”

Because the charter evaluation is biased against the non-classroom schools, Rice said, some of them could be put in jeopardy when it comes time for renewal.

“The association is putting these schools in a compromising position – saying, ‘Well you went down 40 points – we’re not going to support your renewal,” he said. “And they don’t look any further to find out why? The scores went down because these schools were trying to serve a population that wasn’t being adequately served and innovate – which is what charters are supposed to be doing.”

Castrejon said that while the association wants to use the performance tool to help weed out charters that are not performing – she insists that results from last week’s report is not intended to be the basis for schools being shut down.

“What we’re saying is that by this metric and this relative measure we’re seeing some cause for concern,” she explained. “And these schools need to undergo a very careful review by their authorizer and where schools would then be given the opportunity to present better data that does illustrate added-value.”

Rice and Castrejon agreed that the school performance question would be a lot easier to answer if there was longitudinal data that could track individual students, year to year.

Each also expressed hope that the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System could be put back on track sometime in the near future – something that has proved an enormous challenge in recent years.

Sixty three percent of schools that are subject to federal accountability sanctions under No Child Left Behind have been labeled as failing, according to data released Wednesday by the California Department of Education.

But paradoxically, for the ninth year in a row, schools across the state saw an overall improvement on standardized tests last spring. Those scores are used to measure schools under the federal criteria, known as Adequate Yearly Progress.

The AYP system, an ever increasing federal benchmark that rose by 11 percentage points this year, has set an unrealistic goal for most Title 1 schools and has prompted education leaders across the state to call it out as flawed.

 “At school after school, and among every significant ethnic group, California’s students are performing better than ever. The failure here is in our politics, not our public schools,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson in a statement.

Torlakson is one of several state school chiefs who are considering abandoning compliance with federal performance mandates under AYP, though he hopes a compromise can first be reached with the Obama administration.

The superintendent has asked U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to freeze the state’s annual proficiency targets so that a new cohort of schools won’t be subjected to those mandates. He’s also threatened to join with states that have said they would no longer comply with the proficiency requirements.

Although Duncan is critical of No Child Left Behind, relief to California has not yet arrived. Meanwhile, today’s results show that 913 schools and 95 local educational agencies have entered into Program Improvement for the 2011-12 school year. 

Program Improvement, or PI, is a sanction that targets schools or LEAs that fail to meet AYP criteria for two consecutive years. PI status forces educators to implement a series of state and federally-required interventions over a five-year timeline.

A total 3,892 schools and 445 LEAs – which include districts, county offices of education, and statewide benefit charters – are now in PI status.

On the bright side, the results show that 85 schools and one LEA exited out of PI status.

However, statewide student performance on the state’s accountability tool, the Academic Performance Index, jumped by 11 percentage points in 2011.

The average student score is now 778, just under the state’s target of 800. Forty nine percent of California schools have now met or surpassed that goal, which is an increase of 3 percent from last year. 

The API showed improved achievement among Latinos and students classified as English learners, though the achievement gap persists in California schools.

Latinos and English learners each gained 14 percentage points from last year. Latinos had an average score of 729, while English learners scored 706.

African Americans saw a 10 point gain for an average score of 696.

Asians had an eight point gain for a score of 898, and whites had a gain of seven for a score of 845. 

API scores from students with disabilities climbed 15 points to 595.

The API target of 800 was established by the California State Board of Education.

Access to inexpensive Wall Street financing by charter management organizations has emerged a key sticking point in a three-year-old legal dispute over “statewide benefit charters.”

The California State Board of Education used its statewide benefit authority in 2007 to approve a series of new campuses that Aspire Public Schools wanted to open in both northern and southern California – action that completely bypassed local review.

A coalition of public school groups filed suit and eventually got the board’s action ruled invalid by the state’s appeals court in September.

The plaintiffs, led by the California School Boards Association, say Aspire should now be required to return to the districts where the schools are located and begin the process for getting local approval just like any other charter petition.

The case is now back pending before the Alameda Superior Court where the higher court’s guidance is being contemplated and settlement negotiated. Meanwhile, the state board is set to take up the issue, too, next week – a board with a far different makeup since the election of Gov. Jerry Brown and appointment of a new majority who may not be as committed to Aspire.

But simply ordering the state’s largest charter operator to return for local approval is rife with complications, too – even though Aspire enjoys a national reputation for success and a reasonably good relationship with district administrators throughout California.

Based largely on the certainty of the statewide benefit approval, Aspire was able to float a $92.3 million revenue bond last year at reasonable interest rate to build the new schools and refinance old debt.

James Willcox, CEO of Aspire, said that if the certainty of the state board’s approval is taken away – future investors in charter schools will likely view such lending far differently and demand much higher interest payments.

As evidence, Willcox points to $12 million in revenue bonds that Aspire sold in 2002 and $17.5 million sold in 2001 – both of which came at a much higher interest rate and less favorable terms than the $92.3 million they sold last year.

“There’s a very stark comparison between the level of risk that people looked at before versus now,” he said.

He equated the process for getting approval for a charter from local districts to what might happen if the U.S. Postal Service had the authority to approve whether FedEx could deliver packages and letters.

“Regardless of whether the FedEx is doing a good job, I’d expect the Postal Service to say no because they’d love to have those customers,” Willcox explained.

“That’s how the financing world looks at charters – that’s why it is hard to get loans and when you do, they are really expensive,” he said.

Representatives of CSBA and the coalition that filed suit over the board’s use of the statewide benefit charter view the charter financing problem as a side issue and unrelated to the pending legal question.

“It’s our position that the Charter Schools Act was written – and I believe the courts have upheld – that charter schools will be approved on the local level,” said Stephanie Farland, a senior policy consultant with CSBA. “No matter what – unless they meet the standard for statewide benefit – which the courts have also ruled that Aspire does not.

“I think they are getting ahead of themselves and ahead of the law,” she said. “I think the Legislature really intended charters to be a local entity.”

Deborah Caplan, an attorney representing CSBA and the Association of California School Administrators, said that the ambition of her clients is not to shut down any of the Aspire schools or disrupt the education of their students. She said they have suggested giving the organization until the end of June, 2012 to transition the schools from the statewide benefit status into compliance with local approval.

Willcox said despite the September ruling, he believes there’s still a viable option that would allow Aspire to keep its statewide benefit approval depending on how the state board addresses the court orders.

“I would hope that we would still have the opportunity to make our case that we do provide a statewide benefit,” he said, noting that the schools in question serve about 2,000 students from mostly low-income, urban families.

“The courts have helped to clarify the standard through the many, many hours of debate over a few years.” he said. “Now that the standard has been clarified, I hope we get the chance to demonstrate that we meet it.”

At issue is a section of the Education Code that gives the right of a charter operator to submit a petition directly to the state board for approval of a charter school that operates at multiple sites throughout the state. But the law also requires that the state board make a specific finding, “based on substantial evidence, that the proposed state charter school will provide instructional services of statewide benefit that cannot be provided by a charter school operating in only one school district, or only in one county.”

Although the public school coalition lost at the trial level, the state’s 1^st District Court of Appeal reversed the ruling in September. The appeals court found that the state board did not make a proper finding that the same services could not be provided by locally-approved charters.

A plan to change how revenue from tax increases proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown would be accounted for in the state system will cost schools and community colleges about $1.5 billion in 2011-12, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst reported Monday.

Brown’s January budget proposed extending temporary tax increases that would go before voters in June as well as the elimination of tax credits and other changes that could be enacted by the Legislature.

But the LAO reported Monday that the administration only disclosed in recent days that they also intend to change to an accrual basis how they account for four of those revenue features – meaning income would be recorded when earned and debts recorded when they are incurred.

The net effect of this proposal is to increase the state’s general revenues by over $700 million for the 2011-12 fiscal year but decrease the Proposition 98 guarantee by $1.5 billion in the same year.

The governor’s office has defended the proposal, arguing that accounting methods used during the last years of the Schwarzenegger administration did not attribute back to the prior year all net final payments.

H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the governor’s Department of Finance, noted that the proposed change would bring the state more closely in conformance to generally accepted accounting principles. He said the change wasn’t called out specifically because it conforms with the law and didn’t require disclosure.

Jason Sisney, director of state finance for the LAO and the primary author of the report released Monday, said that they generally agree with the Brown administration that the change would bring the state back better into compliance.

California lawmakers have had a long history with changing between accounting on a “cash basis” to “accrual” and back again. In many cases, a change from one to the other was instigated merely to produce one-time revenue gains for the general fund, the LAO reported.

Under the cash basis accounting, cash is generally recorded when the money is received regardless of when it was earned; and expenses are recorded when the cash is paid, regardless of when the expense was invoiced.

Under accrual accounting, income is recorded when the money is earned; and expenses when the obligations are incurred.

At issue here are four tax measures in the governor’s budget: a .25 percentage point personal income tax rate surcharge; a dependent credit reduction; enterprise zone tax credit elimination; and a mandatory single sales factor.

According to the LAO, if all four tax measures are enacted as the administration proposes, the general fund would receive an estimated $177.2 billion over the next two fiscal years.

Without the accounting change, however, the general fund would receive $176.5 billion.

The implications for Proposition 98 are significant.

Under the administration’s plan, a significant portion of the net final payments of taxes from the four sources received in 2012, would be assigned back to the 2010-11 fiscal year.

Because the Legislature suspended Proposition 98 in 2010-11, the $2.7 billion increase for that year would have no impact on school funding, the LAO reported.

The governor further assumes that in the 2011-12 fiscal year, the state will be in a Test One year for the purposes of Proposition 98 funding – which means the minimum guarantee is based on a fixed percentage – about 41 percent – of the general fund revenues, according to the LAO. Or about $36 billion in general fund support.

Without the change in revenue accounting, however, the LAO said that the state would move to a Test Three year – a scenario in which schools receive a general fund share based on changes in attendance and per capita general fund revenues.

The LAO estimated that without the accounting change, schools would receive about $37.5 billion in the 2011-12 fiscal year.

Governor-elect Jerry Brown wants to revise all K-12 assessments within four years – that means fully implementing the new common core standards with instructional materials as well as providing the needed professional development to bring teachers up to speed.

He wants to eliminate most categorical programs, too, and the state regulators charged with overseeing them.

And the state’s new chief executive not only says he would do away with the Secretary of Education – he’s even questioned the need for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Interviews over the past two weeks with numerous former colleagues and educators who have spoken to the new governor about his education plan reveal a complex and potentially controversial agenda that come in the face of a $25 billion budget deficit as well as powerful Democratic interest groups that helped put him in office.

Educators and political insiders, however, say Brown is an ally of schools on a large number of issues. But they also point out that he’s not afraid to confront big problems including those that might make political allies uncomfortable.

“Jerry went to private school. He’s a Jesuit. He’s more into discipline and getting the work, doing the work,” explained Bob Campbell, an Assemblyman during Brown’s first time as governor and now an education consultant.

“I think Jerry has enough common sense to listen to what those ed people have been saying, and to ask them a question, because they’ve been saying the same thing now for 20 years. ‘So why isn’t it working?’ And they are going to have to tell him why it isn’t working…And he’s going to retort and say, ‘it’s not working guys, we have to do something else.’”

Brown’s education plan, which has been available on his website for months, articulates detailed policies including plans to supplement state standardized exams with “very short assessments during the school year;” to “dramatically simplify the Education Code;” and to “create local and state initiatives to increase school focus on science, history and the humanities – without reducing needed attention to math and English.”  

Michael Kirst, who served as California State Board of Education president under Brown and helped advise the campaign, said those ideas are owned by the new governor.

“That comes right from his mouth,” said Kirst, now a Stanford professor emeritus of education and a candidate to return as chair of the state board. “That’s not some consultant writing it. You’re getting the unvarnished thinking there.”

His focus on implementing the new math and English Language Arts standards created out of the national Common Core campaign will be clearly difficult given the budget restraints – but insiders say he is committed.

“You’re looking at sometime before the end of his first term that you could implement the tests, the common core curriculum, the textbooks, the professional development – the whole shooting match,” Kirst said, noting that Brown has not addressed common core directly but fully understands it in the context of implementing new assessments.  

As for the cuts, Brown wants to eliminate most categorical programs and the state offices charged with overseeing them.

Rob Phillips, assistant superintendent at the Solano County Office of Education, participated in an August meeting between Brown and the Association of California School Administrators.

“(Brown) thought there were an awful lot of regulations coming out that could be streamlined if the department of education were streamlined,” recalled Phillips.

Brown also wants to eliminate the governor’s Secretary of Education, which has drawn a lot of media attention – but he’s also suggested in talks with school officials that the state schools chief isn’t really needed either.

“He specifically said, ‘well why in the world do we even need a superintendent of public education?” said Lisa Gonzales, visual and performing arts coordinator at the Santa Clara county office, who also participated in the ACSA meeting in August. 

Other members present at the meeting recall Brown calling the superintendent a “cheerleader for education,” but the new governor has since agreed to work with Tom Torlakson, also elected in November.  

As for appointments to the California State Board of Education, there are strong indications that Brown will immediately replace all seven current members – appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger –  whose term expires or has not yet been confirmed by the state Senate. So far, however, those are just rumors.

Superintendent-elect Torlakson and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg both plan to push for more educators on the board, and Brown has agreed.

“He said he wanted to talk with us more about that and work with us on getting good names of good people that would be willing to serve on the state board,” said Karen Stapf Walters, assistant executive director of ACSA, who attended the August meeting.

Stapf Walters added that she planned to find educators willing to sit on the board and recommend them to the Brown administration.   

Historically, Brown’s former state board appointments were not ideologically driven, recalled Gary Hart, who served as a member of the California State Legislature from 1974 to 1994.

“They tended to be people who were not wedded to a particular constituency,” he said. “They weren’t part of the teacher establishment or the administrator establishment, or one particular ideological faction.”  

But one veteran Republican noted that when it came to appointments, Brown would say one thing and do another.

“He talked the talk, but then he hired a bunch of left wing cabinet members that stopped the construction of freeways and (instituted) diamond lanes, and lost the confidence of the voters,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a longtime republican strategist who was the staff director of the Assembly Republican caucus when Brown was governor.

As for the focus on science and history, “he’s really committed to that,” said Kirst. “That implies, if you’re going to have new tests, they ought to be with up-to-date new assessments. And if you’re going to assess something, you better have a new curriculum. And if you’re going to have a new curriculum, you’re going to have a new framework. And then you need new instructional materials.”

While Brown’s plan may be called far-reaching, it would be difficult to call it naïve. In many educators’ minds, Brown earned his stripes by being intimately involved in the creation of two charter schools – the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute.

John Mockler, veteran education consultant and key architect of Proposition 98, said that while Brown is fairly conservative on education policy and budgeting – his experience in running two charters and as mayor of Oakland will ultimately benefit schools.

“He understands the limits of bold ideas,” said Mockler. “The reality of being a mayor, it’s like the reality of being a superintendent in a local school district. You can sit in Sacramento and talk a lot about bold policy and ‘let’s fire all teachers if kids don’t score on the STAR tests,’ but then you gotta manage that locally and it doesn’t work that way. It’s hard to do that. Easy to talk about, hard to do. Governing is hard, and I think he’s learned that in Oakland.” 

Mockler noted that Brown’s experiences in the field have deepened Brown’s appreciation for finding and keeping qualified school leaders, he explained to ACSA members during the August meeting. Brown wants the public to better understand how the school system works, and so he wants to change the language state officials use to discuss reform, said Stapf Walters of ACSA.

“One of the examples he gave was the fact that our Race to the Top and our accountability system is based on this competitive model, which he viewed as a business model, and that’s part of the conversation that we need to rethink,” she said. “If we do that, he thinks that we can begin to build more public support for public schools.”