The Mother of All Education Reports

The fact that California’s once-shining public educational system is pretty much in the toilet is not in dispute.

California is eighth from the bottom among all US states in math scoring—and that’s only the good news. In reading, California third from the bottom. As for science, the state that gave you Silicon Valley and Cal Tech University has the second lowest science scores in the nation. Only Mississippi is lower.

For the last two decades there has been continuous tinkering with the edges of system and much discussion of who’s to blame for school failure. (Undocumented immigrants, lower-income ethnic parents who “don’t care about their kids’ education”, venal tight-fisted Republicans, spend-thrift, irresponsible democrats, etc. etc.) But the tinkering and the finger-pointing has done little to solve the problem. The schools just got worse.

So eighteen months ago, California’s state politicians did what politicians usually do when they have a humungous problem with lots of political ramifications and no easy solution. They ordered up a study. Thus on September 2005, the multimillion dollar education research project optimistically titled “Getting Down To Facts,” was launched.

The report, which was released last Wednesday, is an interweave 20 different studies involving a bunch of top universities (Stanford, UCLA, Syracuse, UC San Diego and so on) and another bunch of highly regarded research institutes. It turns out to be smart and surprisingly agenda free: There are, however, two crucial problems and six great things you should know about what is being billed as the mother of all school reports:

Problem number one: It’s freaking huge—upwards of 2000 pages long. (The executive summary alone is 72 pages.) This means the chances of lawmakers reading “Getting Down To the Facts”—even the Readers Digest Condensed Version—are somewhere between zero and You-Must-Be-Kidding. So will it turn out to be another $3 million paperweight?

Problem number two: It doesn’t say much that those who are paying attention didn’t already know. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Common sense and facts haven’t prevailed in the recent past regarding California education. So, it’s always possible that this expensive, highly pedigreed report will slap a few legislators and school board types upside the head and precipitate some action. (If anybody reads it, that is.)

As for the actual content of the report, I’ll be going deeper into certain areas in coming weeks, but for those of you who don’t see yourself downloading all 2000 pages for easy weekend reading, here are six of the essential highlights:

1. The problem is not with immigrants or ethnic minorities. Let’s get that out of the way from the get-go. The school system is broken and it’s failing everybody and this report has the numbers to prove it.

2. Okay, yes, California is way on the low side when it come to per-pupil spending, throwing more money at the problem ain’t going to stop the golden state’s race to the bottom. Without fundamental reform—a page-one-rewrite, as we like to call it in the screenwriting trade—additional funding, while needed, will be throwing good money after bad.

3. Dump the lemons. A theme repeating through many of the studies is the difficulty of getting rid of weak or incompetent teachers that, unless changed, say the researchers, will continue to hog-tie all efforts to institute real reforms—either at a micro or a macro level. Dump the le

4. District expenditures are rarely allocated on a What Works basis. California school districts spend millions upon millions of dollars on expensive educational programs that are put into place, then abruptly replaced on a haphazard basis without any real assessment of what has any measurable positive effect and what doesn’t.

5. The state’s school and district data systems are by-and-large a joke. Nobody at the state’s biggest districts—Los Angeles Unified topping that list—seems to have the ability to quantify much of anything, much less the capacity to put those numbers into any meaningful and shareable form.

6. California has a bunch of Beat-the-Odds schools< /strong> that are doing well. Analyzing what they’re doing right might be a good idea. DUH!

There’s more. But that’s a beginning.

Happy weekend.