Senator George Runner
Serving the 17th District which incorporates portions of the Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Ventura and Kern counties.

Senate Republicans are calling for legislative action to make sure California is eligible to compete for $4.35 billion in “Race to the Top” dollars available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The Recovery Act is the single largest pool of discretionary funding for education reform in U.S. history. On July 24, 2009, President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan outlined federal eligibility and competitiveness requirements for states competing for this funding.

Without a change in state law, however, California will be disqualified before the “Race to the Top” even starts. Under current law, California does not have the legal ability to link student achievement data to teachers and principals as the Race to the Top requires.

In 2006, teachers unions successfully lobbied for a law that prohibits the state from linking student data to teacher data for the purpose of pay, promotions, sanctions, or personal evaluation. Unless this provision is changed, California will be ineligible to receive this substantial amount of federal school funding. The state also will miss a prime opportunity to understand how teachers and students work together to reach the state’s achievement goals.

Across California this year, only 50 percent of children were proficient or above average in English. In math, just 46 percent of students were proficient. But those already mediocre numbers are much lower for disadvantaged and minority kids. Only 36 percent of economically-disadvantaged students scored proficient in English, and just 37 percent of economically-disadvantaged students were proficient in math. California’s African-American and Hispanic students scored even lower in English proficiency.

As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jill Tucker recently wrote, “Based on the rate of improvement from 2003 to 2009, it would take up to 105 years to close the white/Hispanic achievement gap and at least 189 years to close the white/black gap, which has failed to narrow by even a point in English since 2003.”

This achievement gap crushes the future of many poor and minority students and should be a good enough reason to repeal the 2006 law that limits the use of student test data. In addition, other recent test scores show that many of the students in the state’s poorest communities would greatly benefit if more charter schools were allowed to compete with traditional, failing public schools.

President Obama has called charter schools a good way to improve student educational performance. In a recent CNN interview, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “I’m a fan of good charters. [W]e’re creating options and new opportunities for parents, particularly in historically underserved communities….[W]e think that’s very, very important....”

In California, charter schools are already successfully serving the most disadvantaged students. In schools where more than 70 percent of students qualify for the free lunch program, 12 of the 15 top-performing schools (based on test scores) are charter schools, proving that focused educational programs with community involvement push up the proficiency of even those students who struggle to succeed.

This is a perfect opportunity for the Legislature to implement bi-partisan reforms that will provide quantifiable information about student and teacher performance in schools throughout the state and that will allow charter schools to flourish where other schools have not. By providing decision makers with information about student learning and teaching success, we can start to fix public schools that are failing far too many kids.

And, if those schools are unfixable, then we can provide low-income communities with new opportunities to furnish quality education to their kids through highly successful charter schools.

Overall, this is a race we must choose to run even if we must remove substantial legal barriers in order to do so. If not, California will continue its race to the middle, or worse, to the bottom.