As Jerry Brown continues with his listening tour on the budget, the fact that education will see a big portion of the cuts now seems like a fait accompli.  The only remaining question, or so it seems, is how deep, and how the districts will deal with those cuts.  There are no additional administrative efficiencies to save teachers, and our counseling, arts, and athletic programs have already hit bone, the next round will be job cuts to core curriculum teachers.

“It is abundantly clear that we will be looking at another round of cuts from the state,” said Wayne Joseph, superintendent of the Chino Valley Unified School District. “The amount of cuts remains to be seen, but it is fiscally prudent for any district to try to plan for the worst-case scenario.

“Because we have endured so many cuts in the past, most future cuts will have human faces attached. This is the human tragedy that many people either miss or are oblivious to.”(SB Sun)

For too long, we have been told that we are paying too much for too little, but the problem really is that we expect a few pennies to go for miles.  You can’t pay WalMart prices and expect Gucci results.  It’s no great mystery when we spend the lowest amount per pupil, and then get poor results.  The bigger mystery is how we have managed to stay in the middle of the pack amongst the states despite our continued starvation of our schools.  That is really the mystery, and the miracle, here.

But the next round of cuts could be different. School districts will really have no way to operate on the amount of cash they are receiving.  Many will flat out go belly up.  We’ll see some districts merging, where possible, and others just going insolvent with no real plan on how to provide the mandatory services to our children.  

Oh, and forget about those 180 days of instruction. Many districts have already fallen to 175, with others looking to go lower.  It’s a sure-fire way to lead our state into a long-term morass. And a way to shock doctrine our K-12 system into a for-profit system that some big corporation can profit from.  Already, a group of parents at a school in Compton used the “parental trigger” to force the school to go charter.

Thus the parental uprising. “Parents operate on a different clock than district bureaucrats,” says Ben Austin of Parent Revolution, a liberal group assisting McKinley parents. “Kids get older every year. We can’t freeze-dry our kids and wait for your pilot programs to pan out.” More than 60% of McKinley parents have signed the petition to free the school from the Compton Unified bureaucracy and install charter school operator Celerity Educational Group to run it instead. (WSJ)

Of course, it helped that several parents also were told by Austin and others that they were simply signing something to “improve their schools” without the information that it would cause the teachers to be fired and/or go charter. In fact, several parents are trying get their names off of the signature list, so there is a long way to go in this particular saga.

However, what is clear is that some business see a real growth opportunity in charter schools. Unfortunately, the success rate of charter schools is really an unknown quantity.  Until this point, charters could reject students who would be a risk to their numbers. Thus you got a lot of cherry picking for the best students. Until this point, California charters had students that had parents that cared enough to change their enrollment. That bias leans toward children with better home situations, and a better likelihood of success in any system.  But if the parental trigger is going to be used throughout the state, the charters that replace the traditional schools will not have such luxuries.  They’ll be trying to do the same thing as other districts, just with lower teacher salaries and “innovative” solutions. I’m sure that’s going to work out well.

In the end, there is no real mystery to California education. It is slowly dying because we are starving the system.  Despite what many California Republicans will tell you, there is no such thing as a free lunch. And just waiving the magic pixie dust of the free market over the school system won’t make it any better.  But it will divert additional public dollars to a private accounts, and in the end, that just might be what this was all about in the first place.