Education Reform?

Earlier this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that the state needed to change policies that spend more money on prisons than on the state’s education systems. On Thursday he signed a major school-reform package. The plan calls for California's lowest-performing schools to be targeted for a sweeping overhaul and it enables the state to try to get piece of $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top funds.

I agree that our school system needs to be reformed and I do not know enough about this plan yet to make a decision on it. our schools need more funding. I truly believe that funding is necessary for education improvement. We can't be so quick to cut school funding the minute we get into a difficult budget situation. I believe that we should establish a set budget per student and that amount should never be decreased.

California's education spending per student is about 14% less than the national average. As a matter of fact, California ranks 44th out of the 5o states and Washington DC. On K-12 achievement, California ranks 39th and again falls below the national average. I think we can see that there is a positive correlation between education spending and student achievement. The two top performing states, Massachusettes and Maryland spend at least 10% more than the national average per student on education.

We have a long way to go in California to get our school system back where it belongs. I have a real problem with the state taking over schools that are not meeting the state mandated performance levels. The reason I am against the state taking over schools is that they automatically reduce the curriculum, eliminating science and history education to focus on language and mathematics. In my opinion, this is just a band aid that will help the schools get back to the mandated level over time. If you focus more time on language and math, it naturally follows that your scores in those subjects will eventually improve. The problem is that these students will be behind in science and history when they enter middle school.

The plan also enables parents to hold their schools accountable, demand change and may even allow them to move their child to another school. I do have a problem with this part of the plan. The schools that perform the best in an area do so because the parents are more involved in their children's lives. They are more involved in their children's education. Allowing a parent to move their child to another school can have sweeping ramifications.

First. The higher performing schools could experience increased class sizes and maybe even over crowding. This would lead to less individual attention from the teacher which would lead to lower performance.

Secondly. Some of the children who move to these schools might not have the level or parent involvement in their lives that the other students do. This may make them fall behind which would then drop test scores for that school.

Thirdly. If all of the children whose parents have even a little bit of involvement in their lives leave the lower performing schools then what will their student populations looks like? The students who are left there would have virtually no parent involvement in their education. This would lead to a lower performing school. This would create an even larger gap between the high performing and low performing schools.

It is proven that children who receive more individual attention from their teachers and parents perform better in school. They have better test scores and are more well rounded students.