Voters approved Proposition 30 in California to raise taxes to fund schools. Where will the money go?
This teacher thinks she knows:
California districts will pay for the gigantic costs associated with Smarter Balanced CCSS testing using the Prop 30 money that the voting public intended should go to actual instruction. Teachers put in countless hours and much energy convincing the public to vote for Prop 30, and the joke is on us. In five years we’ll wonder where all that money went… and the answer will be ‘in Pearson’s coffers’.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sadly, now I know why voters in California are so opposed to tax hikes. In the LAUSD, Riffed teachers have not been rehired, and classes are as large as 50. What happened o the promises?
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Diane..we have to find truthful activist progressives to run for office. Maybe Norman Solomon for Gov. would be better. Or former teacher State Senator Fran Pavely.
But we must get rid of Peres and his crew, and certainly avoid Villaraigosa forever.
So many of us supported Jerry Brown and these results have been so disappointing.
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Bigger classes and less school maintenance but you have I-pads and an expensive education management system to support them. It seems to all be about taking money from the classroom for corporate profit.
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For prior examples, just try to find the billions dumped on “failing”, “priority” schools. Or, how many new, non-TFA classroom instructors has Race to the Top underwritten since 2009? The next thing we hear, schools must close, test scores tank, and actual teaching support grows more and more sparse. I haven’t heard about any local tax rollbacks, anywhere. Where DID the money go?
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I know. I feel like such a dip walking door to door, talking to people all over my area and convincing them to dig deeper into their pockets for public education. Now all that money will go to CC$$. If I had only known.
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Yup!
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Gov. Brown’s Prop. 30 tax money was raised primarily by his ballot initiative for school construction and renovation, plus some instruction. Our governor lied to us!
He is misdirecting this huge economic windfall to focus on the learning and testing of Common Core, which recently failed in NYC and has unproven academic results, but has resulted in a huge for-profit industry.
LAUSD, according to a report last week in LA Report, has a $2 B windfall (can that be right?) due mainly to Prop. 30, but they still wrangle over hiring the highly trained and experienced teachers (30,000 in California were fired over the past 5 years or so) back to cut class sizes from 42 – 47 to only 28 – 32. Broad Academy-trained and Gates-trained Supt. Deasy, was so disdainful of School Board member Steve Zimmer’s suggestion to start hiring back these teachers, that he claimed publically that Zimmer “wanted to hire everybody on the West Coast”.
California educators who are not Eli Broad-directed, are outraged. The more that the LA Times shows smiling inner city children ‘playing’ with their iPads which cost above retail, the more that we realize we were snookered.
I offered up a public apology to Molly Munger for choosing to support Brown’s Prop. 30 over her Prop. 38, and even to vilifying her in the LA Times. Her bill would have given the money directly to schools, with no caveats as to the use accept for successful education practice, and the tax funding would have been under local control. It might have meant immediately hiring back the many thousands of our teachers who were dumped due to budget shortfall.
For a Jesuit, Brown had no trouble strong-arming voters with threats of no more school buses which in big cities particularly LA which has inadequate public transportation, would have meant no way to school for many of our 600,00 students. So educators mainly got behind Prop. 30.
The dilemma now is how do we follow the money? And who will be an honest reporter on how this new taxation of all of us is spent, and what the outcomes will be? We do not have an unbiased press in LA, but only a toadie of the charters, and the paper is on the verge of being sold to Rupert Murdoch, he of the infamous free market investment manipulation, and fame, who now is pushing all districts to comply with his data mining InBloom, along with his colleague Joel Klein of NYC fame, and Bill Gates who was Deasy’s boss.
It is so ugly and convoluted that it is hard for those who do not work with these issues to conceive of this vast push for profits on the backs of students in public schools, and of course We the People who pay the taxes for all of it.
By the way, the report just came out today (see LA Report) that over half of the charters are doing worse than our public schools.
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Ellen:
Can you point to any reports of class sizes in California that are 42-47? The most recent article from Leonie Haimson’s of Class Size Matters does not suggest that this is the case.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/the-7-myths-of-class-size_b_776706.html
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Part of the issue of calculating class sizes is separating out elementary and secondary. For instance, in LA Unified elementary class sizes in K-3 have been kept down to 25 or less the last few years directly because teachers accepted furlough days. However, middle school and high school class sizes are over 40 in many cases. Grades 4-5 are also high.
As a high school English teacher, I can testify to outrageous increases the last 5 years. We used to have a state subsidy to keep English 9 and English 11 classes down to 25 or less. That state subsidy may still be on the books, but LA Unified has “opted out,” so that my English classes last year averaged over 40 and this year so far are just under 40. Do the math: 40 students times 5 classes is 200 students. It’s crazy to think that those students are getting the help they need. So far no relief is in sight, even with the Prop 30 money coming. Next year maybe? I’m not holding my breath.
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Bernie…I think we an online project where teachers report their individual class sizes. We just lost an English teacher at my school (LAUSD high school) because we are “overteachered” as our enrollment is down a bit from district projections. It was almost me and I am eight years in. A teacher who does not do any extracurriculars was displaced instead. Strangely, we have five pool subs at my school this year. They are all credentialed teachers. We usually have only one, who is a real sub. I think the district is displacing huge numbers of teachers and hoping they will quit because their lives are so miserable. But they could be teaching regular classes and bringing class sizes down. Then they can be replaced with TFA teachers and brand new inexperienced cheaper teachers. My biggest class has 41 right now (a ninth grade English class) but my colleague who teaches 11th has 50. We have senior English classes with 55. Since it’s a schoolwide average, we can count those tiny special ed classes and get away with 55 in others and still have the district mandated 42.5 “norm.” The teachers are afraid to complain. All they have to do is tell us we are lucky to have a job and we all get really quiet. Seniors don’t take standardized tests so we cram them in. But our world language and science classes ALL have 45+. Meanwhile we have a teacher whose air conditioning has been out for two weeks while he and his students swelter in August in the San Fernando Valley. Yeah, can’t wait to get those iPads with incomplete Pearson software. That should solve everything.
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Coleen:
Those class sizes are truly appalling. But help me out. When I go here
http://search.lausd.k12.ca.us/cgi-bin/fccgi.exe
and click on a particular school the numbers reported appear lower. Do you know what is going on?
Also when I go here I see numbers class size numbers:
http://www.utla.net/classsizestandards
Do you where do these numbers come from? The main LAUSD site is very unhelpful, badly designed and confusing with a lot of out of date material.
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Bernie, you wrote and said you could not believe that any teacher has class sizes of 40 or more. A teacher wrote and told you that her class is larger than 40. You then say this is not likely because the LAUSD has an average lower than 40. Common sense says you are wrong. Class size averages mask large differences; children with disabilities may have a class size of 5, while teachers like the one who wrote in have a class size of 45. Got it?
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Diane:
I am not doubting Coleen for a single moment – I know it can happen, my wife taught a German class of 48 in 1973.
I was asking if Coleen knew of a better data source than those available at the LAUSD site. I really do understand that an average may hide huge variations.
If I was fighting for additional resources and smaller class sizes then I would have a page on the Union site that highlighted these very facts. The notion that X% of 9th Graders in LAUSD are in English classes that are 30 or over or 40 or over would be a very compelling and a very scary number. Where is it?
All I am asking for is the data.
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DIane and Coleen:
I have not been able to locate data for Los Angeles but I did find some 2011-12 data for NYC – http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/data/classsize/classsize.htm
I took a look at Grade 9 English classes in the General Ed category and found the following:
Average Class Size Students Sections
10.0-14.9 613 50
15.0-19.9 3,346 190
20.0-24.9 16,442 720
25.0-29.9 20,909 760
30.0-34.9 16,563 520
35.0-39.9 142 4
More than 45 191 3
The data indicates that some 58,206 NYC students took Grade 9 English in 2011-12. Almost 38,000 or 65% of the General Ed students in NYC were in Grade 9 English classes/sections larger than 25.
Why aren’t those urging increases in resources for Public Schools highlighting this type of data?
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My son’s sixth grade academic classes at Hale Charter Academy (an affiliated LAUSD charter) have 44 students in them. Yes, I said 44. In math, English, social studies, and science. He is in the School for Advanced Studies and the school does not turn away any qualified SAS students. I am not arguing with their policy, because they are doing the best they can. But that class size is RIDICULOUS! He is not allowed to bring his backpack to classes because there is not enough room.
I also would like to see statistics at the individual class level, because so many factors mask these large class sizes. For example, we have at least six certificated teachers who are out of classroom. A Title I coordinator, two discipline deans who are elected from the staff, a bilingual coordinator, a college counselor, a career counselor and now, a “Core” math coach (Common Core? I haven’t found out yet). Though most of these people do not teach at all (I think one of them teaches one class) they are still counted in our student to teacher ratios, which makes class sizes look small.
Another extenuating factor is that we have small learning communities, and that creates some smaller classes. That means other classes have to be bigger.
We are co-located with a great magnet program. Magnets have a “norm” of 34 to 1, while the rest of us have 42.5-1. So the magnet hired a teacher this year, while we lost one, and our class sizes are already huge.
Administrators have to make very difficult decisions, but there should be an actual cap on individual class sizes. Teachers who speak out are not popular on campus. The governor’s budget, I believe, does away completely with any class size mandates, leaving that to “local control.” Trust me, that can and will be abused. Do you want YOUR kid in classes with 40-50 students, and more? None of us do.
I, too, would like to see some real numbers on class size. And I don’t think we will get that from LAUSD or the UTLA. So I think there needs to be a place where teachers can post their actual, individual class sizes.
I had a journalism class with 55 students last year and complained to no avail. It’s even worse with electives…they can have 55 students, according to my school. And they often do.
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Coleen:
Many thanks for your helpful response. In the absence of any official source of this data, your idea of teachers posting class sizes is a great idea.
Why wouldn’t the UTLA get behind and support such a potent idea? Why wouldn’t the NEA and AFT sponsor such data collection and dissemination?
Why wouldn’t the folks at http://www.classsizematters.org/ develop or coordinate the tools for such a data-base?
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addendum…Just in the past two weeks, articles are popping up everywhere lauding “the mystery man of Common Core”…Coleman, and making him sound almost as good as Michelle Rhee as the premiere voice of public school education…of course his business ventures after he failed as a teacher, are all FOR PROFIT…again, similar to his colleague Rhee who bills herself as non-profit but pays herself a hefty salary and makes millions with all her adjunct activities. These two could be doing Infomercials on entrepreneurship and leave the rest of us alone with their greedy public school intrusions.
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Isn’t Coleman the guy who doesn’t “give a shit” about what students think? That’s certainly where corporate education is headed. Get those students ready for the corporate world, where no one gives a shit about you as a human being. I will protect my son and my students from this insidious, dehumanizing movement.
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Isn’t Governor Jerry Brown the Californian Governor who was recalled in I believe it was 2003 and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger? Maybe he could be recalled again???
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I appreciate your frustration…but he was Mayor of Oakland….and he pulled out all the stops for an elitist charter school….
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No, that was Gray Davis.
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My French 1 classes are always 45-50 students. If they are small, classes can be closed.
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Diane:
What constitutes a “small” class?
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Bernie,
Where do you teach?
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Diane:
I am retired. Besides a short stint as a Math Teacher while in Grad School in the UK, I have not taught in K-12.
Why do you ask?
My wife was a foreign language HS teacher and now teaches ESL to largely graduate level foreign students at a local University. We raised and educated 3 children.
I previously emailed you using your University address and included a brief bio. I can send the same info again to you privately if you would like?
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