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Reaching Higher: Restoring Excellence to California Public Education
By Suzanne Tacheny

Schools in California must change - and they are. To make sure students are prepared for the high-tech, competitive world that awaits them, California schools are raising expectations for student performance and recommitting themselves to educational excellence.

California Business for Excellence in Education - a coalition of major employers and business organizations - works to support these improvements. Business leaders know the vitality of our economy depends on an educated workforce - workers with basic skills who can think critically and find creative approaches to solving problems. We are working at the state level to ensure that the voices of business leaders are heard in the decisions that affect the state's public schools.

CBEE and its member organizations support raising standards for the public schools, ensuring a clear and fair system of student testing and public reporting, holding schools accountable for results, and increasing flexibility, innovation, and competition within the public school system.

Since CBEE's inception, a great deal has been accomplished. California is on course to restore excellence in its public schools. It has adopted standards reputed to be the best in the nation. It has a plan for a testing program fully aligned to standards - including essays. It has also made unparalleled investments to reduce class sizes, improve its teaching force, and it has made massive investments of resources into the K-12 school budgets that will again make California competitive nationally.

Still, much work remains. CBEE remains actively involved in the development and implementation of education policy at the state level to raise standards for performance, build the capacity of teachers and leaders, measure and report progress, ensure meaningful accountability, and increase competition and flexibility within the public schools. The following provides a brief report of progress and important next steps in each of these areas.

Raising Standards for Student Performance
Clear and rigorous standards are the starting point for any improvement effort. Standards make clear what ought to be accomplished. In California schools, new state standards in English language arts, mathematics, science, and history-social science spell out the skills and knowledge students need to learn in these core subject areas. By paying attention to standards, educators - and education policy-makers - are confronted with an essential question: what will it take to help students learn the skills and knowledge they need to succeed?

California's standards are consistently rated as among the best in the country, and they can be invaluable tools to focus and improve instruction. In fact, substantial investments have been made to ensure that text books and other learning materials are aligned to the standards. That work will continue. But, for too many, the state's learning standards are the state's best-kept secrets. They have not been systemically distributed or explained to California teachers or parents.

Broadly communicating information on new standards and tests must become a priority for the state. Local school districts must adopt learning standards at least as high as those set by the state. And, California's system of colleges and universities must also offer standards for entrance that align to the K-12 program.

Suzanne Tacheny, Ph.D., is executive director of California Business for Education Excellence, located in Sacramento (916/443-6411) or Suzanne@cbee.net. She is a recent appointee to the State Board of Education.

Build the Capacity of Teacher and Leaders
Clearer and higher standards provide an important focus in a school community; they help teachers, students, parents, and other community members better understand what's expected and what's possible. But simply raising standards won't lead to better-prepared students without some investment in the preparation of teachers.

With class-size reduction and unprecedented investment in its teaching force, California is again becoming a leader in school improvement. In the past several years, California's investment in recruitment, retention and training of teachers is unparalleled in any state. That commitment must continue.

Leadership has always been an important ingredient in creating high performing schools and districts. In an era of high-stakes accountability, leadership is more critical than ever. A potential leadership crisis is building in California and across the country as critical numbers of school administrators approach retirement with few training to replace them. In the present budget, the governor has proposed targeted funding for recruitment, retention and re-training for those who lead schools and school districts.

Measuring and Reporting Progress
For standards to be meaningful, they need to be measured. Tests and assessments that measure standards tell teachers how well students are learning and tell communities how well schools are progressing toward the standards. Tests specifically designed to measure the standards - paired with tools such as school report cards - are another essential component of California's high-performance school system.

As business leaders, we know that management systems must provide consistent and focused information about the goals of an organization. In education, a robust assessment system should be the central focus of an effective management system. It doesn't have to measure everything; rather, it should convey what is most important. It provides information to those decision-makers who most affect student achievement - teachers, parents, and other local school educators to help educators determine how to help students improve.

In the past year, a great deal has been done to develop a long-term plan focusing on a test that is fully aligned to standards. And now that California has established this plan, it must stick with it. This new system should be developed according to plan, and then left alone for five to six years. Over the past decade, California's assessment system has been a political football, but it is the schools that are tossed about in this game. It makes no sense - and doesn't help schools - to continue to tinker with school tests.

While the test instruments themselves must not be changed, the next step is to improve the overall assessment system with better support and training. California needs to provide more tools - especially technology - to enable educators, parents and local communities to use assessment information to improve student instruction.

Ensuring Meaningful Accountability
The over-arching requirement of an accountability system is ensuring that every school is getting better every year. The goal is to create incentives to motivate schools toward continuous improvement. Clear standards and a robust measurement system can work together to provide good data about each school's strengths and weaknesses. Improvement targets help establish expectations. Once those pieces are in place, clear, predictable rewards and consequences are needed - both for meeting expectations and for chronic poor performance. All of these goals come together in California's Academic Performance Index, which serves as a "Dow Jones" type indicator for school effectiveness.

Clear lines of authority are also integral to effective accountability. Accountability requires a clear understanding of who is responsible for what. It requires that authority be consummate with responsibility. At the state level, the lack of clear roles and responsibilities creates an ongoing blame-game, rather than a focused plan of action. Accountability must be clear at all levels of the system - including the state.

As business leaders, we know that management systems must provide consistent and focused information about the goals of an organization. In education, a robust assessment system should be the central focus of an effective management system.

At local levels, accountability remains just as illusive. While principals, teachers, and other school staffs are most "on-point" for student performance, their effectiveness depends in large part on the effectiveness of the district in which that school operates. Local school boards create additional policies that must make sense within the state context, yet their fiscal authority is not commensurate with that accountability. Clearly defined accountability is also needed for the role districts must play as a service provider to all schools - including the role that districts should play in intervening in chronically low-performing schools.

Increasing Competition and Flexibility within Public Schools
Business leaders know first hand the role that competition plays in improving performance. Demand, of course, is a crucial ingredient in creating competition - and the demand for better schools is clear. Improved performance measures, such as student testing, which provide clear, comparable information to evaluate performance, are also essential for competition. To be effective, test scores and other measures of performance must be publicly reported in a way that is easily understood by parents and a concerned public, which creates the necessary external pressure to help the system change.

As many change-minded district superintendents and policy-makers recognize, the presence of real, viable alternatives that prove change is possible also provide increased competition within local communities. Charter schools - innovations in schooling where rules and regulations are waived in favor of performance contracts - provide such a force in many communities. They demonstrate that change is possible and thus help all schools improve.

Increased flexibility is not simply a goal for charter schools. Results - not process requirements - should matter most for all schools. The patchwork of rules, laws, and policies that governs California schools undermines innovation. Policies that don't support a focus on achieving the standards ought to be eliminated, and educators ought to be encouraged to think outside the box, be creative, and figure out what works best with their unique kids. Increased resource flexibility, then, becomes the final, critical ingredient to improving competition in the public schools.

Stay the Course!
California has made many impressive strides toward restoring excellence to its public schools. In the past few years, the state has committed to high standards, improved testing and accountability, reduced class sizes, made unprecedented investments in teacher quality, and raised overall spending on education to bring the state back in line with national averages. All these accomplishments have been put in place in the last few years and must be allowed to stand the test of time.

Reaching high standards requires constant commitment from everyone - not just schools. Making the institutional changes as massive as those California is undertaking requires years of planning and focused action. It requires constancy. It also requires vigilant involvement from all who care about schools - especially the business community. Working through CBEE, the business community will be that voice in Sacramento.