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For three years, school districts have been writing an annual budget and accountability plan using a state-dictated form that has irritated just about everyone writing and reading it. Next week, the State Board of Education is expected to approve a new version that promises to be simpler, better organized and easier to follow.
The revised Local Control and Accountability Plan, or LCAP (see draft template starting page 7), has gotten generally positive reviews, with some reservations, from school officials and advocates for high-needs students who disagree over how much information should be in the document but credit state board staff for trying to strike a balance.
“We are not completely satisfied, but we will support the revised LCAP,” said Martha Alvarez, legislative advocate for the Association of California School Administrators, which had recommended changes through months of hearings and drafts. Districts’ LCAPs had mushroomed to dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of pages over the past three years. It’s unclear, she said, despite improved readability, whether LCAPs will become shorter or longer under the new template. “At this point, districts need time – a number of years without further changes – to work with it,” she said.
“It’s a meaningful improvement in many ways and in some ways a step backward,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for the nonprofit law group Public Advocates and an author of a six-page critique of the new LCAP signed by a dozen student advocacy groups. Although organized to enable districts to “better tell their story to the community,” the new LCAP template doesn’t demand a full accounting of how districts will use money intended for low-income students and English learners under the state’s new funding formula, he said.
Because the Local Control Funding Formula also gave districts more control over spending, the Legislature envisioned LCAPs as a way to hold them publicly accountable for their decisions. School boards must reach out to parents, teachers and the public for their ideas before setting improvement goals and committing to actions and expenditures to achieve them. Districts also must say how they will improve education for high-needs students – English learners, low-income, foster and homeless students – commensurate with the extra funding they get for the students.
Legislators envisioned the LCAP as a comprehensive planning tool, but not all districts interpreted it that way. The revision makes clear that the LCAP should account for all money that districts receive under the funding formula, which is the bulk of their funding, and address the eight broad educational priorities that lawmakers laid out. They include not only student achievement, as measured by standardized test scores and other metrics, but also parent engagement, school climate, implementation of new academic standards and hiring qualified teachers for all students.
The new LCAP template doesn’t demand a full accounting of how districts will use money intended for low-income students and English learners under the state’s new funding formula, said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates.
The revision also includes a new section that Alvarez and Affeldt agree is important: Requiring that districts make addressing poor performance under the state’s new school and district accountability system a priority.
Until now, this has been missing. For several years, the state board suspended the school accountability system while it created a new one. As a result, districts picked their own spending goals and rates of improvement. Last month, the state board chose a half-dozen metrics to measure school and district performance: standardized test scores in math, reading and science; chronic absentee and suspension rates; measures of career and college readiness; and the success of English learners in learning English. In addition, school districts will be required to create their own ways to measure school climate and parent engagement. The new system will go into effect next year, when districts and schools receive their first “report cards” that will grade achievement and set uniform targets for improvement.
The revision creates two sections that will ask districts to highlight low achievement in any performance metric and describe steps the district will take to improve. One section is for the district overall; the other is for lower-performing student subgroups. There is no section in the LCAP requiring districts to identify lowest-performing individual schools.
Significant changes in the revised LCAP to improve organization, clarity and readability include:
Additional formatting changes and financial transparency requirements:
District officials had sought more flexibility and fewer requirements for the LCAP than the state board staff recommended. Student advocates wanted more details on spending than the new LCAP calls for. Parents, however, should find the new LCAP easier to use.
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Comments (7)
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Karen Swett 7 years ago7 years ago
Once again, there cannot be accountability for agreed upon Supplemental and Concentration expenditures (S&C) if you can not see how the S&C monies are being spent. Currently there are no identifiers - SACS Resource Codes - for S&C It's like trying to follow how John is doing in school but he doesn't have a last name and there are 100 students with the name John. Right now LCFF base, S&C all have … Read More
Once again, there cannot be accountability for agreed upon Supplemental and Concentration expenditures (S&C) if you can not see how the S&C monies are being spent. Currently there are no identifiers – SACS Resource Codes – for S&C It’s like trying to follow how John is doing in school but he doesn’t have a last name and there are 100 students with the name John. Right now LCFF base, S&C all have the same name. That name is 0000. It is time the public gets unique SACS Resource codes – names – for S&C o we can see how it – our public money – is being spent.
Jack Jarvis 7 years ago7 years ago
The community input component needs to be clearly defined and number of attendees at LCAP meetings should meet a certain number or be discounted. In addition district created online surveys should also be transparent and submitted for state approval prior to plan completion. The current process is a total fabrication.
el 7 years ago7 years ago
Last year's LCAP form is so long, and so cumbersome, and so in love with duplication, that I'm not sure anyone can read it. If even I, an education policy junkie who has read my district's budget line by line for many years, who has helped to write the SSC Single Plan for Student Achievement, find this document unreadable, confusing, and unworth my time and effort to read, I can't imagine who does. I also … Read More
Last year’s LCAP form is so long, and so cumbersome, and so in love with duplication, that I’m not sure anyone can read it. If even I, an education policy junkie who has read my district’s budget line by line for many years, who has helped to write the SSC Single Plan for Student Achievement, find this document unreadable, confusing, and unworth my time and effort to read, I can’t imagine who does.
I also can’t fathom how this document can be useful for a district with 700+ schools and a district with just a few schools.
The very first template let you write things that might make sense, that people could read, that the public could find accessible.
Karen Swett 7 years ago7 years ago
There can NOT BE FISCAL ACCOUNTABILITY if Supplemental/Concentration monies are not identified. Supp & Conc need their own unique identifier. SBE – you must create a SACS Resource Code for Supp & Conc. Then we, the public, will be able to see and track this very important public money.
Doug McRae 7 years ago7 years ago
The words "local control" and "accountability" constitute an oxymoron, with those words fundamentally in conflict. The LCAP template and process is fundamentally a strategic planning exercise, not an accountability exercise. The is nothing wrong with a good strategic planning template for local district use, but it shouldn't be promoted as a statewide accountability exercise. The LCAP acronym is not unlike SARC (School Accountability Report Card) that CA has had for almost 30 yrs, an information … Read More
The words “local control” and “accountability” constitute an oxymoron, with those words fundamentally in conflict. The LCAP template and process is fundamentally a strategic planning exercise, not an accountability exercise. The is nothing wrong with a good strategic planning template for local district use, but it shouldn’t be promoted as a statewide accountability exercise. The LCAP acronym is not unlike SARC (School Accountability Report Card) that CA has had for almost 30 yrs, an information transparency program even though it has the word “accountability” in its title.
We don’t allow students to assign their own grades. We don’t allow employees to self-determine compensation. Rather, these “accountability” functions are delegated to folks higher on the respective food chains for education and business enterprises in the US. Statewide assessment and accountability programs require decisions at the state level to allow for the required comparability across districts and schools for the entire state. However, strategic planning decisions, including financial and curriculum/instruction decisions, should be left to local control.
The concepts of local control and accountability constitute an oxymoron. The sooner we accept that, the less conflict there will be for both local and state decision making.
Replies
John Fensterwald 7 years ago7 years ago
Don't really follow you, Doug. The issue is accountable to whom and for what purpose? The Legislature set eight broad areas, from academic achievement to school climate, that school districts must pay attention to, in return for more control over money and decision-making. At least by design (with very uneven execution, as we have seen), the LCAP is the community's way to hold their school boards accountable for achieving goals, using strategies and expenditures agreed … Read More
Don’t really follow you, Doug. The issue is accountable to whom and for what purpose? The Legislature set eight broad areas, from academic achievement to school climate, that school districts must pay attention to, in return for more control over money and decision-making. At least by design (with very uneven execution, as we have seen), the LCAP is the community’s way to hold their school boards accountable for achieving goals, using strategies and expenditures agreed upon in the LCAP, which parents and the public, by law, are supposed to help create.
Doug McRae 7 years ago7 years ago
Sure LCAP can be used for local accountability to the local community, and that is fine. But I was talking about mandated statewide accountability via LCAP, essentially a mandated strategic planning process covering what the state sees as priority areas, some of which may or may not be judged as important at the local level. In one sense, LCAP the way it is being implemented is a violation of the Guv’s principle of subsidiarity.