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It’s no surprise that so many parents in California have a positive opinion of the public schools their kids attend. Parents see the hard work and the dedication of teachers — and the challenges that teachers face — and they appreciate all they do. But do the people in charge of public schools in the Golden State — those at the top of the decision-making ladder — deserve such warm feelings? As shown by the latest machinations of the state Department of Education, that’s a much harder case to make.
The controversy builds off the long-held view of many progressive activists that public schools in California are letting down students in schools in poorer communities, which often have disproportionately Latino and Black student enrollment. Litigation related to claims of disparate treatment led the editorial page of The New York Times to question California public schools’ commitment to civil rights in a scathing 2014 critique. In 2020, a new lawsuit making similar claims — Cayla J. v. California — alleged that ineffective remote learning programs set up by the Los Angeles and Oakland unified school districts in response to pandemic-driven school closures disproportionately harmed low-income Latino and Black students. The claim blamed this on policies pushed by the state Department of Education, the state Board of Education and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
State education officials didn’t just reject the idea they bore any blame for the nightmares faced by many students in Los Angeles and Oakland. They threatened Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Thomas Dee — and other education researchers given access to state data — with legal action if they provided information used in this or any lawsuit deemed “adverse” to the California Department of Education.
To insist that researchers can only use school data in a way that is neutral or makes the department look good is perverse and antithetical to what should be the goals of public education. Had such policies been in place 20 years ago, they could have kept the lid on perhaps the worst scandal in the history of public schools in California: the 2005 report by Harvard researchers that credibly alleged the state had for years knowingly exaggerated graduation rates, especially among Latino and Black students, by relying on what was plainly “misleading and inaccurate” information.
Thankfully, on Aug. 17, the EdSource website reported that the state had mostly backed away from its threats against Dee and others. But given state officials’ history, there is simply no reason to believe this resulted from a realization the threats were wrong. Instead, they were embarrassed by the optics of the flap. , many of these same officials were behind an even more aggressive power play to limit public awareness of school shortcomings: the 2017 introduction of what was billed as a tool to help parents quickly evaluate a school’s quality. Instead, as many observers noted, the state’s new “Dashboard” system was maddening — a “tough-to-understand jumble of pie charts, ratings and text offering measurements of a school’s performance on nearly a dozen different factors, some obviously relevant and others not so much,” in the words of the Los Angeles Times editorial board. The notion that this confusing design was accidental — and not the goal of its authors — is demolished by the fact that six years later the “Dashboard” system remains as clunky and unhelpful as ever.
Alas, with the exception of a handful of lawmakers — starting with Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the educator and former San Diego Assembly member — such tactics are seen as no big deal by most of those with power in Sacramento. California students and their parents deserve infinitely better.
