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Michael
Kirst is a professor of education, business administration and political
science at Stanford University. He is a co-director of Policy
Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research consortium
including Stanford, UC Berkeley, and USC. In this capacity, Dr.
Kirst is at the forefront of the PACE agenda to provide analysis
and assistance to California policymakers to help build an ongoing
picture of California education, including information on student
enrollment, performance, curriculum, human and fiscal resources,
and school reform. |
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On-Line ...
Michael Kirst discusses
the future of standardized testing in the college admissions process.
"I
don't go along with the idea that centralization is the cause of all
our ills. A lot of our ills have to do with poor curriculum and things
of that sort."
 
"I
don't think Proposition 13 is the full villain of the piece."
"There
is a feeling in California that this system has really been neglected
and really needs support and we are moving forward."
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JOHN
MERROW
Tell me about coming to California and discovering the public schools.
MIKE KIRST
I came here in 1969, and brought two young children with me from Washington,
D.C. and the schools were really quite good. One of the main things
I remember was we had free summer school. We had six weeks paid for
by the school district where they had kids go everyday to a program
nine to 12 in the morning that was like a fairly good summer camp
that you’d pay money for. And this was all at the school district's
expense. We had very small classes specialized personnel. The school
district had so much money that they didn’t even use the state
text books. They sat on the wall and they bought text books off the
market that they thought were better and more appropriate and more
interesting. So it was really quite a rich service base.
JOHN MERROW
Did you notice things changed as your kids got older?
MIKE KIRST
Yeah. They went through the school district and the schools in San
Mateo County through the public schools for high schools. Summer school
went away for my second child, because that was one of the first things
to be cut. The text books became older, and the special services for
health became less. And then when you got into the high schools, the
buildings began to be older and more run down, the counseling staff
was very sparse and they got back to a basic number of classes. So
the way they did this was they cut the classroom periods from seven
periods to six periods, and then some school districts cut to five
periods. So we actually cut the school day in high school dramatically
in some of these school districts. So, it just began to melt away
around the edges, and then it began to meld into the core over time
between roughly the early seventies and the middle eighties.
JOHN MERROW
So you and your wife, as parents, you were aware of what was going
on?
MIKE KIRST
Very aware of what was going on. It began to really hit after Proposition
13 and during that period when the high schools began to be squeezed,
and they got less money from the state because of school finance equalization.
So if you lived in a high spending school district, which we did,
they actually got cut more than a low spending district. And so it
began to wither away. The buildings looked worse, and the periods
were less, there were fewer classes to choose from in high school,
not as many electives. And the schools just began to lose library
resources and counselors.
JOHN MERROW
Were parents getting angry?
MIKE KIRST
They were getting angry. And I was on the other end of this. During
the crucial period that we made all the cuts, I was president of the
California State Board of Education. In 1978 when Proposition
13 was on the ballot, I was president and the crucial years after
that were ‘78 to roughly ‘81 when I was president. And
we had two things coming at us. One was we lost half the revenue of
the local public schools. In other words, the property tax was cut
in half so the local revenue basically dropped in half. So the state
had to come in to "bail out" the local school districts
to get them somewhat back to even. At the same time, we had this court
decision called Serrano vs. Priest that said we had to equalize spending.
So we made what we thought was a logical decision, that if the state
is going to put back the money to make the districts at the local
level more whole, we’re not going to give all the money back
to Beverly Hills to take them back to where they were. We’re
going to level the system down.
We made a decision to equalize, after Proposition
13, by leveling the system down. So we cut the high spending districts
much more, meaning gave them less money in the bail out from the state
after Prop 13, and we gave the low spending districts more money and
they actually had their spending come up. So we cut the wealthy districts
dramatically, and that's exactly where my children were.
JOHN MERROW
So you actually were leveling down.
MIKE KIRST
The theory of school finance reform, which I’ve been a part
of, is that equalization would lead to leveling up. You take the bottom
and you’d level them towards the top. California was in a terrible
condition where it had to meet school finance equity at a time it
had to cut the budget dramatically because of Proposition
13. Decision was, we’ll get equity and we’ll level
down. And we actually made the most progress towards equity during
that period that we cut the budgets and leveled the high spending
districts down.
JOHN MERROW
So as you look at this, would you say that those decisions contributed
to a decline in California's public schools in an important
way?
MIKE KIRST
Well, the Proposition 13 cut the budgets
of the state and local districts by quite a bit at that time. I’d
say the low spending districts rode this out and became slightly better.
The real impact during that area was in the high spending districts
and they were really leveled down. And so we got the state into a
very, very narrow band where we still are now. That's low spending,
but we are highly equalized, so the people that like equity, they
think California is really terrific because it's all spending
about the same amount of money.
JOHN MERROW
We were just at a High School down in Los Angeles. A school built
for 1200 kids which now has 5000, a year-round schedule. Talk to me
about schools like that.
MIKE KIRST
I think the big picture is that California grows so rapidly. If we
were like Pennsylvania, for example, where the population was steady
and declining, we wouldn’t be in this condition. The state of
California grew six million people between 1980 and 1990. Several
years our school enrollments went up by over 200,000 a year. We grew
four million people between 1990 and 2000. So we’re always having
100,000 or more students to accommodate, and the rapid growth often
takes place in areas that don’t have the financial wherewithal
to build schools rapidly to meet them. The big thing is, when we go
back to Proposition 13, is that you needed
a two-thirds vote to pass a local school construction bond. That came
out of Proposition 13. So you couldn’t go to the local tax payer
and say, "Pay for this," and you couldn’t slow the
growth of the kids, and the state had very small construction funds
that it would let out, and all you could do is get in a line in Sacramento
and that line was long and by the time you got any relief from them
you could go many, many years with double sessions and maybe never
get to the head of the line.
JOHN MERROW
Is a shortage of money the source of California's woes?
MIKE KIRST
Certainly money is one of the source of the woes. I mean, until we
lowered the bond passage rate from two-thirds to 55 percent, and even
there we’ve made limited progress, the buildings in many places
were a shambles. They just look bad. It takes money to build buildings,
and buildings are a part of the, of the importance of schools. So
money was important there.
Our libraries eroded terribly and we’re about fiftieth in the
number of librarians. The science labs were antiquated. Moreover,
this is a very high cost place to be. We are about sixth in the country
in teacher salaries. And then somebody finally adjusted that for the
high cost of living here, and we dropped all the way to 32nd. From
sixth to 32nd, because we have such a high cost living. So money is
clearly a factor here, no question about it. It's not the only
factor, but it is a factor.
JOHN MERROW
Someone said, the unintended consequence of Proposition
13 was the centralization of authority at the state level. Is
the problem structural?
MIKE KIRST
I think that state centralization has undercut the financial system,
but not necessarily the education and teaching system. So I don’t
go along with the idea that centralization is the cause of all our
ills. A lot of our ills have to do with poor curriculum. But clearly,
the states that are doing better than California have a balanced system
of some state money and some local money, and when the state money
goes down in recessions, you can offset that with local money. We
have only one thing to rely on in this state, and it's income
tax basically. And so we’re very vulnerable to economic downturns.
JOHN MERROW
Is California moving in the right direction?
MIKE KIRST
I do think California is in a good direction now. We're putting our
policies together at the state level so that they're coherent. We're
focusing the schools on results. We're getting our testing systems
so that it's aligned with our standards. So the last four years have
been very heartening in the progress that we've been making, both
in increasing our spending and getting better policy and better instructional
direction.
JOHN MERROW
Proposition 13, is that the villain of the peace?
MIKE KIRST
No. I don't think Proposition is the full villain of the peace. The
performance on the national assessment of educational progress is
so low that it cannot all be blamed on the financing situation. The
financing's not bad enough to cause the abysmal results where we're
always near the bottom three or four on national testing. So it's
got to be more than Proposition 13.
JOHN MERROW
The other factors are?
MIKE KIRST
It's hard to sort out all of these and which ones contribute most:
rapid growth that we were unable to meet, so just continual growth
of the sytem. The changing pupil population where a quarter, 1.5 million,
of the students are limited English-speaking. That's a gigantic challenge.
A lack of clarity about what we were supposed to be teaching and learning
and a lack of a curriculum focus and a reading focus that was really
effective.
JOHN MERROW
Is race an issue?
MIKE KIRST
I think it's an issue. I think it was more of an issue during the
transition period between the middle '70s and the middle '90s when
the population was changing very rapidly toward minorities, particularly
toward Hispanics and Asians, and those groups were not participating
in the political process in an equivalent way.
Let me be specific. We did a report in 1994. It can be argued that
California schools hit bottom in 1994. We were almost last in reading
and so on. And we looked at who voted in the 1994 election - this
is a study at Stanford. The Hispanics in the schools were 38 percent
of the school population and they were six percent of the electorate.
And the Asians were 12 percent of the school populations and their
vote was 3 percent. So we had 50 percent of the kids were Hispanic
or Asian and those two groups were 9 percent of the electorate. And
in 1994 we turned down a state-wide school construction bond when
we were bursting at the seams.
Since then, minority groups have been much more active in organizing
and voting. The movement to limit illegal immigrants and not allow
them to go to school led to a big movement of Hispanic political organization.
There's now a Latino caucus in Sacramento, which is very powerful.
So no question, we had a tremendous - and still do in, in major ways
- a mismatch between who votes in California and who is served.
JOHN MERROW
Since this is a program about education, let me give you a test. It's
a multiple choice question. The solution to California's educational's
problems is, A, educational; B, financial, fiscal; C, political?
MIKE KIRST
Well, I think primarily we have to work on the education side of it
at this point. I think that we are able to teach more kids to read
in more depth and we know how to do that. We are doing more of that.
So I think the solution has to be in designing better programs for
curriculum and in recruiting and retaining better teachers.
JOHN MERROW
Do you think California has turned the corner?
MIKE KIRST
Yes, I think in this way that when a political body like California,
and a civic culture, recognize how big a problem they have, and they
resolve to work on this as best they can - and there's times when
your budget's going to be tight and when you're in a recession - then
you've turned a corner and you've got a resolve to move forward. And
I'm feeling more confident of that, given that when you really get
in a tight situation like this year, with a $24 billion deficit, that
we came out as well as we did. |
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