The LA Times has an interesting account of how the California Teachers Association whipsawed Schwarzenegger.  Quick background: Prop. 98, an amendment to the state constitution, guarantees certain education spending levels.  Predictably, it’s also a massive obstacle to balancing the budget, which Schwarzenegger had promised to do in his 2003 campaign:

If the amount spent on education in a given year fell short of Prop. 98’s guarantee, the difference would be paid off in the future. Because the state almost always owed money under Prop. 98, the education lobby, and the CTA in particular, held a political sword over the governor and the Legislature.

Accepting this reality, Schwarzenegger in his first weeks in office approached Hein again and, with (adviser Bonnie) Reiss handling much of the negotiating, cut an extraordinary deal that gave him a one-year cushion as he tried to reduce a $16-billion deficit. Under the agreement, the schools would receive whatever the Prop. 98 guarantee was eventually calculated to be in his first budget year—minus $2 billion in savings that Schwarzenegger sought.

But a year later, finding himself backed into a corner, Schwarzenegger apparently realized too late the poison pill he had swallowed.  And according to this, even after the $2 billion postponement, K-12 spending in FY 2004 had been increased nearly $2.6 billion to $59 billion (a per-pupil average of $9,864).  So maybe Schwarzenegger can be forgiven for thinking in late 2004 that the CTA might provide some flexibility:

On Dec. 15, three top Schwarzenegger aides, including Tom Campbell, told John Campbell (no relation to Tom), a Republican legislator who was drafting a budget reform initiative, that the governor wanted to amend Prop. 98 as part of the measure.

The next day, Schwarzenegger invited CTA President Barbara Kerr, a Riverside schoolteacher, to a meeting inside the governor’s Capitol offices. Schwarzenegger and his team had decided to make no mention of the budget reform proposal. Instead, he used the meeting to try to figure out if there was any way he could renegotiate his original budget deal with CTA.

I’m having some trouble, Schwarzenegger confessed to Kerr. I can’t keep the deal this year without hurting health care and other programs. Is there anything you could do to help us?

We have a deal, Kerr bluntly replied. We expect you to honor it. The CTA had agreed only to the one-time, one-year savings of $2 billion from the Prop. 98 guarantee, she said. If Schwarzenegger didn’t give the schools the full Prop. 98 guarantee, including the growth, he would be taking more money from education. "I think he was startled that I didn’t just say, ‘Oh, OK.’ I don’t think he likes to be told no," Kerr said. There was discussion but no resolution. Kerr and the CTA officials left after 90 minutes.

As the article goes on to illustrate, Arnold learned the hard way that no California governor messes with the CTA.  Period.  Meanwhile, the editorial staff suggests that everybody on both sides of the LAUSD takeover could use some time in detention:

As legislation to carve up governance of the school district moves forward, the posturing has heated up to the point of political neener-neener. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa berates and belittles the district with questionable statistics. Superintendent Roy Romer delivers an over-the-line retort, likening the mayor to the architects of Japanese American internment. The mayor then reacts to this relatively minor miscue with dramatic outrage and demands a retraction. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger then has Villaraigosa’s back with a quick verbal jab at Romer, implying that the superintendent deserves to be fired for the "horrible" job that’s been done running the district.

The governor’s staff needs to do a better job on prep — the point of the legislation is to disempower the fractious and glacier-slow school board, not the superintendent, who is leaving in September anyway after having made real improvements at the schools over the last few years. Those improvements, though, have been far from Romer’s boast of being "spectacular." This is a district desperate for change, not fictitious accolades or poisoned barbs.

It can become easy to forget that underneath the verbal fireworks lurks an actual piece of legislation, and that it remains a step in the wrong direction. The bill comes before the state Senate Appropriations Committee in one week, and though Villaraigosa’s office has been hard at work amending it, so far nothing has emerged that would move it in the necessary direction — true mayoral control of the schools.

I hope somebody over in L.A. is chronicling all this, because it probably deserves its own book.  But while the LAUSD takeover brawl continues, neighboring districts are grappling with falling enrollment:

Over the last seven years, nearly 400 students have left the public school rosters in Santa Barbara. Enrollment in this wealthy, Spanish-tiled coastal haven has dropped as steadily as home prices have risen.

It is a trend expected to continue as the median home price pushes past $1 million.

It is also a trend that increasingly appears to be occurring across California.

Public schools circling downtown Los Angeles are losing students as their neighborhoods gentrify. A similar shift is underway in the Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles, and Orange and Ventura counties.

Statewide, public school enrollment was down slightly this year, for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. And though officials aren’t quite sure of all the reasons behind the drop, they are sure that the cost of housing is one of them.

In Santa Barbara, school administrators worry about lost revenue, because funding is tied to enrollment.

Already, administrators said, the decline has cost the district millions annually. Now, having made small, less-painful cuts, they are considering larger steps, such as selling off vacant property or building housing to sell to teachers at below-market value.

Building the houses, they say, would help recruit teachers, who otherwise might not be able to afford the area, and the school system would bring in some revenue from the sales.

Another option is to start closing schools, a move that is always unpopular, said Jan Zettel, the Santa Barbara School Districts’ assistant superintendent of secondary education.

"We don’t think we will have to close a school in the next year," he said, "but beyond that, yes, it’s entirely possible."

In response to this dilemma, a collection of philanthropists has devised the perfect solution: new edutaxes!

Every property owner in California, no matter how big or small or valuable their parcel, faces paying a flat $50 tax to fund schools under a measure voters will be asked to approve in November.

Although it’s still early in the election season, the move already is generating criticism from taxpayer groups and property owners who say it’s a regressive tax and adds to the burden on average citizens who are already overtaxed.

Proponents of Proposition 88 - authored by EdVoice, a coalition that includes backing from such wealthy philanthropists as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Silicon Valley investor John Doerr and SunAmerica Chairman Eli Broad - say the state’s schools are in dire need.

But critics note the measure places the same tax on a small one-bedroom home in Reseda as it does on a mansion in Bel Air or massive farm in the Central Valley.

"I think it’s going to look foolish to have the two primary proponents, Reed Hastings, the owner of Netflix, and John Doerr, another Silicon Valley billionaire, impose a tax on everyone else that hits their multimillion-dollar mansions the same as a struggling family," said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

"I’m not sure they have completely thought through how that’s going to be perceived."

No matter where you may sit on the idea of a flat tax, there’s no denying that last sentence is a bit of an understatement. 

Diane Ravitch points out some important history:

When judged by their influence on education, foundations have a decidedly mixed record. The most successful American philanthropists by far were Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald. Carnegie, the steel magnate, used his foundation to build 2,500 free public libraries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which are in the United States, and his name became a blessing to readers across the nation.

Rosenwald, who headed Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the early 1900s, directed his foundation to underwrite the construction of more than 5,000 schools in poor, rural, mainly African American districts in 15 Southern states, as well as to endow Tuskegee, Howard, Fisk, Atlanta and Dillard universities, which were (and are) predominantly black. Rosenwald’s munificence saved a generation of black students.

At the other extreme, the most spectacular blunder by a foundation was the intervention of the Ford Foundation in the politics of New York City’s public schools in the late 1960s. In a struggle for control of the school system between minority activists and the teachers union, the foundation funded the activists. Ford-sponsored community groups ousted union teachers from their schools, and the union responded by striking and closing down the schools for two months in the fall of 1968.

The ugly confrontation, accompanied by charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism, poisoned black-Jewish relations in New York City for three decades. The Legislature defused the crisis by decentralizing the 1-million-pupil school district into 32 community districts, an arrangement that satisfied few people but remained in place until 2002, when the Legislature gave control of the school system to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

So what does this mean for GatesBuffett?  As Ravitch points out, the Gates Foundation has already made its share of blunders (for more on those missteps, go here).  But as stated earlier, Buffett believes in Gates, which really is a pretty big deal. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fix America’s schools? - that was the intent of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which set the stage for standardized testing and raising educational standards across America. (more)

Deal breaker - How Arnold Schwarzenegger changed his mind on Prop. 98 and lost the support of the all-powerful teachers union. (more)

Bill Gates, the nation’s superintendent of schools - Diane Ravitch:  Never before has any individual or foundation had so much power to direct the course of American education, which is one of the primary interests of the Gates Foundation. (more)

Check back later for more education news.

UPDATE:

Few poor, minority in charters - Charter schools in Utah increasingly are serving wealthy, white students and leaving poorer and minority children behind in traditional public schools, a Salt Lake Tribune analysis shows. (more)

CA schools try to deal with declining enrollment - Over the last seven years, nearly 400 students have left the public school rosters in Santa Barbara. Enrollment in this wealthy, Spanish-tiled coastal haven has dropped as steadily as home prices have risen. (more)

GAO: Growth Models Hold Promise for NCLB Accountability- Ed Week (subscription required) Carefully-constructed growth models can help meet the No Child Left Behind Act’s goal of getting the nation’s students to academic proficiency, but states face technical hurdles in creating models that work, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. (more)

School choice finally getting a hard look -    Even in a state that has grabbed hold of its public school monopoly with both hands and refused to budge, the idea of choice is gaining some ground. (more)

John Stossel: How the media smear school choice - Most public schools are far from outstanding. America’s government schools have rigid one-size-fits-all rules that reward mediocrity. (more)

WSJ: Socialism in reverse - The advancement of charter schools, vouchers and private scholarship programs has been much too slow for the well-being of our poorest children. (more)

Children left behind in LA schools - If the No Child Left Behind Act is to work, school districts have to take part. And early evidence indicates that in at least one major case, that’s not happening. (more)

UPDATE:

GOP donors open wallets and open up - Money may talk, but for years, the two largest Republican political givers in Texas haven’t. But like the Wizard of Oz inching out from behind the curtain, Bob Perry and James Leininger are taking measured steps into the public eye – acknowledging that their enduring silence has let critics define them as spooky, secretive power mongers. (more)

Pro/Con: Should Congress back school voucher plan? Yes - Margaret Spellings: President Bush and I believe that families in communities where schools fall short deserve choices when it comes to their children’s education. (more)

More options for students - President Bush’s landmark No Child Left Behind Act, though controversial, was designed to help struggling students escape failing schools. Thanks to that law, students in three Greenville elementary schools will have the opportunity to attend better-performing schools. (more)

Jeb high executioner - How deep is Gov. Bush’s capacity for revenge? Deep enough that the governor, who wants to bring Latinos into the Republican Party, would try to oust from the Legislature the man who not long ago stood to become the first Cuban-American president of the Florida Senate. (more)

ChemJerk (now there’s a nom de plume) has a lengthy takedown (hat tip to this week’s Carnival of Education) of the "student as customer" model, which he suggests is damaging to education in general.

First off, I think a bit of clarification on ChemJerk’s part would be helpful.  As he points out in the lead paragraph, this approach has its adherents in both public secondary schools and the post-secondary level, but since much of his discussion seems to have applicability largely at the college level (the three links at the end are all related to cheating in college classes), we really wouldn’t have much to add. 

However, here’s an important perspective.  I would agree with ChemJerk that many factors–due dates, grading policies, price of services–are things that no student, K-12 or post-secondary, should be able to negotiate.  Furthermore, what ChemJerk points to as non-negotiables are, in a lot of ways, key indicators of the level of difficulty of a particular school.  I’d suggest that students really aren’t the principal consumers of K-12 education–parents and guardians are.  And just as a college student has a wide array of options to decide where he or she will go to school, it should be up to a parent to find a school that has the level of achievement that best meets the needs of his or her child. 

L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a less than pleasant appearance before parents to talk about the takeover:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school reform plan received its first and only local public vetting Thursday evening in a sometimes raucous hearing where Los Angeles residents addressed state lawmakers, who will have the final say.

Perhaps the most significant blow was landed by officials from neighboring cities, who announced their opposition to legislation that would give Villaraigosa substantial authority over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Parts or all of the cities fall within the boundaries of the Los Angeles school system.

For those who have been on the fence regarding the takeover, this sort of stuff will probably only sour them on the idea.  If it’s true that this was the mayor’s first and last appearance before the public to discuss the takeover, it’s obvious that, in the words of one city councilwoman, this thing "is so clearly about money and ego and not education."  And of course, this sort of thing doesn’t exactly help either:

A special meeting of the San Fernando City Council was scheduled for this past Friday with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to discuss reform for the LAUSD. The council, of which I am a member, had agreed to meet with Villaraigosa before taking a formal position on his reform plan, otherwise known as Assembly Bill 1381.

But the meeting was never to take place. The Mayor’s Office called three hours before the scheduled start to cancel. Apparently Villaraigosa and his staff were unprepared to host a meeting that would be open to the public, as San Fernando City Council meetings must be to be in accordance with state open-meetings laws. 

The image of this thing being hashed out in smoke-filled rooms likely won’t sit well with Los Angeles voters.