Pressure to Excel as Funding Cut

California’s public schools, colleges and universities could have used a good campus psychologist in 2003 to help them cope with their budget burdens and other struggles.

The K-12 schools endured a wrenching year of cuts in services despite increased pressure from Sacramento and Washington to improve results on standardized tests. Students at community colleges, California State University and University of California campuses unhappily faced higher fees and, in some cases, larger class sizes.

Meanwhile, educators debated policy questions about the awarding of high school diplomas. Algebra became a graduation requirement for the first time, even as state officials delayed a high school exit exam because of high failure rates.

The University of California appointed a new leader after its president retired, and the system confronted controversies about its management of nuclear research labs and undergraduate admissions policies that appeared to favor some students with sub-par SAT scores over others with more impressive marks.

But even as California got a new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a new education secretary, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the biggest education theme in 2003 was money.

K-12 public schools lost more than $1.5 billion in state funding. The loss meant cuts for after-school and summer school programs and fewer counselors and teachers, among other things.

In March, California’s school districts notified as many as 30,000 instructors that they might be laid off in the coming school year. The number in jeopardy had dropped to about 3,000 in May, when school districts issued pink slips for the fall.

Several school systems abandoned the popular K-3 class-size reduction program for some grades, prompting parents in several communities to raise money to preserve the smaller classes of 20 students per teacher.

The cuts “were the most difficult that schools have seen in at least three decades,” said Kevin Gordon, executive director of the California Assn. of School Business Officials. “We’re talking about real classroom impacts that had been pretty much insulated in prior years.”

In California’s higher education systems, the financial crunch caused some to wonder whether the state could continue to make good on its guarantee of a place in college to every qualified student.

California’s community colleges raised fees from $11 to $18 a unit, and course offerings were slashed while more students crowded into the remaining classes.

Both the UC and Cal State systems raised undergraduate student fees by 30% before the fall term began, a jump that followed a fee hike of 10% to 15% for undergrad and graduate students in December 2002. Many higher education experts expect further increases in the coming year.

The two university systems also made significant cuts in research, administration, libraries and student services.

Funding losses to the UC and Cal State systems continued well into this month, when the finance director for newly elected Gov. Schwarzenegger announced $53 million in immediate cuts to the two universities, including deep reductions in college preparatory and outreach programs.

The UC system weathered other changes as well.

President Richard C. Atkinson retired Oct. 1 after an eight-year tenure and was replaced by UC San Diego Chancellor Robert C. Dynes, a physicist.

The University of California grappled with a series of management problems at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons design facility that the university has managed for the last six decades. In April, the U.S. Department of Energy, citing “systemic management failures,” announced that UC, for the first time, would be required to compete for the contract to run the lab when the current deal expires in 2005. The university has not yet decided whether to compete.

At year’s end, UC faced trouble of another sort, with the release by the chairman of its governing board of a report critical of the university’s admissions policies. The preliminary analysis by John J. Moores, a San Diego businessman, showed that nearly 400 students had been admitted to UC Berkeley in 2002 with relatively low scores on the SAT entrance exam, even as thousands of students with above-average SAT scores had been turned away.

UC and UC Berkeley officials defended their policies and said the SAT exam was not the only criterion or the most significant one in the university’s admissions decisions.

In California’s high schools, students faced a new graduation requirement: algebra. Yet state education officials also postponed enforcement of another graduation essential: the new high school exit exam.

The state Board of Education, responding to low passage rates on the test of English and math skills, voted unanimously in July to push back the exam requirement for two years; students in the class of 2006 will be the first who must pass it to earn diplomas.

The year did have some good news for high schools and other campuses, which showed significant signs of improvement on standardized tests. More than two-thirds of high schools met test score goals set by the state in 2003, twice as many as the year before. Overall, 78% of schools statewide met their testing targets, up from 52% in 2002.

Despite the improvements on state exams, California’s schools performed poorly on national tests. The state’s fourth-graders, for example, ranked among low scorers nationally in reading and math, near youngsters in Georgia, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Hawaii.

In 2003, the Legislature approved the largest school district bailout in California history, providing a $100-million emergency loan to the insolvent Oakland Unified School District in exchange for a state takeover.

In Los Angeles, the local teachers union exercised its considerable political muscle when it successfully supported two new candidates and an incumbent in races for seats on the Los Angeles Board of Education.

The election gave United Teachers-Los Angeles a friendly majority on the seven-member school board.

The Los Angeles school board also narrowly voted to finish the long-troubled Belmont Learning Complex near downtown by demolishing two buildings sitting directly over a recently discovered earthquake fault, finishing four other partly built structures and creating a community park at the site, among other facilities. The board agreed to spend an additional $111 million on the $175-million school, already the most expensive in state history.

As the year drew to a close, however, Riordan dominated education news. In November, Schwarzenegger appointed him to serve as California’s latest secretary for education, giving Riordan a new platform to promote his ideas to give principals more authority over personnel and budgets and to restructure school financing so that more money winds up in classrooms.

Soon after Riordan assumed his new post, he startled Sacramento by exploring the possibility of also becoming president of the State Board of Education as a way to further his and Schwarzenegger’s education agendas. Schwarzenegger will be able to fill four vacancies on the board as early as January.