Jerry Brown’s Three Biggest Failures

Gov. Jerry Brown is getting the acclaim he deserves in his final days as governor for helping turn around a state that seemed adrift and for being a visionary on climate change. He’s clearly left California for the better. But his biggest failings — his blind spots and, in one major case, his inability to get others in his party to see the bigger picture — threaten crucial aspects of California’s future.

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The first example is public education, where reformers emphasizing data-driven best practices and accountability from students, teachers, administrators and parents alike have produced significant improvements in union states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and non-union states like Florida and Texas. But instead of learning from these states, Brown mocked the “siren song” of metrics-based education reform in 2011. Two years later, he introduced his own reform — the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which wiped out many state-imposed mandates on districts and directed more funding to districts with higher percentages of English-language learners, foster children and poor families. Each district was required to develop a specialized Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to guide efforts to improve students’ outcomes. …

Click here to read the full article from the San Diego Union-Tribune