Assembly Standing Committee on Education

All right, everyone, I think we'll get started here. Welcome everyone to the joint Committee hearing of the Assembly Committee on Education and the Assembly Budget Subcommitee Number three on Coherence and Fiscal and Programmatic Planning with the focus on the local control and accountability plan.

First of all, let me say that I think we can all agree that effective programs that improve outcomes for students begin with a plan, a coherent plan considering the goals of the program, the needs of stakeholders, and a shared vision.

We can all also agree on the General concept that state planning and reporting requirements serve important purposes, among them promoting the effective use of public funds and the evaluation of policy initiatives.

At the same time, I know that I have met with many of you in the audience, and I've traveled throughout the state and heard a lot of education stakeholders complaining about their frustrations, the so called plandemic with the current reporting and planning requirements.

I am here to acknowledge and to say that I understand your frustrations and we are here to listen and learn in order to ultimately try to improve our current situation.

As I've met with many of you in the audience today about the circumstances in your local school districts and your school sites, I understand that you are not necessarily opposed to planning, reporting or accountability, but rather want to maximize your time spent to afford you greater time and resources devoted directly to serving students. So we are here.

I want to emphasize that we have heard and we will continue to hear your frustrations. We acknowledge them, but today we're hoping to focus on solutions. We want to figure out what works and what needs improvement. For example, just a few weeks ago, our two committees hosted a informational hearing on community schools.

And we heard a lot of great testimony on how the intentional planning of community schools in different school districts throughout the state have been leading to encouraging and exciting student outcomes.

So I'm hoping that much of our discussion today centers around how to improve our current system to focus so that we can all focus on improving outcomes for our students. I look forward to the discussion today. And let me turn it over to the Chair of the Budget Subcommitee, Mr. Alvarez.

Thank you very much, Mr.Chair. And before we dive into the hearing, I want to acknowledge and recognize the fact that this is our colleague's last hearing as Chair of the Assembly Education Committee.

It has been an honor to serve with you and alongside you with multiple hearings like this one where we've identified, thanks to the public testimony and the way that his leadership and his team has put together these hearings, we've been able to identify not just problems, but solutions.

And so I want to thank you for always being focused on that in the work that you do, in the work in partnership. And I know that that doesn't stop with today as the last hearing. That will continue with you and looking forward to that. So I want to thank you first and foremost.

And second, I want to thank the Members of the public who are here and those who will be testifying.

As the chair just stated, we've heard loud and clear pandemic, as has been termed the coin, the current requirements of reporting, how onerous it is, how duplicative it can be sometimes, and the lack of coherence between the paperwork that has to be filled out in order to be accountable and and actual planning and executing, which is what ultimately what matters because that's what leads to student outcomes.

So while we don't want to get away from making sure that there's accountability and that we identify the use of resources that are so important to Californians, we must make sure that there are specific purposes for what the reporting is so we can get the data that we actually need to be able to do better planning, to reassess, to recalibrate, and to make sure that the funding that continues or opportunities for funding growth are done in a way that are reflective of the actual needs that you all give us through the feedback of reporting.

That's what it should be about, not just about making people do work to let us know that the money was spent, but how the work was done and why the money was spent in a way that was useful to all of you and the work that you do with our kids.

So as the chair stated, we're very much aligned in this. It's not about problems, it's really about solutions. We've asked all of the panelists repeatedly and I'll do it once again.

We ask you to come forward and share the strategies that you think will help us implement this better, making sure that we support the work that you want to do in the way that's best, most effective and most impactful.

So in preparation for today's hearing, we have heard from some of these themes and I hope that we can elaborate on those today as we strive to improve the strategic planning process for us as a state. So we've heard about the incoherence LCAP versus planning purposes, timing, technological solutions are lacking, support is lacking.

Helping leas with new programs, braiding and coordinating planning initiative fatigue, too many new programs, too quickly, too quickly to start and too quickly to end. I would say predictability, especially in one time funds and a compliance and categorical mindset. I'm also curious about what we can learn from the community schools planning process.

We have had a hearing a couple weeks ago. We've done visits, I think all of us, to these schools. We hear about how that process has been instrumental and successful in ensuring that the programs are working well together.

I think we can learn something from that and perhaps we can take those learning lessons and apply it in many different settings and ways for the other reporting that we have of programs. I hope that most of the discussion today centers around achieving those outcomes for students.

That's always the center, front and center of the work that my Committee is focused on and certainly again, thanks to the leadership of Member Mertzucci that has been the focus of the policy Committee. And I hope that that's the spirit of today. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Chair Alvarez, and I appreciate your kind remarks. So those of you that have a copy of the agenda, you see that we are expecting State Superintendent Tony Thurmond to be joining us. We have received word that he will be joining us shortly.

And so we'd like to go ahead and start with panel number one and invite all of the Members of panel number one to the the witness table.

And this would be Brooks Allen, Executive Director of the California State Board of Education Kathy TroXell, Associate Director, LCAP and Compliance, Fresno County Superintendent of Schools Dana Budd, Associate Director, LCAP and Compliance, Fresno County Superintendent of Schools and Edgar Cabral with the Legislative Analyst Office. Why don't we begin with you, Mr. Allen. Welcome. Thank you.

Good afternoon. As Chair said, my name is Brooks Allen. I serve as the Executive Director of the California State Board of Education, and I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Chair Alvarez and Chair Muratsuchi and congratulations as well as Members of the Assembly Budget Subcommitee and Assembly Education Committee for including us in this important conversation.

For this panel on state fiscal and programmatic plan requirements, I will focus my comments on the role of the State Board of Education in the Local Control and Accountability Plan, otherwise known in parlance as the lcap.

From the Board's vantage point, the LCAP is where state expectations and local implementation most directly meet and where the cumulative weight of our policies is often felt most acutely.

With that framing, I would like to offer a set of observations grounded in the intentional tensions that California has been navigating since LCFF and the LCAP were created in 2013.

First, there is a tension, as has been acknowledged in the opening comments here today, between the simplicity and efficiency on the one hand that we seek and ensuring that statewide priorities and guarantees are implemented as intended.

On the other In 2013, California folded more than 40 existing categorical programs into the new local control funding formula to to simplify how resources flow to districts, how districts spend those resources, as well as how to make funding more transparent and equity driven.

At the same time, the Legislature in that time entrusted the State Board of Education with developing the LCAP template and related expansion regulations, essentially creating the planning and accountability vehicle to ensure that this new simplified funding vehicle would still deliver on the state's statutorily prescribed priorities and and equity commitments. And that's important context for today's conversation.

LCFF was not simply a change in funding, it was a change in how the state would pursue equity and accountability.

The state shifted away from a system of many fragmented programs and toward a formula and local planning structure anchored in state priorities defined by the Legislature, local flexibility, community engagement, and transparency, with particular attention to how districts use supplemental concentration grant funds to to increase and improve services for students with greater needs.

Second, there is a tension as we all live between giving implementation time, exercising that patience and persistence that we all seek, and yet also exercising humility and recognizing the need to be nimble and responsive when experience, feedback or new needs require adjustments.

We want the system to learn and improve, but at the same time we also have to recognize that constant revisions create churn at the local level and can crowd out the work of improvement. Third, all of this sits inside the larger balance between local control and flexibility on one side and statewide accountability and transparency on the other.

LCFF and LCAP shifted much of the how of accountability to the local level. That shift was intentional and in many ways necessary. But it also means that state leaders reasonably ask, as you are today, how is this funding being used? Is it being used equitably? And what is working or not at the local level?

The question is how to strike the right balance in reporting requirements so that the state gets meaningful visibility without turning planning into simply a compliance exercise.

As you both have noted earlier, the LCAP was designed to make LCFF real, a vehicle for strategic planning with a focus on state priorities, community engagement, and transparency about how those investments will support improved student outcomes.

For many local educational agencies, it also represented a cultural shift, aligning instructional planning and budgeting around goals, actions and measurable progress rather than treating those, as historically been the case, as separate lanes. The state priorities established by the Legislature in 2013 and you will hear a theme in my comments.

We do talk about what was in statute continue to reflect the critical concerns that about foundational conditions like teachers, materials and facilities, implementation of standards, family engagement, student achievement and engagement, and school and school climate, access to a broad course of study and other student outcomes.

The LCAP includes goals for student groups and schools within these priorities, measured through a combination of state and local indicators that are based on legislatively defined metrics, again underneath those legislatively defined state priorities, and that they are all reflected in the dashboard, which is intended to help communities and policymakers see progress and identify where support is needed.

The State Board's role in both developing the template and instructions was meant to provide a consistent framework across LEAs and not to eliminate local control, but rather to ensure transparency, comparability and fidelity to that legislative intent.

The LCAP requirements in statute emphasize the linkage among goals for all students and student groups, specific actions, budget expenditures, and the demonstration that supplemental concentration funding are improving or increasing services for students, generating those funds alongside the plan summary and meaningful engagement over time, as has been noted at the top here today, the system has accumulated strain.

The LCAP is expected to do a lot and the pressure to make it a one stop shop in many ways has made these plans very long. And as the State Board often hears at our meetings every other month when we take up accountability, increasingly this is incompatible with LCAP's intended purpose as a strategic planning tool.

One large district's LCAP has been noted in the May Times is exceeding over 600 pages. When plans reach that scale, they become difficult for parents and community Members to use, and districts can end up writing primarily for compliance rather than for strategic planning and continuous improvement. At the same time.

The LCAP is not the only planning and reporting document LEAs must manage. Federal requirements and other state initiatives have created parallel and often duplicative reporting structures. Districts often describe what we've already heard a few times cited today as something called the plandemic.

Well intended programs that end up layered on top of each other, each with their own timelines, rules, plans and reporting and auditing requirements. As those requirements stack up, districts often have to add additional administrative staff and fiscal staff to track compliance across funding streams rather than directing scarce resources towards staff and supports that directly serve students.

And this brings me to the LCAPS evaluation. I'm sorry, evolution in roughly a decade and I've been staffing the Board for many of those years.

The template has been revised a total of seven times, often through budget and legislative decisions to incorporate new requirements, new funding streams, efforts to require to reduce duplication, and new equity and reporting expectations.

We've seen additions designed to strengthen equity and improve transparency, such as the LCFF budget overview for parents, increased focus on student group disparities and more recent requirements connected to programs like the equity multiplier and use of Learning Recovery Block Grant funds pursuant to a legal settlement.

Many of these changes are reasonable, in isolation and well motivated, but the cumulative effect is real. Districts need stability to implement well, and constant revisions make it harder to build capacity, engage communities meaningfully, and stay focused on improving student outcomes. So what's the path forward?

Recognizing that this is the focus of later panels, I just offer three quick observations for consideration. First, we need clear, limited core reporting that is tightly tied to statewide priorities and equity, and it is genuinely usable.

The goal should be focused on the few measures and narratives that best show whether students are being served and whether disparities and opportunities and outcomes are being reduced and addressed. And clearly defining the audience is essential. We have to design the LCAP for the user.

Families and community Members should be able to find and understand the most important information without needing to navigate hundreds of pages and to have a CBO on speed dial. Second, we need stability over time, fewer major template shifts and more support for implementation.

Where changes are necessary, they should be predictable, well supported, and aligned to the reality that meaningful improvement takes time, as we all know. Relatedly, wherever possible, the state should align cycles. Planning, accountability and support should reinforce one another rather than operate on competing timelines.

If we seek to have districts plan in coherent multi year cycles, the the surrounding state processes should respect and strengthen that planning horizon. Third and finally, we need a coherent system of documents and processes, recognizing that no single document can simply serve every purpose. The goal should be alignment and usability.

Parents can understand it, local educational agencies can use it for goal setting strategy, and the state receives the transparency it needs while reducing duplicative reporting across initiatives.

That means, of course, investing in more integrated grant and reporting systems, aligning requirements for related programs, being more deliberate in program design so that collectively we stop layering on new obligations without scanning first for what can be folded in, streamlined or retired.

Put simply, if the LCAP is where many of these pressures land, the solution cannot simply always be just add more to the lcap. The solution has to include reducing duplication and improving coherence across the broader system.

In short, we can have both local control and stronger accountability, but only if we intentionally focus on balancing simplicity with transparency, flexibility with equity, and stability with responsiveness. As we'll hear from my board President, Linda Darling Hammond, who's here in the audience and will be closing things out today and others later this afternoon.

That balance is central to how we will modernize our education system while staying true to the equity promise that that lies at the heart of the lcff and I look forward to the conversation.

Thank you, thank you. We will move on to the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools.

Good afternoon Chairs and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to share how local education agencies are currently navigating California's planning and reporting landscape.

We are Kathy Troxell and Dana Buddy speaking today on behalf of the Fresno County Superintendents of Schools, Dr. Michelle Cantwell Cofer and the 31 school districts and 29 charter schools serving more than 190,000 students in the Central Valley. Today we want to show you from a practitioner standpoint how the educational field experiences, reporting and compliance requirements.

Accountability for public funds and state outcomes is a good thing, but how the state does it makes a difference. We want to be clear at the onset. Districts are not asking for less accountability. What creates difficulty is not any single requirement. It is how requirements accumulate and operate independently of one another.

It is when plans that were already completed and being implemented have to be reopened and revised when legislation or guidance changes. Mid Cycle Picture this A sixth grade teacher logs onto a zoom meeting with me as students work quietly in the background not to plan lessons but to learn how to write the lcap.

In my next meeting I coach a second grade teacher who is helping draft the LCAP because the Superintendent is also the principal, HR Director and Transportation Coordinator. In another lea, a brand new principal calls to ask how to navigate multiple unfamiliar systems to enter the same data across three different platforms.

This is the lived reality of many LEAs across Fresno county who are working to complete up to 400 reports across 17 CDE divisions using 36 different reporting methods and systems, each one with its own login criteria and rules.

In Fresno county, the average LCAP length has grown by nearly 150% over the last 10 years with some districts experiencing increases of 300 to 400% in length.

What we have learned from our work with LEAs is that when new state requirements are introduced thoughtfully and coherently, students benefit because the adults in the system are better able to focus on improving outcomes over sustained periods of time.

To support districts with coherence, the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools organized a portion of these existing requirements on a single multi year calendar and I believe that you have had a copy of those that aligns reporting timelines, engagement periods and planning milestones into one place.

Our LEAs have found the tool to be helpful, but the tool itself isn't the solution. It's more like a bandaid, easing the burden but not fixing the underlying problem itself. Using the tool, districts can access a snapshot of key reporting deadlines from both an annual and multi year timeline.

By seeing requirements across the full year and multiple years, we aim to help districts anticipate workload, sequence activities logically, and avoid the constant scramble that comes with added deadlines. This is critical for our small rural school districts which routinely rely on county office staff to assemble timelines, interpret reporting requirements, and navigate state and federal mandates.

The tool also offers a dedicated program page that consolidates a program overview, related state and federal guidance and reporting links into a single location. This reduces the need to navigate to multiple CDE web pages and portals. Again, the tool helps leas manage complexity. It it doesn't remove the complexity.

The tool underscores the value of coherent state level planning before rolling out new programs and grants to the field. Our districts support transparency and accountability. They also desire coherence. Specifically, this looks like reporting timelines that are aligned so that the work is done once and used well.

It is fewer duplicative narratives and mid cycle changes as well as systems that protect strong oversight without pulling educators away from classrooms. This will allow educators to reclaim hundreds of hours currently diverted to compliance work and to redirect that time back to teaching, learning and supporting students.

In the words of one of our small rural school superintendents, repetitive reports pull me away from the most important part of my job, the kids in the classroom.

Fresno County Superintendent of Schools stands ready to continue partnering with state leaders and education organizations to advance coherent practitioner informed solutions and to provide technical expertise and tools to develop in collaboration with the field.

Thank you Mr. Cabral. Welcome.

Good afternoon. Chair Muratsuchi, Chair Alvarez and Members of both committees Edgar Cabral with the Legislative Analyst Office so I was asked to provide a little bit more of the state perspective on some of the planning and reporting requirements, with a particular focus on some of the non LCFF related plans.

As Mr. Allen walked through some of the history and the intent around LCFF and lcaps, there are certain areas of these reporting and planning requirements that the state can't control.

There are a number of federal requirements that districts have to comply with and there are some voter initiatives like Proposition 28 that create some specific requirements and those the Legislature does not have control over.

However, a lot of the more recent plans and additional reporting have been created, in particular through the budget process and added by the Legislature as the state has created new programs Some of them ongoing and some of them one time.

And in some ways you can consider some of these planning requirements as sort of an offshoot or a continuation of the shift to LCFF where the state has provided a lot more flexibility to school districts and the trade off to that. The expectation is that there is more deliberative local planning and there's more transparency around those activities.

And the LCAP is really intended to be that primary tool. But recently the state has also added additional reporting requirements. Partly partly in part because the LCAP is already so big. There may be a concern we don't want to, you know, how are we going to know what's going on?

If I care about this program, if I put it in the lcap, how do I find it? Right. But also there's still some desire for some specific information and there's a number of reports. I'm going to highlight a couple of the ongoing ones that exist.

There's an expanded learning opportunities plan that's required of school districts and there's also a home to school transportation plan that's, that's required. Both of these are significant new expansions and funding at the state level. Expanded learning. Increase the amount of funding for before and after school programs by like Eightfold.

And there's much more flexibility for districts and how to spend that versus the ACEs program and then home to school transportation. The state changed this model and now allows districts to get reimbursed for 60% of their costs associated with transportation, which has resulted in significant increases in how much the state spends.

And the idea being that we can increase access to transportation at the local level. So why did the state add these requirements? I think it's, it's covering a lot of the major issues that we talked about with regards to LCFF and lcaps.

There is a desire, given that there's more flexibility now, for example, an elop, more flexibility in terms of exactly how those funds are spent in transportation. The opportunity to expand your program beyond what the.

Your previous allocation was, that there be more local engagement and also that there be more transparency both at the state and local level in terms of wanting to understand how are these additional funds being spent and are they aligned with the state's intent and do we think that they're effective?

I think that what we would encourage the Legislature to consider is to look at these requirements. And I know there'll be a solutions panel later, but I think for some of these in isolation, even in thinking about those goals, do these requirements get the state what it wants? Out of it.

And even from a local transparency perspective, are we getting what, what we want? There's a lot of reasons to think these planning requirements themselves don't get you a lot of that. You know, in looking at those plans, for example, the expanded learning opportunities plan and both the transportation plan, they.

The plan in and of itself is not a measure of quality engagement. The plan is just the plan that was adopted. When you look at the plan, if you're interested in getting more information, these plans are primarily very narrative driven.

For example, the ELOP plan has 12 different categories that school districts need to fill out information about their program. For example, what are you doing to create a safe and supportive environment? What are you doing for student engagement? How are you creating collaborative partnerships? Very narrative driven.

You can find a list of essentially every partner that a district might have. It doesn't really tell you the depth of partnership. Right. It doesn't tell you that this, that this nonprofit is at every school site and is doing a robust program. They could just be in one place and be listed. Right.

So it doesn't really help provide that, that kind of deeper understanding of what's going on anyways. And it can be cumbersome to put together. The ones that we've seen are 20 to 40 pages for the expanded learning plan. That's on top of the usually 100 page plus El Cap.

The home to school transportation plans are a little bit shorter, but they also. Similarly, there's a lot of narrative. They don't necessarily answer some of the key questions. When we talk to, we get questions from the Legislature and from others about what they want to know about these programs.

They want to know things like does the district have a yellow P at every school site? Are they serving, if they're a tier one district, are they serving all students or just unduplicated pupils? What's the participation in the program? How many students are actually enrolled in a program?

The plans don't give you answers to any of those questions. We do for both of these programs have separate reporting requirements.

On the home to school transportation site, a more requirement that was added right away when the program was created that requires districts to provide information on ridership on the number of bus routes that school districts have and demographic information on the number of students that are participating in that program.

On the expanded learning side, this is something that's beginning for 25-26. There was a recent Bill, AB 1113 from 2024 that requires now through CalPads districts to collect information on whether students are participating in the program.

I think I would argue that from a state perspective, those two reporting requirements get you more than the planning requirements themselves do. And though obviously still has some requirements for school districts, it can be less burdensome than those large planning requirements. So these are just two examples.

You could do this with all of the plans to think through and look at that lens and what is it that's in these plans? Are we getting value from these plans?

That could be a way to try to streamline some of these requirements to reduce some of the burden that exists for school districts, while at the same time keeping in mind what the state's goals were in enacting some of these requirements. So I'll stop there, but I'm happy to answer questions at the appropriate time.

All right, questions from the Committee. Dr. Patel,

More of a comment than a question. I want to thank our chairs for hosting this informational hearing. Chair Muratsuchi, I have been really honored to serve under your leadership for these last several months, my first term in office, and really appreciate your thoughtfulness in putting this hearing together. Chair Alvarez, I really appreciate your leadership in working with you. And I see Chair Fong down at the end as well.

Really enjoy thinking and brainstorming with all of the leaders here at the dais and also want to highlight that the work that you're highlighting as experts in the room and practitioners on the ground, as a former school board trustee and someone who worked closely with CSBA on working towards finding ways to get towards coherence, it's wonderful to hear this conversation happening today.

I know on the ground, I have read those LCAP reports and they have grown in size over the years that I had been reading them and frankly, grown in size for really no implementation or accountability purposes in many occasions. And I appreciate the testimony heard today and look forward to hearing more as this hearing continues on. So thank you for bringing your important feedback and starting this conversation.

All right. And Dr. Patel, I know that we'll be. I'll be passing the gavel to you. Congratulations. I know that you're going to figure out how to solve the pandemic, so I look forward to.

Can't wait.

All right, Any other. Okay, I have a few questions. So, Mr. Allen, I think you have the overview of the statewide governance picture. And so we heard from Fresno county that they're helping and managing, but not solving, you know, the root causes of the pandemic.

Mr. Cabral had some ideas on how to how we can try to meet the objectives of the LCAP while at the same time trying to avoid some of the multiple layering and you know, with all of the different reporting requirements, the reporting templates, the timelines, you know, my General understanding of the problem is that, you know, the Legislature when we establish a program like the ELLP that, you know, we want to have accountability measures to ensure that the funds are being spent properly and to meet the objectives, the Department of Education, they come up with the specific planning requirements and the State Board has the oversight over how the entire LCAP system is working.

So in terms of how to can you give an overview of what you would envision, you know, as the overall direction that we need to pursue in terms of meeting the goals? You emphasize balance over and over again.

How do we meet the objectives of the LCAP in meeting the goals, ensuring that the local planning discussions are taking place while at the same time not overwhelming our school districts, giving some relief to our local school districts in terms of all the reporting requirements.

I think that's the million dollar question, or do we make it a billion dollar question these days? I think what I tried to emphasize and when I spoke to the balance, is that I would really like to underscore.

I don't think that there's any perfect sweet spot, and I think that's what I was really trying to underscore, is that these things that are, if you view them in isolation, each one of them, even in terms of a value, I think most of us would agree is something we should pursue.

And yet they are in tension with each other. In fact, one of my favorite old Ed policy class lessons was they talked about the triangle that has. We have equality, efficiency and liberty, the three points of your triangle. And all three people say, I'm all for efficiency, I'm all for freedom and liberty, I'm all for equality.

But they are all in tension with each other. And so most of what happens in education policymaking falls somewhere in how you balance those tensions, how you try to balance these out. So I think one thing, and this is what I tried to underscore to your question, chairmertucci, is that I think we have an opportunity.

I think it's why these hearings are extraordinarily valuable to have these conversations that are comprehensive in scope, because so many of these conversations take place in isolation. And so the decisions made in that isolated scope makes perfect sense to everyone involved.

But when you start adding those on, either historically adding them on or added on even in the same year across the board, they may not make as much sense.

And of course, that is the lived reality for most of the folks working at our school sites, county office of education, district offices, is they have to live all of it at once.

So I think part of this, and this is one of the three thoughts I offered, is to try to have a requirement where if you're going to add something in, we have a requirement that we take a look at what else could we peel away or what is already there that is duplicative?

And then I think it is investing in the types of systems that Fresno has been on the forefront of trying to champion. And really how the state takes a lesson from what's happening at county level. Where can we see things that can be braided and done in a coordinated fashion?

Our colleagues at the California Department of Education have been pushing and pushing to try to do more in terms of grant management and better integrated systems.

We think there's a ton of promise there, and I think that could help identify the kinds of opportunities for efficiencies that we should all seize because it would still provide what we're seeking in terms of clarity and transparency. To Mr. Cabral's point, it should actually be information that's useful. Right.

Just seeking information for information's sake isn't the point. Just like compliance is not a bad word, in my opinion. It's what gives us buildings aren't going to fall down under an earthquake. It's what gives us clean water and clean air. But it's compliance without a clear purpose.

And for the same reason, we shouldn't be seeking information without a purpose.

Okay. And I am reminding the Committee and the audience that we're going to have an entire panel to focus on the proposed solutions as we move forward, but wanted to make sure that the rest of the Committee had an opportunity to ask questions to this panel. If not, thank you very much for setting the stage.

We appreciate your testimony very much. We would now like to welcome to the table Superintendent Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who will give his annual overview of the governor's budget proposal, as well as what the Department of Education is currently focused on. So welcome, Superintendent.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Mr. Chair and Mr. Chair, and our future chair. And I'm sure at some point in time, future Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to be before you. You know, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the presence of that first conversation that just took place about reporting.

And look, I want to echo what you heard from those district representatives. Reporting functions should not bury those who are doing the work. They should be data points that tell us if these programs are working right. It was once put to me in a way that I often like to think about it.

We have to be able to show, is anybody better off? And how do we know? We have to have access to some ability to show impact. And this state has made incredible investments, but that should not bury the people who are doing the work.

And I would absolutely echo what we heard from the small districts, the rural districts, the districts that often have an administrator who doubles as, as in classroom teacher or in some other function. And so, Mr. Chair, you asked a question in the last panel. What's the answer?

There certainly are no easy answers, but there are certain elements that I think really do help us answer the question. And by the way, we've been piloting at the Department of Education what we call a kind of a simpleized form that could be used across multiple grants.

And, you know, districts should be able to use the same format for grants. Now, that may not work for everything that goes into the lcap. I think that is probably a more complex conversation.

But from the standpoint of the grants that have been provided, it is possible to create a common reporting form that people can become familiar with, and it can be short. And we've been piloting something that might be a few pages. And we'd like to continue to work with the districts that you heard from today, with the author.

I know that the author has, the Assemblywoman, has a Bill on this subject and with all of the association groups. But what's key to me is that we have to listen to the LEAs. We have to listen to the districts about what is a burden for them and where they can give impact.

And, you know, if our goal is to have better reporting, how do we do that in a way that is less onerous for them? That's one thing. And then I think there has to be.

What we have in many ways is coordination amongst Committee staff, staff at the Department, staff at the State Board of Education and at the associations, so that there's agreement on what that reporting structure looks like. You know, I got to give a credit to the Committee staff.

They always say, make this less onerous for districts, but there is a push and pull to say, make it less onerous. And then by the end of a legislative year, we're getting calls saying, hey, we need to have information about how that grant went.

And so I think if we can all sort of sit together and talk through what a structure might look like, I think that we can get there. I think we can get there before the end of this legislative session.

And I'm prepared to name someone at our Department, one of our chief deputies who's flanking me right now, to work with all of the partners who are interested in how we might also address the concerns about the LCAP reporting.

Because as you heard from Mr. Cabral, there are federal reporting requirements that we don't have any flexibility on, but we can control certain things, and we can control what the format for our grant reporting looks like. And I think our districts are. Are asking for it. We should honor them with that.

I think if we listen to them and we work in a collaborative way, we can get there, and we're committed to doing that. Thank you. Let me just say also to thank you, Chairman Mirsucci, for your service here.

It's been an honor to work with you for the better part of, I would say, the seven years that I've been in this office. But I think it's more like 11 years in Sacramento.

This too will be probably the last time I have the opportunity to present to you all in this capacity at the start of a legislative year.

I would say that you know, there's much work to be done but many things that I would note this Legislature has supported this Governor and this Legislature have supported many great things in education, not the least of which is having tripled per pupil funding.

If you look at the California school dashboard, you will see that in every single indicator California students performance is moving in the right direction. Universal transitional kindergarten, a real game changer that is now fully funded. You know, a measure that I was proud to sponsor. Expanded learning funded. You know, everyone talks about plandemics and pandemic.

The whole world has gone through the pandemic and is striving to recover and bounce back. I just read a report this week that talks about babies who were born in the pandemic now who are in kindergarten and first grade. We're seeing a high level behaviors from those very students.

And so as the world tries to recover, California has done more than any other state in terms of its investments in expanded learning. Universal meals, you know, breakfast and lunch, reading coaches, math coaches, you know, community schools, $6 billion for broadband. That California will finally once and for all close the digital divide.

You know, as you look at literacy, I think about the top five elementary schools in our state are all districts that have received reading coaches programs.

And they're all part of a cohort that we've convened of 200 plus districts that we call the move the needle cohort where we work with those districts to provide best practices around reading and math.

By the way, this is where we've been having the conversation about piloting a simplified reporting structure and so many great things provided through this Legislature and certainly in this budget, but still a lot more work to do. I would mention some legislative priorities that you'll hear us talking about this year in education. I mentioned transitional kindergarten.

We are embarking again this year on seeing universal kindergarten in the state of California. Think about what you'll hear from first grade teachers who talk about students who often show up unprepared.

They haven't had any exposure, you know, from the basics, from holding a pencil or maybe even learning the Alphabet or even just becoming socialized to being in school. I would also raise up the issue of dealing with the needs of homeless students in our state. Data tells us that There are about 300,000 homeless students in the state.

And it might be more, but what we know is that there's somewhere between 8 and 9,000, maybe 10,000 unaccompanied minors who are homeless on their own. Imagine that under the 18 and on their own. We've worked on legislation, Mr. Chair, and both the chairs have been a part of this to keep Ayes out of our schools.

And even as we see attacks on our immigrant families, we have legislation that. That helps to protect our schools. We've worked with every school district to help them to know their rights, that they are not required to admit someone from an Ayes agent perspective unless they have a judicial warrant.

And so that not only helps to prevent the disruption of education for our students, but it also protects our. Our revenue. As you all know, many students have declined to go to school because of fear that there might be an immigration consequence. And so we know that. That there's much more that we can do.

As to this budget, again, I would commend the Governor for what has been proposed. You know, with. With all the challenges that exist to California revenue, to have a budget that doesn't envision actual cuts per se, and continues to invest in programs like the discretionary block grant, very significant for our school districts. They.

They always ask, are we getting it again? I mean, this is a grant that you might recall, has been provided to our school districts every year at least since the pandemic. And so our districts have needed this to help them cover the rising costs of education.

So many things, again, around expanded learning, you know, the additional funding for community schools, tremendous things to support our school districts. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the one thing that I think is giving our schools heartburn. They're excited about all the things that I mentioned. Money for teacher prep, money for reading coaches.

But there's the one thing, and you'll probably hear this throughout this year, that they are concerned about, and that is Prop 98 funding.

And as this budget proposal threatens to undermine the very goals by withholding a staggering $5.6 billion from Proposition 98, that is something that at every district that you go to, you will hear those folks saying, we need that money. They need a signal that they could even have that money.

Districts right now are making decisions about making layoffs because they're saying without that, we have no choice but to lay folks off. And so I would just echo what I have heard from so many districts.

The ones that are facing strikes, the ones that are not, they're all saying, we need to have a signal that we can count on receiving those dollars. You know, introducing that uncertainty while prioritizing new programs and one time funding. Overgrowing the base makes it exceedingly difficult for our schools to address the needs of their workforce.

Strikes are on the rise. Staffing shortages continue despite these investments and our students will pay the price. This funding manipulation undermines the bargaining table. It creates barriers for schools to plan thoughtfully and ultimately results in a chilling effect on infrastructure and workforce investments. And so I would just echo the importance of moving this forward.

You know, I'm here joined by our team at the Department. We're happy to take questions that you have about this budget, about the reporting structure, about the governor's proposal for shifting governance. We've heard from hundreds of employees at the Department.

We've actually done our own survey work to be able to try and think through ways to address that. Whether it's about the extension of Prop 55 or other revenue measures for education, we're here to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you. And I wanted to say I respectfully urge iPhone.

It's just a bad habit, but thank you for the time today.

All right, thank you. Mr. Superintendent, any questions or comments from the Committee?

I just want to thank you for working on the grant reporting new form to make it a little streamlined, especially for my small rural districts. I would love to collaborate with you. I know we've talked about it before, but just wanted to extend that offer again.

You bet. Thank you, Assemblymember. I mean, you have really helped to provide real clear eyed examples of the impacts on your districts. In our cohort of the move the needle group, there are probably 2 million students served in those districts. The majority are at small and rural districts.

And so they give us feedback, don't schedule too many meetings, you know, don't create work that takes us away from the classroom. And so in this way, we think that the reporting structure can be amended for the grants.

And one day, one day what I'd like to see is that there can be a way that, you know, I also hear the flip side. You know, you got to write a, you got to write a grant application to get the report.

Sometimes I hear from districts, they say we just don't have the people power, we don't have the infrastructure to do that.

I would love to see us also get to a place where we can create some kind of an automatic eligibility structure for those types of grants where we know you're going to qualify if it's based on free and reduced lunch numbers. You know, we create something like that.

But we'll start with the reporting structure and then aspire towards how we make it easier to actually get those grants in the first place.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments from the Committee? I have one, Mr. Superintendent. I'll just keep it real brief because, you know, we know we want to get back to the focus of today's hearing. But you know, you mentioned how the Department of Education has tried to make it easier for school districts in terms of complying with reporting requirements.

I'm working on a Bill to propose a task force to explore what I know the state of Louisiana and perhaps other states have been doing in terms of having a statewide uniform reporting portal so that different school districts didn't have to deal with different portals, different reporting forms. I just wanted to.

I just want to put that out there. I don't want to go into the details of the proposal, but would love to work with you and with the Department of Education to explore again how can we work to make these reporting requirements easier.

I know it's going back to the Fresno county superintendent's presentation about how we don't want to just manage this pandemic to make it, you know, but at the same time, we want to see if there are practical ways that we can provide some relief to local school districts to meet with their reporting requirements. Yes, we accept.

We accept your invitation to work on it. We also are a part of a number of networks. I mean, on a monthly basis we're in calls with the state superintendents all over the country. And so we have access to folks in Louisiana and other states to see what portal they might be using.

I mean, I think our challenge in the state of California is upgrading our entire data collection system. How do we do that? And while there is work ongoing, there are still efforts that need to be enhanced. But we would be happy to work with you and your legislation with the ultimate task force.

And you mentioned Louisiana and it reminded me Louisiana is one of many states that have created these long term plans for supporting literacy and making sure that kids learn to read by third grade. California's not quite done that. Now. California's made lots of investments in, in different components related to helping students to achieve literacy.

We are proposing that we as our state would have a five year plan that we would launch now that would have all of the components that many states have also engaged in. Dyslexia screening, professional development, reading coaching, high dose tutoring. I know Assemblymember Hadwick has asked about this and that we could do more in these areas.

And so we have developed a budget proposal for what a Five year plan around reading by third grade will look like. We will make sure to send copies to all of you in all your offices. We would also welcome partnership as we look at Louisiana or Mississippi or any other state to continue the work here in California.

All right. Seeing no further requests from the Committee. Thank you very much, Superintendent, for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'd like to move on then. To invite Members of panel number two to focus on local perspectives on fiscal and programmatic planning coherence. I'd like to invite Grant Schimelpfening.

Okay, that's almost as long as Muratsuchi, Assistant Superintendent from the Lindsay Unified School District. Dr. Ed Manansala, Superintendent of El Dorado County Superintendent of Schools, Nancy Albaron, Superintendent, San Jose Unified. Dr. Corey Greenlaw, Assistant Superintendent, Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Dennis Weichman, Superintendent, Sanger Unified, and Tristan Brown, Legislative Director of the California Federation of Teachers. Welcome. Shall we start with Lindsay Unified?

Thank you. You did a great job on my name, by the way, Shimmel Finning. So thank you. Good afternoon, Chairs Alvarez and Muratsuchi and Members of the Committee.

My name is Grant Schimelpfening, and I serve as the Assistant Superintendent of Administrative services or the CBO in Lindsay Unified School District in California and Central Valley in Tulare County. We serve approximately 4,000 learners in a high needs agricultural community.

For the past two decades, Lindsay has operated a performance based, or some call a mastery based instructional model where learners progress based on mastery rather than age. This redesign required us to rethink grading, pacing, interventions and resource allocations so that every part of the system supports learner progress. Our operating philosophy is very simple.

We are uncompromisingly learner centered. Every opportunity, every program and every dollar is filtered through a single question. Will this improve outcomes for our learners? Because of that clarity, we work intentionally to maintain coherence across funding, accountability and instruction. When new programs arrive, our first question is not how do we comply?

It's how does this strengthen our existing system? Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, or ELOP funding is a good example. Programmatically, ELOP was largely clear. We understood what services needed to be provided and moved quickly to expand supports for students. Where we experienced more ambiguity was around expenditures.

Terms like quote, necessary and reasonable, along with evolving guidance and audit interpretation, required districts to make judgment calls. In Lindsay, we leaned into that flexibility. We took some liberty in how we interpreted allowable expenditures, always grounded in our belief that we were doing the right things for kids.

We were willing to lean into that flexibility because our context allows it. We had Stable governance, healthy reserves, and strong alignment around our learner centered decisions. But when implementation language leaves room for interpretation, risk tolerance begins to shape implementation and erode coherence.

In practice, that means districts are making decisions through a lens of potential audit findings rather than through a lens of student impact. Districts with context similar to ours may expand programs more aggressively. Districts with less margin for error may implement more conservatively. The statute is the same, but the implementation can look very different.

A different example is the recent literacy coach funding. We value the state's focus on literacy, but when funding is narrowly targeted, site specific and short term, it can begin to pigeonhole decision making. In Lindsay, our first conversation was not about hiring, it was about alignment. How does this strengthen our instructional framework?

How do we leverage it in a way that fits our long term design? And how do we avoid building something that disappears when the funding window closes? If the same funding had been provided with broader flexibility tied to literacy outcomes, we might have structured it differently in a way more fully integrated into our long term instructional design.

Short term, narrowly structured funding requires districts to redesign around that funding window rather than allowing funding to strengthen long term systems. Because we consistently filter every opportunity through our strategic lens, we are generally successful at leveraging funding to its fullest. But preserving coherence requires intentional discipline. The same is true with the lcap.

In Lindsay, strategy drives the document, the document does not drive the strategy. Our internal priorities guide decisions year round. Then we ensure the LCAP accurately reflects that work. That discipline keeps our focus on learners rather than compliance mechanics. However, coherence becomes more difficult when multiple planning reporting structures operate in parallel.

Lcap, SARC program specific reports and one time funding plans, each with separate timelines and formats. While each serves a purpose, the cumulative effect can shift district capacity from strategic implementation to document management. In Lindsay, coherence is not automatic. It depends on clear internal priorities. Leadership continuity, fiscal health, governance stability, and consistent learner centered filter.

Those conditions allow us to navigate ambiguity and maintain focus on student outcomes. In Lindsay, coherence comes from consistently filtering every opportunity through a clear strategic lens and asking whether it strengthens the systems as a whole. That discipline has made a difference for us.

From our perspective, coherence improves when expectations, including audit and reporting requirements are clearly established at the outset, when funding timelines align with planning cycles and and when reporting structures are streamlined or unified. Wherever possible, predictability and clarity reduce risk and allow districts to focus energy on outcomes rather than interpretation. Thank you for the opportunity. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you. El Dorado County.

Good afternoon. It's a privilege to be with you. Thank you for the invitation. My name is Ed Manansala. I'm the El Dorado County Superintendent of Schools. I've had the opportunity to serve and lead in urban education in Sacramento for 15 years.

And in the last 10 years as the county Superintendent of Schools in El Dorado County, I'd like to open up with a big idea that permission to focus is the hallmark of successful systems change and improve student outcomes.

I'd like to share with you an approach to coherence that focuses on proactive strategic planning and and execution on a countywide basis. I'd like to go back to 2013 at the implementation of LCFF. At a retreat with 15 districts and all of the superintendents in El Dorado County. We had the opportunity and privilege to lead collectively.

Together, our 15 districts serve approximately 30,000 students. The challenge at that time was the transition from NCLB to lcff. But it also was an opportunity. But as a reminder, under NCLB there was at times a sense of noise clutter and at times a punitive climate in terms of its accountability, accountability system and approach.

There were multiple compliance measures, categorical programs that we were navigating with good intent and how we responded to the needs of our students based on data related really was a significant challenge. We were at a crossroads transitioning from the prior accountability system to LCFF.

And what we saw clearly and as LCFF was introduced it was more than about a single number. We were going to be focusing on equity and also welcome sense of local control. There's a gentleman. We use an expression in El Dorado County.

Let's bring the best to our leaders and teachers and a researcher by the name of Michael Folin and a practitioner. And we were retreating in South Lake Tahoe at this time. And there was this discussion of how are we going to take advantage of the structure and take this constructively.

But we said let's get a C in compliance but in a in focus priorities where we felt it was going to have the greatest impact on student outcomes. This positioned a shift in Mindset, collective structures and strategies across all of our districts, El Dorado County Office of Education and in El Dorado County.

I'd like to share with you what does this actually look like in practice. A primary engine of LCFF is continuous improvement, capacity building and coherence and systems alignment. An intentional shift from a reactive approach to a proactive approach.

One emerging trend that we saw across El Dorado county was the need to improve in mathematical outcomes and instruction for that matter. So what we began to do was build structures and systems across multiple school districts and we were focusing on clear expectations, think of standards, common effective practices, building teacher and administrator capacity and monitoring progress.

What did this look like in practice? Coaching in classrooms, monthly site based improvement teams, collaborations where we would come in person across districts two times a year and really looking at common data to accelerate improvement.

Our theory of action was if we provide strong coherent foundational academic supports and district skill, high leverage strategies and priority areas, then we embed coaching for teachers and leaders. This will build sustainable district capacity and as a result outcomes for students will improve.

By using this proactive county wide approach to improvement, we have seen the following improvements in student outcomes in mathematics, we're beginning to see preliminary academic gains in districts showing growth across mid year formative assessments and end of year summative assessments, increased 9th grade math gains and appropriate placement because we were focusing on Preschool to third grade and the eighth nine transition across all of our systems, Schnell elementary grew 25% from fall to spring in 2425 and 25% from fall to winter.

This academic year, Camino Union School District has seen a 50% growth in mathematics over the last two years. Chronic absenteeism also was an area of focus. We had 11 of our 15 districts in what we call differentiated assistance because of chronic absenteeism.

We focused looked at strategies over a two year period and all 11 were pulled off differentiated assistance in respect to chronic absenteeism. We had granted that permission to focus in mathematics. Permission to focus on chronic absenteeism.

As I conclude, I want to acknowledge from 2013 to 2026, while we are speaking to the complexity of our reporting, the challenge of leading and instructing is much greater in these last few years. Public Health I don't need to say too much more. Many of us here led through Covid. We're dealing with staffing shortages, climate issues.

In El Dorado county we went through the Caldor fire, burning 220,000 acres and closing 20 schools. Just last week we had six districts closed because of the snow. We're dealing with advanced technology issues obviously in terms of artificial intelligence and how things are impacting instruction and even school safety.

Just looking back at the last two weeks we've had to deal with ensuring safety through threat assessments and unfortunately, even on Monday of this week I had to go to Buckeye elementary because we had a teacher brutally murdered last week. Watching a principal and a superintendent, their board and their community navigate those challenges.

Next week those teachers and leaders will be convening from preschool to third grade, eighth and ninth grade, focusing on mathematics improvement. This is the complexity in which we're dealing with.

I'm going to ask you to try to wrap up.

Thank you. Permission to focus is what we're after. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much. Next we have the superintendent for the San Jose Unified.

Hello, everyone. Members of the Committee. Chair Alvarado Alvarez. I'm sorry. And chair Muratsuchi. My name is Nancy Albaron and I have the privilege of serving as the Superintendent of San Jose Unified. I'm in my 10th year, but I have professionally grown up in the organization. I've been there since 1999.

Before I share my recommendations, though, I really want to briefly talk a little bit about our context, because context is exactly why local control matters. San Jose Unified is the largest urban district in Santa Clara County. We are a very diverse district. We serve 41 schools, schools, 25,000 students.

And we're also a district that has 50% unduplicated students and 23% English learners. When you talk about the Silicon Valley, people think a lot about wealth. But I think that if you are leading in Santa Clara County, you understand the diversity and the complexity of serving being a public servant in that particular area.

We're a district of great contrasts. We have tremendous affluence in the south, and we have tremendous need in the north. We're also a basic aid district. We became a basic aid district right around the pandemic, which makes me an outlier in comparison to some of my colleagues on the east side.

We also have some of the highest paying districts in the Bay Area because of basic aid status. And that distinction matters in policy conversations. It also matters when there are 31 districts in the county, 19 are in the city of San Jose, and local conditions vary significantly. We also have a very complicated history.

In the 1980s, we were a broken district. We had labor strife. There were multiple strikes. In the 80s, we also had a superintendent that was convicted of multiple felonies. We also had the court that found us intentionally segregating schools. It was not a good time in San Jose Unified. We had lost the trust of our employees.

We had lost the trust of our community. Rolling back salaries was not a popular decision. In the 1990s. Our board hired a visionary and equity focused superintendent, Dr. Linda Murray, who I had the privilege to serve under as a teacher and a leader.

And I have to say that there's a lot of lessons learned from that history, and that's why the context matters. One of the things that we learned from that era is that you need to do this work in collaboration with your labor partners. We do the work in San Jose side by side with our labor partners.

We also learned that we need to learn from the past to inform our present. We need to look at a few priorities and focus as an organization and and work together. I have seen that happen as a teacher. I have seen it happen as a principal and as a central office leader.

And as I prepare today, I thought about Margaret Wheatley's article that I read with my leadership and all of the administrators in the district called Islands of Sanity. And I think that Islands of Sanity are really important right now in these chaotic times.

We are leading in an era of political divisiveness, of changing laws, growing compliance demands, and declining trust in public institutions. At the same time, the needs of our students, especially those furthest from opportunity, require more focus and more support. So the question for me is this.

How do we create coherence in a system that's constantly being pulled in different directions? In my experience, coherence starts with discipline. It starts with clear, aspirational strategic plans that are rooted in community voice and strong enough to hold the constant change, the constant to change. In San Jose Unified since 2014, we have had a strategic plan.

Our strategic plan is aspirational, and it allows us to have the agility and the flexibility to navigate anything that comes at us. It required a lot of conversations and engagement with our community. But these our five objectives are very aspirational. The first one focuses on a rigorous curriculum that inspires students to discover their own greatness.

The second one talks about an innovative workforce. The third is a unified community that elevates opportunities for all. The fourth is enhanced resources that make the extraordinary ordinary in our system. And the fifth is an efficient and effective system that asks and answers the questions why and what if?

Using this frame, we align our planning, including our LCAP priorities, to avoid fragmentation and keep our focus on the nucleus of the system, which is the classroom. When the LCFF and the LCAP started, we were energized by the promise of local control.

We believe we could build action plans based on our local context in partnership with our labor groups, our community, and our staff. That promise still matters, but over time, local control has been narrowed by layers of compliance.

And when the work becomes overly compliant driven, we spend more time producing plans and reports and less time improving teaching, learning, and supports for students. I always relieve this as a teacher and as a principal. What we mention, what we measure and what we monitor gets done.

But when you mention everything, measure everything and monitor everything, very little gets done. And because our funding structure differs for many districts, I have learned the coherence. It's not about having more plans. It's about having the discipline to align resources, people and accountability to the few things that matter most. So my recommendations are very specific.

When we system leaders and elected leaders hear concerns, let us focus on the value that sits underneath the pain point of our constituents. What is the concern really about? Is it teaching and learning? Is it social and emotional support? Is it accountability? Let's get curious and identify the specific process connected to that value and improve that process.

Too often we respond by creating a new plan or a one time funding stream that may feel responsive in the moment, but it often increases fragmentation and does not solve the root problem.

Second, let's go out and seek the perspective not only of those who are calling our offices, those that are emailing us and those that are attending public comment, but also those that feel well served. We need both voices.

If trust is broken down and there are other places in the system where trust has been built, we should ask what are those key levers that a school, a Department, a school district, a governance team pulled in order to build that trust?

Going to try to ask you to wrap up, please.

And third, let us build data monitoring systems and help districts measure what matters most in a timely way with one reporting portal for accountability so we can focus more time on capacity, not on direct, on our capacity building and direct services for students. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next, Fresno County Superintendent.

Close. Assistant Superintendent. Thanks for the promotion. Good afternoon, Chairs and Members. Corey Greenlaw, Assistant Superintendent with Fresno County Superintendent of Schools. We've been there about 20 years. It's a great place to work. Very happy to be here to talk for a few minutes.

I'm going to start off with just the scope of Fresno County, just to kind of understand how where we come into this. Little over 200,000 students, third largest school district in the state of California with Fresno Unified, all... And I don't want to say down. All the way to our little, smallest one, Big Creek, 17 students in the mountain. Fantastic place to be if you want to come visit sometime.

I'm here to talk about our role as the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools in strategically supporting some of our local education agencies and how they actually make these improvements with our students and what we actually do. You heard earlier from some of our amazing colleagues in our LCAP and compliance department that do fantastic work.

And I wanna talk a little bit about what that work is and how it interweaves. So that way we have some cohesion, coherence, and strategic approaches to the ways that we work with our districts. Namely one of the ones that's sitting right next to me, Dr. Wiechmann.

At Fresno County, we've built a strategic support model that helps districts move beyond simply submitting reports to coordinate their work in a coherent and aligned way. Specifically, what I want to discuss is how we intentionally interweave differentiated assistance support with the universal compliance work we provide to all districts.

The state created the DA process to ensure LEAs have the support they need to improve outcomes for students. At the county offices, we work to help districts realize those gains with students through technical assistance and ongoing support. Fresno County DA coaches and our LCAP and compliance coaches work in coordination and concert, but with very distinct roles.

DA coaches focus on that improvement work, root cause analysis, data analysis, that ideally leads to sustained systems change and improved instructional strategies. Our LCAP and compliance coaches do not direct or oversee that work. Instead, they help districts clearly see how the improvement efforts identified through DA can be aligned and reflected within required plans and reports.

For example, if the district's DA process identifies chronic absenteeism or literacy as a priority, our LCAP coaches help district leaders think through how those strategies are accurately captured in goals, actions, expenditures, and metrics within the LCAP or other required documents.

The role is not to control the improvement work, but to ensure that the district's improvement efforts and its compliance documents tell the same story. This coordination reduces fragmentation and it ensures that planning documents reflect the real work happening in schools. Let me give you a concrete example.

In Sanger Unified School District, we work closely with Dr. Wiechmann and his amazing team to coordinate multiple required reports throughout the year. Our team helps align accountability timelines with budget adoption, board presentations, and federal reporting deadlines. We assist in organizing data so that it's consistently represented across plans.

When improvement priorities are underway, whether connected to DA or local initiatives, we help district leaders ensure those efforts are coherently reflected in required submissions. This coordinated approach allows a large district to manage complexity strategically rather than reactively. However, the impact of these requirements differs significantly by district size.

Large districts like Sanger often have assistant superintendents, directors, fiscal analysts, and data teams who can distribute this workload. They have internal infrastructure to absorb new mandates and divide responsibilities. You've heard about... Small districts do not, and you've heard about some of those things earlier on in our first panel and those that small districts and the challenges that they actually face.

When we think about the reporting requirements, the statutory requirements are the same for small districts as they are for large districts without maybe some of the support that they may need. So the timelines, documentation, standards, and public transparency obligations do not scale down based on enrollment.

For small districts, the cumulative weight of these mandates can be absolutely overwhelming. This is where the county office plays a critical equity role. Our compliance team helps interpret requirements, build manageable timelines, which you've seen today that you have in front of you. Provide templates, organizational tools, and offer individualized coaching to our districts.

By coordinating compliance support with improvement efforts such as differentiated assistance, we help districts, especially small ones, align their work in a way that is coherent, strategic, and student centered. Ultimately, our mix of universal and targeted assistance to districts is about more than compliance. It's about coherence and capacity building.

As district administrators and teachers transition over time, the county office serves as the connective tissue between state policy and local implementation, helping districts integrate mandates, improvement strategies, and fiscal planning into a unified system focused on student outcomes. Thank you for your partnership and thank you for the opportunity for allowing us to talk about this today.

Thank you very much. And so we'll transition to Sanger Unified.

Good afternoon, Chair Muratsuchi and Chair Alvarez. My name is Dennis Wiechmann. I'm Superintendent of Sanger Unified School District. I have been in Sanger Unified since 1999. So part of what you have heard through the implementation of LCAP and the ability that it gave Sanger Unified, much like... By the way, we love Lindsay. Coming through, but the ability for us to come through in a coherent model and say, this is what is important to us.

These are the goals that we have and this is what we're going to focus on. And for Sanger Unified, the mission is very straightforward. It's improved student achievement with three goals. Ensuring that every student grows a year or more, closing the achievement gap, and ensuring a safe environment. And that is the coherence for us.

And so the LCAP and that flexibility allowed us to continue doing and build on what Sanger Unified had been known for. And just a quick demographic for us. If those of you who do not know where Sanger Unified is, we're about 10 miles southeast of Fresno. About 13,200 students, 65% Hispanic, 70% unduplicated, which is actually dropping to 60%, which presents a different funding issue. But we also have been extremely successful.

And I say that because we have been extremely successful. And I love Lindsay and El Dorado because our coherence has allowed us to integrate the, and I'm going to say one time dollars, but the set aside dollars that have come through into something that we already have. And Lindsay, hit it on the... Okay, your name? Grant hit the nail on the head.

Risk aversion, audit risk aversion. When there are things being passed that look good and the Legislature comes through, and then there are the trailer bills and all the requirements that get built into that, we sit down and spend way too much time in leadership cabinet where it should be looking at student data, which we do really well.

Instead we look at how we're going to fit these funds in. If we're going to get an audit exception coming through, what report is going to match this report? And so it starts stacking those reports onto reports, onto reports. So when we look at the amount of time for us, just with the individual reports, it's about 486 hours.

And that is just kind of staff time going through. It doesn't talk about the time that it takes our staff to actually implement and takes them away from what they're doing in the classroom. And you've heard a lot of the echoing the same concern. So I don't necessarily want to repeat that. But the duplicative reporting that we have to do, the antiquated systems.

And I know we're talking a lot about the LCAP and different funding reports for the different programs that have come out. But the standard accounting code, there's bigger things within CDE that make it extremely hard even to do the budget audit, the first interim, because the systems are not up to date.

So when I hear having one reporting system, that would be ideal. And just as a note, when you look at it, I guess for me, I look at things that are very simple. When we sit in cabinet, whatever we are doing, we simply look at student achievement.

Did it make a difference on student achievement, if that's what we're working on? Did it make a difference on suspension rates? Did it make a difference on chronic absenteeism? And then we adjust. And so, but it is one reporting model. It comes into cabinet, we can have those conversations coming through.

And I think that coherence has led to us being successful. I do, though, also want to thank the Legislature because the ELO funds have been extremely helpful coming through in supporting student achievement, connection to the community, attendance. The TK expansion has been hugely helpful.

Even though, and we're going to work through it, we'd rather have the funds and have to work through it than not. Has been hugely helpful. And we just did a report last night on the impact it has had on reducing our EL students and having them actually classified as English learners in kindergarten.

There are great things that the Legislature has done. So for us, it isn't saying, okay, just do away with that. Just make the reporting a little bit more streamlined for us so we can continue to focus on what we need to focus on and continue to support our staff and our students. And I'm going to leave it at that because I think we've kind of covered some of that. So.

Okay. Thank you. Mr. Brown with California Federation of Teachers.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, both Mr. Muratsuchi and Alvarez, for providing us with this opportunity and your hard working staff to put this hearing together and all the Members here today. Yes. Tristan Brown with CFT - A Union of Educators and Classified Professionals.

We represent a wide array of educators within the system, so we have a broader lens starting in early childhood education, all the way through the university system, both in the public and private sector. And this hearing has given me a great opportunity to go to our locals and ask them for their feedback on coherence.

At first, everybody kind of turns their head and goes, coherence? Okay, SAT word. And I ask them the money and the plans, is it working? Yes or no. And then a volume, a flood of information comes out from our locals.

And honestly, it's been really heartwarming to hear the rest of this panel talk about where real cooperation seemed to be a key component of success. And I think that is the common thread from what I heard from our locals. So we're both LCFF, basic aid, educators in special ed, CTE, adult ed, and everything in between.

And the common threads were, we hear a lot of words. Plans, goals, reports, accountability, supports, equity, design, measures. The list goes on. This is a lot of what's in the rhetoric of the education policy in this state. But they also start to stray from the original intent because it's, from our point of view, there are communities that don't feel like they have ownership.

And so these words lose their meaning because there's no programmatic efficiency or efficacy. And when the plan becomes too large, it becomes their plan, not our plan. I think a lot of folks might sit around the table and then think this is now run away from us. I won't kick the horse of the LCAP. That's pretty done here. I might do it to transitional kindergarten though, for a second, because there was a lot of cartoon before that horse.

All of a sudden, from our point of view, it seemed like, hey, finally, this wonderful program that is going to come and really bring up and elevate the opportunities for so many households. Came before we really knew what we were doing when it came to the curriculum, if we were sure we were going to recruit the workforce to be able to actually provide it, if we had the facilities ready.

And that begets some sort of reaction that says, hey, if you had just asked me, we could have maybe figured that out a little bit ahead of time. And so it's difficult to speak on coherence when the system really is made from all of these separate governing bodies on the state, county, local level, to say nothing of our collective bargaining impacts and all of that too.

We've seen the frustration manifest in attempts from other unions that have tried this bargaining for the collective good, where the strikes are more about programs of support for students than it was about take home pay for educators.

We heard this from our AFT National President, Al Shanker, who was praising a then novel new concept of charter schools that were supposed to be these programs run by teachers, these enclaves to be co-managed with teachers and not corporations.

We've seen recognition of the importance of collaboration in community schools where there is a pillar of shared governance. However, even today we're a little wary that that pillar may have a relaxed maintenance of effort, I'll put it.

So it's not to say that the pendulum between categorical constraints and local control should swing far, but perhaps rather our collective goal here can be to recognize where those sweet spots can be, where leadership of our system at each level grabs an oar and works with stakeholders not only to row in the same direction, but also to have to agree on what the navigable path is.

So to be clear, this is not advocating for a coup against superintendents and boards and administrators. This is me claiming Jaws and saying we're going to need a bigger boat if we're all going to grab that oar. We asked why are schools managed like a corporation or military organization? Why few leaders and many subordinates?

Can there be such thing of programming and fiscal coherence when the decisions are exclusive rather than inclusive in that model? We look at an example like Gore and Associates, which is a popular company that makes GORE-TEX jackets you've probably heard of. It is a $4.8 billion company that's been thriving for 67 years with 12,000 employees but no bosses.

Again, not advocating the overthrow. Rather, leaders respect the humility there and say the best ideas come from others. It isn't about close supervision of director over subordinate. It is rather that employers are given mentorship and support by the veterans of the organization.

Everyone is treated with respect, and consensus guides what success looks like, including who serves as leadership, how projects are attempted, if at all, and what peer reviewed ranking of performance can be. In summation, coherence in programs and funding needs real collaboration between boards, superintendents, teachers, classified staff, parents.

Also communities of color and other communities that are feeling like they have no ownership of their school system either. And if nothing else, you could guess, fund the, tax the billionaires and fund the system. All roads lead to revenue. If we had a little bit more, we could actually make a lot of these plans a lot more successful. I'll stop there.

All right, thank you. Questions? Dr. Patel.

I want to express deep gratitude for all of your testimonies. You've heard me say this probably many times before. As a former school board trustee, I am with you superintendents in spirit, in understanding your interest, in your need to focus. And I think that's a lot of what our communities are asking for on the ground.

I think our parent communities, and frankly even our workforce employer communities, are asking for our students to graduate from high school with high levels of literacy and math competency, as well as some applicable real world job skills. And having you able to focus on those deliverables would be amazing.

However, what we've learned over the years is that it takes a lot more than that to put a completely whole child out into the world. Right? And so with LCFF, I think the goal was to reduce the categoricals, provide lots of flexibilities to districts so that you could plug the holes in the dam where the holes were showing up in your own communities. Right. That's what was intended.

And yet we're seeing the need, over the years, some of it related to Covid, but some of it Covid just revealed the cracks in. I think some of it was underlying to begin with of so much more need in our school community. So we created all of these extra plans, right? And part of the recovery.

So we have ELO-P, we have Universal Meals, we have community schools, we have all of these other programs now adding on. And essentially it's like a categorical series of programs, which we tried to move away from to begin with. So in thinking about this incoherence, are we saying that... And let me see if I could gather my thoughts properly.

Are we saying that really it would have been better if we had just increased the giant pot of money to the base and trusted our districts to do the right thing? Or are we saying that we really need targeted, focused programs to make sure we're doing interventions the way maybe we envision them at a state level? Really big, almost philosophical question, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I don't bite.

We're going to Rochambeau to see who's going to respond. Man. And that gets into a very difficult kind of pulling on that tension that goes back and forth. Because the unduplicated pupil count and the unduplicated amount and the supplemental concentration came out for a reason.

And without forgetting the history, it came out for a reason because we were not being successful in closing the achievement gap within identified subgroups. So. And then it gets into how the districts are going to do that and if they're truly going to address those needs and from the... Well, let's speak from the Legislature standpoint.

So I guess that that becomes, you know, kind of that balance. How do you trust? Because ultimately it comes down to this. Are you going to trust every single district in the state of California to be able to take that extra money and put it where it needs to be? And Sanger Unified, I would like to say yes.

In most of the districts, I would like to think absolutely that would happen. But I know that's the, that becomes the gamble on the Legislature side to trust us, and trust us to say no, we're going to do it. And then if it doesn't work, then a compliance part for a district who, if they're not doing that. That would be my initial...

And just to add to that, I think the community input part was supposed to help us make sure that we could have trust.

If I could add, Assembly Member, that I think you can know when communities are feeling like their schools are not supplying, they're not hitting the target. We've seen a lot of legislation, even last year, that caught a lot of headlines because communities felt like they were not being listened to.

So I think that there is a loud alarm that a community can hit. Perhaps we can refine that to be better and have responses better. But also it's almost like, you know, when you see it, when there is success. It's when parents and teachers and administrators and everybody feel that they're actually making the mark.

When the student who just graduated comes back and visits their second grade teacher and gives them a hug. You know, those are the, that's how you know it's working. But if we have a program out there and we know that students are faltering, if the literacy rates are not getting up there, how do we know what's going on behind the curtain?

And do we have communities saying, boy, I wish we had a hot meal program, which is something that we have strived and done a lot for. Right. There are other factors out there that, again, if you just asked me, I could have told you what might have helped in the inside of the classroom. And those conversations are not always naturally occurring.

And that's where we feel that more of that input can lead to, yes, trust us, because we will be darn sure you'll know if it's not working because our graduation rates are low, our literacy rates are low, parents will tell you. And so there is, I think, a balance there that, again, the pendulum should not swing too far. But we'll know if it's not working.

Yeah, I mean, you have my head spinning a little bit with that question because it's a great question. So this is kind of off the cuff, but because I'm the CBO on the fiscal side, we do have fiscal indicators when the county office will jump in or when...

So if we had a similar system on the academic side, perhaps that would be a system where there's indicators that say, okay, now it's a time for the county to get involved or it's time for the state to get involved at a certain level.

But beyond that, if the district is functioning and they're seeing growth, let them keep doing what they're doing. And not only that, CDE or another organization can go watch those districts. What are they doing, learn those lessons and then share best practices out to the rest of the field. Just an idea off the cuff there.

I'm going to be chairing till the Chair returns. Ms. Bonta, do you have some... Ms. Patel, did you... Dr. Patel, did you finish? Okay, can I just ask a follow up on that? Because, I mean, the indicators do exist. There's dashboard, there's numbers.

The fact that nobody's actively engaging as a result of that, if it's not the community themselves, I think there's something to be said for that for is there a role for someone. I think that's very interesting. I mean it should be the board. But when you have schools who...

And I represent, unfortunately, a couple, which is too many, schools who have not demonstrated the outcomes we'd like to see. But typically they are in the communities where people are less affluent, less active, less vocal, and seems to create some level of comfort that maybe should not exist at our local level. Ms. Bonta.

Thank you. In all full disclosure, I spent the better part of 10 years working with school districts on strategic planning and visioning. And then when LCFF got rolled out and the LCAP got rolled out, working with whole school communities to basically pull together those LCAPs and do so in a way that ensured that there was a great amount of community involvement in developing out those LCAPs. So I'm intimately familiar with the challenges and the opportunities as well.

Because my question, I have a couple. One I'll start with is particularly for the superintendents in the room. When you are doing your multi year planning with your cabinets or your extended cabinets, what documents are you using to be able to outline the vision that you have, the implementation plan that you have, and how you are going to understand and measure results?

Why don't we go down the line?

Yeah, I was going to say a few—I'll jump in. When we're looking at our multiyear plans, we rely heavily on the LCAP and so, coming through and that information. So, I guess let me make sure I'm going to answer the question because it's multifaceted.

But when we look at the multiyear plan, the information that we're getting into the LCAP from the LCAP Committee, which has parents, students, our surveys, and then looking at our action plans and what we're doing and then monitoring those over multiple years, and then we also overlay that with a lot of budget from the different, as we've talked about, from the different—and I'm going to use the term categorical and I know they're not categorical but my brain gets stuck in there.

And so, as we're doing those multiyear plans and the areas that we're going to target for improvement, and I think it was mentioned previously that the LCAPs have grown in page numbers significantly. So, ours is up to about 122 pages, which may be small compared to others—that I don't know.

But that becomes that guiding document for the multi year plan that we use. And then here's part of the difficulty though.

But when we get into the actions and we're saying, okay, this plan is going to encompass our concentration funds, it's going to encompass other actions that we do that are going to guide us, the categorical or the limited time funds can become an issue with that because as we're working to try to address and community schools is a perfect example.

Great. The community input that we got and what they're doing for our sites that have gotten those awards are great. And now, they're going to start cycling out. And so, I think we've got a series of two or three schools that were year one funding that that funding is going to go away.

And so, that starts to change the dynamics and the, and I know you guys have heard this before, the learning recovery block grant money that's going away, we're—our enrollment is not declining but it's kind of flat. And our unduplicated rate dropped 10%, which is about a $10 million hit over three years.

So, it's going to take time, but it forces looking at that multiyear plan and what our sites are doing and having to make adjustments which we did a, yesterday at the board meeting, we had to do a reduction in force for seven parent student advocates trying to balance that out.

I don't know if that answers your question. Okay. And sometimes I am a superintendent, warning, that we just start talking and then we don't stop. So, it's fine to.

We have a very similar approach. It starts at the governance level, and we do the data discussions at the governance level and then, we prioritize areas of need at that level and then, we begin to develop action plans and present those at the board level.

We talk about approaches, you know, how they're going to be deployed, how they're going to be implemented and monitored. And then, there are reporting cycles throughout the year. My evaluation goals are tied to those organizational goals.

And then, the—all of the school, we're a highly centralized model and so we have really tight agreements about positions and how we use those positions to change outcomes for students. And so, all of the school sites, their school plans, are backwards mapped from the district goals and then they engage with their communities in a similar fashion.

Talking about, for example, if literacy is the focus and we have literacy coaches and they know everybody will have a literacy coach, on the budget side, we have an equity policy that talks about allocation of resources based on need. And we've had it for a long time.

And so, every school gets 20% more funding than all of the high need schools. And so, we, you will see more funding and more staffing at the high need schools versus the most affluent schools. We have open enrollment policies.

So, people that are at the affluent schools that don't have those resources, more counselors, more coaches, more intervention specialists, they can transfer to other parts of the district if they would like to access those services. And then we just go through that cycle.

I think what makes it challenging now is that when the data comes, it doesn't always come at once. And so, you're, you're having a lot of disruption, and you can't be as focused on the plans and measuring progress, reporting out.

So, we've, we've, you know, we have to do a lot of workarounds, but that it starts for us at the governance level. And the budget is—there's already an expectation that 20% more goes to those schools.

And so, we have staffing sheets that go out to the schools and then the site leaders present those to their staff because obviously, our teachers get input into the budget at the site level and we all work together to define what is it that we need, what are the supplies, the training.

But it really starts at the governance level around what the data is saying.

Through the Chair, can I follow up with a?

Well, I appreciate that and I think those were both incredible examples around some of the positive aspects of the LCAP, in terms of the way that it essentially drives an opportunity for us to develop out a plan and focus on the resources that we need to apply to that.

I think I fully expected this panel to take a different direction in terms of the areas of improvement that were more focused around the inputs to—from the states—than just simply the kind of the required outputs that you all have to generate. One is the input around data, student information, student data, and achievement data.

We know that there are significant lags in the information that we're able to kind of collect from you and report back to you in order to be able to make it relevant for the year that you are—that you are approaching.

And the second I fully would have expected is the misalignment around knowing the funding that you will receive and in what pots and the limitations that funding often has.

We know that we go through a process, our cheerleading, of doing often one-time funds that hit your doorstep and with a vast amount of requirements around them and the timing of those funds are, I'm aware, completely out of sync with, with your, with your planning process. So, can you speak to those two aspects?

I can, 100%. And so, I will tell you, we do not rely on CDE and postmortem data when we're making decisions. So, we have benchmark testing that we do three times a year. We do that whether we're going in TK, K, first grade.

And we just have started using a testing platform for our secondaries, so 9, 10, 11, and 12, as we're rolling that out. So, we do that and we're looking at individual student growth. We do it three times a year so we can make those decisions coming through before the data is there on the dashboard.

The dashboard becomes confirmatory. But we have a lot of data points that we monitor before and that's a district level. We're also a PLC district. So, that goes all the way down into our PLCs that are using formative and summative measurements throughout the school year on those individual standards that they're doing.

So, whether that's exit tickets, whether that's end of unit assessments. So, we have a lot of internal data systems that we monitor in order to, just to your point, to not wait until the data is published and it's too late to make an adjustment on that.

And again, Superintendent talking, one of the other things that we do, all of our schools do a, we call it a summit success plan. So, they are already analyzing their growth academic data, their attendance data, their suspension data that we can get a lot easier.

So, I'll take out the state testing. All of the local data that we have, they are meeting with their guiding coalition and they're putting together plans as soon as the school year is over.

They present those in July, working to make those changes, going through and say, okay, what was working, what wasn't working, and how do we support—we go all the way down to the PLC. If there's a PLC that's struggling with that data, how do we support the PLC? How do we provide the additional?

I would argue that those are workarounds that you have innovated around.

And so, for the purpose of informing this group of legislators, both ends folks who focus on budget oversight as well, the pointed question I will ask is given the misalignment, particularly around achievement data and funding kind of security, what recommendations would you make to this body to be able to support greater alignment?

I'm going to speak to the assessment side. So, I've spent the last many years working across it. I was an Assessment Fellow for the state of California while I was working in Fresno County. So, we've done—I watched from the old STAR system to the implementation of the new data systems and the rest.

And I will say that while yes, it's a postmortem in certain ways because it is summative data, the state of California and the CDE particularly have worked very hard to allow us to access those data much, much earlier. I remember the days of waiting until October to get those officially released.

So, we work very closely with our districts to be able to provide systems as they are testing, to be able to access, use those, to help them make decisions. Now, I'm not speaking about the finance part, I understand that the fiscal part along those lines.

But as far as the assessment, it is one piece of the decision making that can happen and it has been much more effective than it has been in the past. Many of our districts—Sanger is a, is a stellar example.

There are many of our districts who don't have the robust systems, strategies, or data systems in place to be able to do that type of—and they are, they do rely on, on the high-quality assessments that do come from the state of California.

And so, we work as a county to help them with that analysis to be able and use that within the districts as they come out. Would it be greater to better to have it earlier? Of course it would. But realistically, that just doesn't happen when you're doing...level data.

So, I think that there are ways to do it, and we've seen the state, the CDE, as well as the counties, really do some of that work that's boots on the ground with districts to help them use it to make some of those decisions as early as possible because it is released sooner than it's publicly released to a district. Like, you know, along those lines. Just a thought.

Apologies.

I would agree. I appreciate you just highlighting the misalignment, or as you were describing it, as workarounds, that could be on the operational fiscal side, or it could be on the academic side. But I would agree with what was just shared. There has been an awareness and a level of improvement in timing. Right?

But what you will tend to find is depending on the development of the LEA or even the county office where we're working on structure—so, for example, in El Dorado County, and I'll speak to this both on the operational and the academic side, we aim to build 30, 60, 90 day assessments that, while we're looking at summative assessment data, we're now having to look at just more in terms of our data monitoring systems because if it's not built out at the state level, that's where we're expending some energy and time.

So, depending on where you're looking at in the state, I think you will see systems lagging or out in front in building what you're describing as workarounds, while we're also acknowledging there have been areas of improvement, even on the timeliness of academic data.

But in summary, we're having to create structures and ways to engage, to gather data and information, and ways to inform our teachers and improve classroom instruction rather than waiting till the lagging data comes out.

I think this is why context matters because that's not been my experience. I think in our system it is that's like the first I've heard that that that support is available.

And so, I think that ours, and I'm the largest district in our county, so it is, we're doing a lot of that, and it is delayed and hard. And so, I will follow up with some of you.

One last comment on that too. And the state—one of the things I do I love about the dashboard and where it's going is the difference from standard.

And I'm going to go too full not to get too far into it because Corey and I are both stats teachers at Fresno State or used to be, but cohort data versus individual student growth data. So, when I was talking about our interim assessments and how we actually measure performance.

It is based on growth data that we get using iReady or IXL. It's reliable, it's valid. We can do an assessment in the beginning of the year. We do a mid, and then we do an end of year assessment. And they have stretch growth—typical growth and stretch growth. So, then we can come through.

And especially, when you're talking about closing the achievement gap, being able to look at the cohorts and saying, okay, within this specific identified cohort on iReady, did they—what percentage met the stretch growth? Because if all you ever do is grow a student one year and they're already behind two years, you will never catch up.

And so, when I talk about the usefulness—so, I guess a recommendation, and I'd be hesitant because I don't want to mandate anything but some, some type of measurement where districts like, I know, I'm like, I don't even want to say that because we—can we go off the record? I don't want to mandate anything for anybody.

All I can tell you is that what works in Sanger Unified and for us, we share stuff too. And it's been a process of getting that growth data, getting it into the system where we're already a highly functioning system. But we didn't do it alone. We collaborate a lot.

So, we worked with Clovis Unified, who had a lot of that built in, we worked with Fresno County Office of Education to say, how do we come up with that metric? So, then, and you're right, it's just local.

It's us coming up with a workaround because it was the right thing to do if we truly want students to learn, don't give me static cohort data on the dashboard, which, you know, one year, you're at, you know, 52% proficient or advanced, the next year you go down to 50 while they're different students.

And so, that's—which is I'm going to lean into the difference from standard is that individual growth, it's not perfect, but it is, it's a little bit late, but at least it's moving the dashboard kind of in there. And then, I'll hit the second one that you talked about.

I didn't know how free we would be with the funding, but the one-time funding is extremely difficult for us. It is extremely difficult for planning, in the way—my finance, Chief Financial Officer is back there. He's shaking his head. I can't see him, but I know he's shaking his head.

But the way it comes in is also extremely difficult. Not knowing what that final, you know, the, the one-time monies are going to be to kind of backfill because we didn't put it in the Prop 98 funds, it just makes budgeting difficult.

And then, those are one-time monies, and it was the panel before that talked about, you know, we've had those one-time monies almost every year after Covid. It would be nice to say, okay, if it's going to be that substantial, then build it back into the base and let us have it, because we get a tremendous amount of pressure put on us by labor partners and rightfully so.

They're fighting for, you know, fair wages and going through. But it makes it difficult when those funds are coming in one time to then commit a ongoing percentage because we're gambling. We talked a little bit about risk calculation already.

That's a difficult one to do because if we're wrong on that, two or three years down the road, you see now, all of a sudden, you're, instead of seven, because we were, you know, kind of trying to manage that. It's hundreds. And that can be so disruptive to a system.

So, that one we didn't, I didn't realize we could get into. But yes, the onetime funding, being able to address that, getting it into the base.

So, that is really what we're dealing with instead of the individual pockets and then trusting us to say we're going to increase this, and you will know, some of it is going to go to labor. If it comes in that thing, it's going to.

But then, we're also going to do that academic, you know, we talk, it's focusing on academics because that truly is our moral imperative, so.

Can I just ask as a follow up for CFT, our labor partners, to weigh in particularly on the operational misalignment and the funding component of this?

We also I think share the same frustration that temporarily, we're always a little bit of out of sync of what we're trying to guess at for next year and what we're bringing back from the year before and trying to land on something that is sustainable and not over reliant on one time funding.

So, I think there's a lot of agreement there. There's, I think other concepts too that still, I mean, I appreciate using real time data to, to help advance the plan, but also, contextually and geographically, these things can differ a lot. We've heard from other districts where parents are struggling to utilize and educators utilize these tools.

IXL, IReady, etc. And that there are more on the way that actually completely subvert the educator in the room, the encroachment of AI, that that actually will test students and put them into categories. And the educator doesn't even know what the questions were and why students are grouped up.

And so, there's a big disconnect now then from someone who has the front row seat to maybe help educate that plan as to what the necessities are. And now, they're just kind of making sure the Wi-Fi works.

And so, there's another disconnect there and families will feel like, again, this is not our school, this is the school. So, I, yes, agree on a lot of those things. But there, again, I think needs to be some swing back to having a more comprehensive level of feedback.

So, not to get rid of the IXL, but that there is more data out there that we could have.

And again, not to put that into an accountability form and write a 75 page paper of what you heard, but I think you know when you see it and you can adjust accordingly and have proved up that you had that collaborative process, then we can have trust in that process until, again, somebody hits a big red button that says there was no notice, there was no actual real discussion.

And this plan, we didn't actually write any word of it. It's all rubber stamped stuff, you know, when that happens. So, there you go.

Can I say one more thing about the one-time funds? And I think, you know, obviously, we appreciate one-time funds, but we have a practice in San Jose Unified that we do not hire positions out of one-time funds, simply because of, you know, what has happened to us in the past.

And so, we work really hard to try and make sure that we can create the best working conditions for our teachers because working conditions are learning conditions. And I do believe that we have to do something for our workforce.

It is, I am concerned, this is the first time in a long time that I have been very worried. The credentialing programs are not—people are not going into our profession for a variety of reasons. And I think the one-time funds have some great intentions.

But there is not, at least in my area, a group to pull from or hire from and then to be laid off two years later when you cannot afford it anymore. It is a morale killer. It's detrimental to the system. We have stopped doing it probably 15 years ago. We haven't done laid off notices.

And we really work hard with our labor partners to talk about what can we do that isn't within the budget to improve those conditions. Because, you know, we want to have the best and the brightest in our system at all layers. And we've done a lot of work with labor to improve job descriptions, create more efficiency.

And I think when you have a workforce that feels trusted, respected, supported, they can do some incredible work, but I think that it is a barrier because of the funding levels.

Thank you all for those responses. I'm going to try to bring us back to what I thought, although what has been shared is really important and I really want to get into it as it relates to some of the issues you've all raised.

But I'm going to make an attempt, and maybe not as successful one of bringing us back to the panel topic, which is the fiscal and programmatic planning coherence. We're trying to pull from you some of those ideas that you all opened with your remarks about.

I guess the first one would be, and I was going to embarrass myself and ask all of us who are parents with kids in schools, when was the last time you read the LCAP?

But I know I'd be one of the first ones to it's been three years, by the way, in my case, but my son who was in elementary is now in middle, so I've got to go read that there.

But the reason I say that is because we had a hearing a couple weeks ago on community schools and the input there and the testimony there was around just how people really felt that they were heard, that that process was meaningful, that that process led to something that was tangible, that they were seeing things happening in the school sites and in school districts.

And so I guess the sort of general question for those of you who I assume probably most of you have community schools in your jurisdictions, are there lessons learned to be pulled from that process? Because I keep asking myself, as I hear more conversations around community schools, is why is the LCAP more not like that?

Or isn't that what the LCAP is supposed to be? And so there's clearly I've learned some differences in what each one of those is supposed to be.

But maybe from all of you who have done this work on the ground, what are things briefly, if I can just go through all of you, lessons learned about that process that may be valuable for us to know about, perhaps not committing you to any changes or any new mandates, but just to get a better sense of that and just go down the line, it'd be great.

Yeah, I think, and this is just a theory of mine, I don't have any research behind it, but the topic itself is where you so in our high poverty community, the community schools dealt with stuff that was immediate needs for people, mental health, basic needs. On the LCAP, it's very academic heavy.

And they're like, yes, that's great, we trust you go do the academics, but that's not our priority right now. So for our context, that's my, my theory why we had so much more success on the community schools is because they're trying to feed their families. They want clothing, they want mental health. That's where their priority is.

Not that they don't care about education, but sometimes in education we have acronyms, we have things that just, they don't understand. And so they say, yeah, just go teach my kid. We trust what you're doing.

That's just my theory as to why I think it's the topic necessarily, not necessarily the process, because we have a process that's similar. We're going to get feedback from them, but we have a difficult time getting feedback from families with regard to the academic LCAP related stuff. We do our best and we share information out.

A lesson learned we had was the very first LCAP. We said, here's how much money we're getting, supplemental concentration. What should we spend it on? And that wasn't the question to ask. What we did the second time was we said, here's what the data shows, here's where we're struggling.

What can we do to support you to help us? And then that gave us ideas about where to spend the actual money because we were the ones who had the research and all the stuff that actually held how to fix those problems. But to go to your immediate question, I think it's a different.

It's the topic that changed the outcome of that process.

Yeah, but even the way you asked the question was that seemed pretty significant. It was for us for sure. Yes.

Coming through. And I think for us, the LCAP, we really, the community schools in that process has been mirrored really from our LCAP process and what we were doing in LCAP.

And the difference, a research reason why there's more input coming at a local site or for community schools grant is the same research where a parent will be happy with their school site, but they'll be upset with the district.

And there's lots of research on that that my, you know, the district's a mess, but my school's okay, my teacher's okay. And it's that local, it's that proximity to them to the point it's there. That is their hub. And that really was their brilliance in it.

It came through as this is an effort that is specific to this local community. The input that you have is in that local community, the LCAP. And we've got a great LCAP. My LCAP coordinator is here, or that oversees it. But it is different. You're one level up.

You're talking district-wide, not that immediate need that is in my neighborhood, that is supporting my student directly. So I think that kind of site, that psychology and social dynamics, I think plays into it why there's a little bit of difference.

So I said I wanted to hear from all of you, but I think I'm going to hear a common theme. So let me ask for the next folks that speak. Certainly you can add to that or differ from that.

So then shouldn't we be investing in some way for community and parents to engage more significantly in a similar way by. By sharing how important the document is for the ultimate outcome of their students? Is there something missing in that conversation that we could do better that we don't provide you with the ability or resources to do?

Now, if I may, Assembly Chairman, and this is a rhetorical question, this is not a question back to you, but why have you not read the LCAP in your district? Because it's not something you snuggle up on a Friday night to spend reading 250 to 300 pages of an incredibly technically dense document.

So I don't think there's a problem with the collection of information from our parents. The processes and systems are there. We have really great systems to be able to go out and ask as we work with our districts across the county. There's ways to do that.

But what that feedback entails back into changing in a document that's so technical that may not be super relevant as opposed to change this at my school site and give me more access there. So I think there's. So I don't think it's really the process of collection of it.

I just think that maybe how it's actually provided back to those, to the individuals, may be a challenge for them to see where that. How do I see change happen from this year to next year? If I have to read in Fresno Unified a 500-plus page document every year it gets long.

So I think that that's where kind of the rub lies.

I think it's the process. I know when we first did our strategic plan, right before the LCAP first started, it was very aspirational. People were real the conversations with our communities. 3,000 people gave input into it, but it was really focused on the desired future state for, for the employees, for students and for parents.

And so people want to talk about the future and you see a lot of alignment across people's hopes and dreams for their child. Like I've never met a parent that's like I want my child to be naughty and not learn. And you know, they are very.

They want all the same things that, you know, we all want as parents. And so I think we structured that conversation about the default state versus the future, that that desired state, that how do we get there together and that, you know, just like when we have children, you know, I have two, they're very different.

One needs braces, the other one does not. But the outcome is, you know, straight teeth, you know. And so I think really shaping it as a conversation because I know, at least in my community, parents, they. It's not so much what you say to them, it's how you treat them, how they feel.

And really talking from an aspirational level and then hearing what their feedback and tying that feedback and the value that sits with that feedback to the plan was a very smooth transition. As the plans have gotten bigger and more complex, it's getting harder and harder. And I can see the disengagement on the part of parents.

I know when I go to my DLAC, it's not the same feeling of the future and hope that it used to be because we have to get through the requirements.

But I do think that starting from a process that really lays out people's hopes and dreams and what is actionable given the budget and what we have to accomplish, I think parents love to participate in that. But I think when you start with just the terminology and we all speak in acronyms, so it just becomes really challenging.

Just add a few points. I would agree with what has been shared. I think there's been an evolution of district leaders who have originally started aspirational, tried to engage, learned and how to improve in more meaningful engagement, and have also had to manage with greater complexity. So Lake Tahoe Unified School District.

I've watched them really grow in the manner in which they engage during the development of the LCAP and also just the manner in which they have created touch points with their community and improving and engaging students, parents and all the way across.

But again, I think the process has really been in this continuous improvement loop, both from a community schools vantage point and LCFF. But again, the themes that I'm speaking to really harmonize what already has been shared.

Mr. Chairman, I think I'll bookend too about the part of the question because maybe as an analogy, if you want, if there's something wrong with your car and you're going to the mechanic, it's a very quantitative world. They're asking, well, should I check the fuses?

Should I fill your coolant with R122 or should I do this, I don't know. I want the AC to work. That's what the customer wants. And I think the, the families there are saying, we're having a really hard time because I learned long division and I don't know what the hell this is. So how.

What's the solution there? Is that more tutoring and ELOP. Is that like, how, how do we translate then that qualitative data back into the quantitative? And I don't think that it's the job of the parent necessarily to do that, but the community will provide that information as.

And then how do we pivot and maybe try to figure out what is. I know this is sometimes a loaded term too, the flexibility to say, great, we tried for six months to hire tutors for math in this analogy, we didn't get any. Why?

Well, is it an $18 an hour job that's three hours a day, who can have that? Like, how are we.

Should we, instead of contracting ELOP out to the C3, maybe there's more that we should have had in-house, where we have our own subject matter experts that could have tried to negotiate a way to have them bring in more time?

I mean, I can go on to the what if tree all the way down to the roots, but that seems to be a better way where we can have better translations between the qualitative and quantitative kinds of discussion there.

Any other questions from the Committee? All right, thank you very much to this panel. And so, in the interest of time, I'd like to move to our third and final panel that will be focusing on solutions. How can the state support coherence from the beginning?

We will like to invite Jason Willis, Senior Policy Fellow from Wested, John Affeldt, Managing Attorney of Public Advocates, and the California Partnership for the Future of Learning. Sara Pietrowski, the chief government Relations Officer for the California Association of School Business Officials.

Dr. Debra Schade, California School Boards Association, and last but certainly not least, Linda Darling-Hammond, President of the California State Board of Education. If we can start with Mr. Willis. Welcome, everyone.

Good afternoon. Chairs Alvarez and Muratsuchi, Members of the Assembly Budget and Education Committees, thank you so much for your time here today. My name is Jason Willis. I've spent 25 years across practice, policy and academia in a variety of sectors, notably public ed. I've been in practice in urban systems.

I've worked with WestEd, helping to implement several large statewide education reforms, and now have a privilege of teaching at McGeorge. And every once in a while, I get to go to the cold East Coast. That variation in experience really gives me a unique vantage point today on this topic.

I think important in my comments I want to set a definition of coherence. Said that word I don't know at least 100 plus times, but nobody's actually said, well, what is it?

And so my offering is that coherence is when every area of activity reinforces and is reinforced by others, both improving how bureaucracy responds to pressing social issues and aligning fundamental values and purpose. So the great news is that through LCFF, California has articulated a well-aligned set of values. Equity, accountability, continuous improvement, and local control.

But signals about coherence in other fiscal and programmatic planning indicate that while there is widespread agreement on the core set of values, the machinery that's intended to reinforce them is not functioning as it should. I think we've heard quite a bit about that already today, so I know that we're going to focus on solutions.

But I do think that it is worth interrogating the problem a little bit further that we're talking about and importantly to understand the nuances that sit underneath of the challenge of what we're seeing from a fiscal and programmatic standpoint. So I wanted to offer some reinforcement on my colleague's testimony, but also offer some other insights.

We've heard a lot about the kind of proliferation of documentation and paperwork. In fact, one saying one of the panelists talking about how the increase in the LCAP has grown by 400x, my analysis would suggest that we've seen very similar rates of growth in things like just the LCAP instructions and templates alone.

I will tell you this is not by coincidence. This is intentional and structural. Not to say intentional like we meant to do it, but that is the way that our system operates. Another example that we've heard is about how individuals engage with the LCAP.

And one of the things that you can do is you can assess text and its complexity. And it turns out that in order to understand and really absorb what is happening in an LCAP, you probably need a graduate level degree.

I'll also note that the average Californian has about a seventh grade reading level, so it's likely no surprise that there's this level of disengagement. And when we go further to look at this analysis, one thing that we can understand is is that we see that lack of engagement.

If you look at trends through web searches around adoption interims, unaudited actuals LCAP adoption, it turns out that our budget adoption interim actually continues to get more interest from the public than does any of the work around LCAPs, right? So again, there is a misalignment between the things that we're trying to achieve.

The second, in the forthcoming getting down to facts 3 research compendium, we find that education administrators spend nearly 26% of their work week on compliance activities that they find burdensome. And I distinguish that because there's a lot of other stuff that they do that they actually find valuable.

Again, to reinforce one of my colleagues previous points, and if I was to kind of illustrate how much time and space that is, that's enough time and resources to provide every unduplicated count student in California with a 15 minute personal one on one check in every week for the entire school year.

Like that's the scale of resources that we're able to measure so effectively. This puts education administrators in a conflict. Do I document how to support students or do I spend time supporting them? The system has created what they call a Hobson's choice.

It's the illusion of having a free choice to choose when you really only have one option that's viable and especially given the constraints. Third, in the same study, we discover an intriguing and perspective altering behavior education administrators, when they see a compliance activity as valuable, they actually spend more time on it.

When they see it as valuable, they will spend more time on it. And that is where I think there is opportunity for people in this room for you as elected leaders in California.

Fourth, a recent report from the core working group on the statewide system of support comprising LEA leaders, county office officials and state agency representatives reached very similar conclusions. In fact, they were so strongly aligned to this that they anchored their entire set of recommendations around two principles, Reciprocal accountability and coherence. So let me be clear.

There's no single agency that you can point to and say you're the bad actor. This is a system wide issue in which we are all contributing. So let me offer just a few of my suggestions for discussion today and also state that there's no predefined playbook on this.

This has been something that we have operated with as local, state, and Federal Government for decades without a lot of attention, right? Compliance is not really the thing that people want to work on, you know, and we know that it drags, it creates drag.

In fact, one of the things that I would like to offer as a, as a solution is really thinking about this notion that our system will naturally move towards what you might call compliance drift.

It is so strong, it is so reinforcing an adult's behavior that we will naturally move in that direction, even if we are the most aspirational about any new law that we pass in the Capitol.

I could ask you're at seven minutes. We asked for five for each so you can try to streamline your Chair.

The last thing that I'll mention is really thinking about how to move away from this compliance mentality and in particular thinking about the legislative and Executive branches own processes and systems.

Start by interrogating and revising the very processes by which laws are written so that they are more fully integrated across disciplines and therefore reflect the reality that practitioners and communities live by on a day to day basis. And with that, thanks Chair for that note. I will wrap up.

Thank you very much Mr. Affeldt.

Good afternoon, Chair Mersucci and Assembly Members. John Affel, Director of Education Equity at Public Advocates, and Chair Mersucci, I want to thank you for your services, Chair. We appreciated your continued commitment to education equity and our students. Thank you. We support the elimination of duplicative requirements, effective reporting, and increasing efficiencies.

That's a worthy endeavor, but Public Advocates and California Partnership for the Future of Learning Network, and many of our community partners urge you to resist the automatic blind call to shorten, streamline, reduce administrative burden without really thinking about what's at stake here.

With the passage of LCFF, the state accomplished a number of momentous shifts in equitable spending in multiple measures, accountability and continuous improvement in focusing on closing achievement gaps, in district flexibility, and in transparency and community engagement. And of these last two shift, it's critical to recall the grand bargain that was reached before we casually undermine them.

Districts were accorded much greater flexibility to make instructional and spending decisions and relieved of a huge administrative burden in exchange for historic levels of effective community engagement and transparency. In those decisions, over 40 state categorical programs were eliminated. The LEAs were relieved thereby of a slew of bureaucratic compliance mandates.

Those mandates required hours of accounting, tracking, reporting and General bean counting and limited district spending to the mostly narrow categorical confines. In fact, the LCAP is the fulcrum on which districts and the state ensure all of those momentous shifts are happening and it admittedly is carrying a lot of water.

Transparency, engagement, accountability for increasing and improving services, accountability for closing achievement gaps, accountability for hitting the district or the state's priorities. Which one of those should be streamlined? None. I submit. Instead, we need to do a better job with the LCAP and with the LCFF architecture to promote effective, comprehensive, and coherent strategic planning and gap closing.

Four suggestions 1. Improve transparency, accessibility and shared decision making let's move beyond the so last century PDF to interactive web based LCAPs with engaging graphics and click throughs that start with a high level district story and progress on to reflection of goals and actions and expenditures and on down to impact and intersection with what's happening at the school level.

Use AI to translate district budget documents and other district plans into the LCAP architecture and significantly reduce human time on tasks for what we estimate to be a mere 10 to 15 million dollars, which is decimal dust out of a 140 billion dollar K12 education budget.

A new web based interactive LCAP could be designed and implemented and isn't the fulcrum on which LCFF rests worth that two structure LCAP development and Adoption as a school a school year long conversation, not just something presented at two meetings in June with little time for community to review and influence the lcap.

That's what happens in a lot of districts. You only get the first review of the LCAP in in June and this two weeks later there's another meeting where adoption happens. There are best practices out there where districts start sharing as soon as April with their draft LCAPs.

Public Advocates issued a report on the 10 year anniversary of LCFF two years ago. We have many constructive suggestions on how to improve engagement and timing in that respect.

Three with new and better technologies as discussed, we actually could do the comprehensive and coherent strategic planning LCFF and the LCAP call for, such as connecting and cohering the LCAP to school level plans for student achievement and community school implementation plans. To answer Assemblymember Alvarez's prior question, why are community school plans being engaged and less so lcaps?

My answer would be because they are about the school site. They are about shared decision making. They are about braiding funds. Parents care about what's happening at their school site. We should be thinking how we can effectively cohere the district level LCAP conversation with what's happening at school sites and SPSA plans.

And I think if we have better technology and use it, we could do that. Also bring into the LCAP the critical new transformative investments that we've seen since passage in 2013. Community schools spending, the after school ELOP programming, the universal TK.

These things should be reflected, integrated and cohered and we think could be done effectively and four Continue and sharpen state investments in effective community engagement. We have helped to earn the State's investment of $113 million in the community Engagement initiative that has been very helpful in developing some best practices in community engagement.

But there's still money there that could be used for critical research in what aren't we doing that we could be doing to improve engagement? What sort of human centered design practices could we use and how could we invest in improving district staff capacity to do engagement well and community capacity to do engagement well?

You're at seven and a half minutes. Okay, to conclude, we ended up with so many categoricals over time because districts overused their flexibility too often neglecting the neediest students and Sacramento intervened with categoricals.

I think most districts genuinely want to make LCFF and LCAP engagement work as promised, but if we don't, the pendulum will swing back to a new and greater era of Sacramento State directives. So we think it's time to update LCFF and the LCAP and get this right. Thank you.

Thank you. Next Ms. Pietrowski.

Good afternoon, Chair Muratsuchi and Members of the Committee, I'm Sarah Pietrowski.

Here today on behalf of the California Association of School Business Officials, or CASBO for short, we represent over 30,000 dedicated California school practitioners who work to ensure our public schools have the financial and operational foundation necessary to deliver high-quality education and support services for each and every one of California's students.

I want to begin by thanking the Committee for their focus on this issue. Being on the front lines of district operations, CASBO Members see firsthand how fragmented funding and planning requirements can lead to incoherence and inadvertently pull focus away from our shared primary goal, student success.

The path to coherence requires tapping into local expertise. California's TK12 system is grounded in bold, admirable principles equity, flexibility, transparency, accountability, and local control. Local control is so foundational to our system that it provides the basis and the name for the state's funding system.

This principle offers a clear path toward building a coherent system for student success and that path begins with working closely on policy development with those closest to our students.

As you have all experienced, the individuals working in our local educational agencies have invaluable insights into what it takes to create a workable system in partnership with their parents, staff, students and community. Not a day goes by that I do not learn from my colleagues in local educational agencies about what coherence for student success requires.

They know that achieving student success needs daily attention and effort to design coherent programs that work for all students. We recommend continuing to tap into their expert into the expertise of our local school leaders. By inviting those who implement these policies to help shape them, we ensure that our state level vision aligns with local reality.

We have heard valuable testimony this afternoon from local leaders across the state with some common themes. These common themes can be distilled into five key areas that we can all focus on in our shared goal for a coherent system for student success. Those five key areas are: One, ongoing, stable funding. Coherence is impossible without fiscal predictability.

We must ensure that funding structures allow for long term strategic planning rather than year to year survival and dependence on one-time funding streams. Two, sustained focus over time, coherence is created through consistent goals and sustained effort, rather than a cycle of rapidly shifting mandates and new programs. This consistency will lead to real change more quickly.

Three, clarity as a driver, the rules of the road, such as guidance, FAQs, and audit guidance requirements, should be finalized, and the necessary supports provided before the work is expected to begin at the local level. And because each LEA is unique, we must ensure that they receive the specific level of support needed to succeed.

Four, meaningful and strategic planning that leverages community input. Planning requirements should be designed to provide real meaning for improving student opportunities and outcomes, and be especially cognizant of the limited staff resources in our small local educational agencies. And finally, we should have a modern technological solution that simplify work and lessens the human burden.

We should invest in our data systems to bring our technology into the 21st century. In conclusion, the local control funding formula promised coherence for our schools. Today we see that vision being obscured by disconnected, shifting, and sometimes contradictory requirements and fiscal uncertainty. CASBO and its members want to help refocus our collective energy on the students we serve.

We ask that you recommit to the principles of local control by ensuring that our funding is stable, our focus is sustained, and planning requirements are meaningful, aligned, community driven and most importantly, leading to improved student outcomes. Thank you and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you, Dr. Schade.

Oh, you should. Let's get your mic turn on.

I'll restart real quick.

There we go.

Thank you Chair Muratsuchi and Alvarez and Members of the Assembly Education Committee and Assembly Budget Subcommitee Number three, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Debra Schade, President of the California School Board association and a 24 year board Member in the Solana Beach School District in northern San Diego County.

In both roles, I have seen firsthand how state planning and reporting requirements affect local educational agencies. Let me be clear. Well designed reports that provide genuine insight into operations and student outcomes are critical to accountability and continuous improvement.

But over time, the volume, the scope, the complexity of these mandated plans and reports have grown to the point that they often undermine their original purpose. The fiscal cost of compliance statewide likely reaches into the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. When staff, time, consultants, and administrative systems are considered, the opportunity cost is even greater.

Every hour spent duplicating data or navigating overlapping requirements is an hour not spent supporting our teachers, improving instruction, serving our students. Recognizing this, CSBA published a report titled Drowning in Documentation, which offers a roadmap toward more effective and manageable reporting. Our recommendations focus on making accountability clearer, more efficient, and certainly more meaningful.

First, streamline the Local Control and Accountability Plan, which has become so lengthy and complex and it no longer communicates clearly with parents or the public about district performance and priorities. For small school districts in particular, the LCAP consumes an outside share of limited staff time.

The state should take a deliberate approach to reducing its size and complexity while preserving its core accountability functions. Second, eliminate redundancies. Districts are frequently required to report the same or similar information across multiple platforms.

The School Accountability Report Card, the California Dashboard, the LCAP, the School Plan for Student Achievement, School safety plans, and other reports often overlap significantly. While each was created with good intentions, together they create duplication that drains resources without improving transparency. Third, calibrate the volume, the timing, the frequency of required plans and reports.

What is intended as a single plan with a final report often evolves into quarterly or annual updates. Once programs are implemented, the state should consider setting clear time limits and reasonable reporting frequencies and evaluate how new requirements align with existing timelines to avoid overburding staff. Fourth, increase support for local education agencies

Where reporting is warranted, the state can invest in efficient tools and systems that streamline data collection and reduce administrative burdens. In some cases, reporting could be shifted or consolidated at the county office or the state level, particularly when information is already being collected elsewhere.

Fifth, before creating new planning or reporting mandates, policymakers should examine whether existing tools such as the Dashboard or the LCAP can serve the intended purpose.

The Legislature and Administration should collaborate with statewide education organizations to identify opportunities to reduce and consolidate information gathering efforts and leverage existing data systems to meet policy and fiscal goals with minimal added burden.

And finally, consider the impact on small school districts with very limited staff capacity that must comply with the same planning and reporting requirements as the largest districts in our state. Administrator to teacher ratio requirements often limit their ability to dedicate staff to compliance.

At the same time, access to grant funding is frequently conditioned with on time consuming application, forcing small districts to choose between compliance and pursuing critical resources for students. Designing requirements with these realities in mind, supporting county offices and assisting small school district Increasing base funding and revisiting ratio requirements would significantly improve coherence and capacity.

In addition to our report, CSBA has co sponsored legislation to address this issue. SB 1315 in 2024, SB 374 in 2025 by Senator Archuleta required the California Department of Education to develop recommendations on which planning and reporting requirements can be eliminated, combined or shortened.

Although the report did not meet the intent or the requirement of the legislation, the Department has been provided more more time to resubmit the report and we urge the Legislature to ensure the intent and purpose of SB 1315 is upheld.

We are currently co sponsoring HR 87 with Chair Muratsuchi and AB 2008 with Dr. Patel alongside CASPO, ACSA and the small School Districts association to encourage scrutiny of new mandates to ensure they truly advance accountability, transparency and student achievement.

Taken together, these recommendations and legislative efforts can create more efficient, coherent system one that prioritizing meaningful reporting while protecting the time and resources schools need to improve student outcomes. And I do want to say that you should have all gotten the short version.

We do have a long version that you can access online as well and and we can make that link available if you need it. So thank you for your time.

Thank you. And last but not least, Professor President Linda Darling-Hammond. Thank you.

Thank you very much. My name is Linda Darling-Hammond. I'd like to start by thanking Chair Muratsuchi and the Members of the Committee for really taking up this very important topic. The current system in California was built piece by piece over the last 100 years, so we're talking about more recent years.

But I do want to call attention to some areas in which we have a geological dig of policies and governance structures that do create instability and incoherence, some of which we then see the results of in the more recent efforts.

County Superintendent Ed Manansala named just a few of the big challenges our schools are encountering and, and ask for permission to focus. And I think that it really is up to the state to figure out what conditions will allow that kind of focus. You know, we applaud districts when they're able to achieve it.

But there are a number of things, as Jason Willis pointed out, this is a system wide issue.

I won't dwell on these issues here, all of these issues here today, but I do want to just point to a few underlying sources of systemic instability and incoherence that we have inherited in our system and that we have to contend with. And we do need to give these things some long term attention.

They may not be achievable within this current session. And then I'll go on to the more immediate problems. But perhaps the most fragmented system of governance in the country is here in California. We have the State Board of Education, separately from the Department of Education, separately from the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence.

The California Commission from Teacher Credentialing is a separate agency. Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team. 58 county offices. A higher education system includes the community colleges, the CSU and the UC each as individual segments that do not have a relationship to each other or, or to the K12 system.

So we are managing and those of us who are engaged in this work try to manage as collaboratively as possible all of this fragmentation, but it does create fragment buffeting of regulations from different sectors that are inconsistent and create the need for many workarounds and it impacts our students.

So just to say that this is something that's part of our landscape, but it does need attention. The need for one time funding came up a lot.

We have a need for one time funding in part because we have such an unstable revenue base and you can't spend all the money you might get in a given year in the base if you don't know what's going to happen the next year.

So at some point we'll need to look at revenue sources if we don't want to, you know, continuously have the need for one time funding strategies that produce categorical programs. And then they often come and go. As several people have noted, you get some good programs. There was worry from the superintendent of Sanger about community schools.

Good work has been done. Does it just go away? So this is another area that we need to attend to. Finally, budget timing, as Sarah Petroski just noted, and I think you may have noted that as well, that the budgeting with annual budgeting of the school Budgets, they're not confirmed until July.

Districts have to decide on layoffs in March, they have to do three year planning. The timing creates instability, it creates a certain kind of incoherence.

And then finally we have a funding system based on average daily attendance, which is getting less and less predictable with climate events and with immigration raids and other things that are outside the control of districts.

But they have to budget based on membership and then they need to cut the budget based on what might have happened in the world. So big issues, we can't deal with them today. But we do need to be aware that those are systemic questions that the state does at some point need to address.

So we have an extraordinarily unstable state school system, more so than almost any other state in the country, in my view. That is then also dealing with all the issues that you've heard over the course of the day. We've heard a lot about the problems and they've been well described.

I'm just going to list a few of the concrete steps that the governor's office, the Legislature and the state board have taken and are taking and might take to support greater coherence and create more stability for school improvement. And I should mention the Department of Education in that list as well.

One is that we have tried to be more intentional in using one time funding because it is something we can't avoid. So we've been creating programs that have long spending tails like seven to 10 years for the community schools program. The Legislature aided in that by adding extension grants to the current proposals.

And in the governor's budget proposal for this year is the integration of the successful program now into ongoing funding. But when we try to, rather than giving a one or two year tail, give a five or seven year tail, we can integrate one time funding into the system.

There is, I think in the community School Partnership program the development of local capacity for coherence. It's been amazing to see what a lot of the schools have been able to accomplish in it's a system that involves the county offices, the LEAs networks of schools in the 2,500 schools that are serving hundreds of thousands of students.

We see in the data that's coming out the positive outcomes for achievement, for chronic absenteeism and so on. What they're really doing is bringing coherence to an incoherent system. They're organizing and integrating those programs. That's a benefit to us in the coherence quest.

And we ought to figure out how to continue to do that and to enable the program if it does grow, as is proposed, to be closer to two thirds of our schools to blend and braid their funds even more seamlessly. A third thing that we can do is align the applications and funding systems for related programs.

Last year, the Legislature authorized the design of an integrated support to teacher support programs, including student teaching stipends and teacher residencies, through a grants management system that's being designed by the Kern County Superintendent of Schools in partnership with the Teacher Credentialing Commission. We could be thinking about this in other areas as well.

How do we put together more streamlined and unified both application systems and reporting systems? The LCFF document, as has been noted, could be made more streamlined without losing its goals, both in the way that it is required and then the way in which the template that requires responses is designed.

So I think there are a number of things that could be done in that regard. We could work towards greater coordination across our currently disconnected sectors.

We do have a new coordinating council, thanks to the Legislature, the California Education Interagency Council, which will try to bring together TK-12 with higher education, with our workforce development system, to do some planning, to be purposeful, to think about the alignment that could result from that. We could be more strategic in those ways as well.

And we are working to rationalize our accountability system and our statewide system of support. We've added a lot of elements to the state accountability system that have created incoherence among the growing number of requirements. The LCAP is a symptom of that, but there's actually an underlying set of additional requirements that is also reflected in the LCAP.

So the State Board has been tasked with rethinking the current system of differentiated assistance to address its misalignment with the other elements of the state system of support and to allow it to become a stronger tool for school improvement.

One piece of that would be putting it on the same three year cycle as the LCAP so that as you're planning and being strategic, you're also taking account of what the improvements need to be. There are a few other things we can do and I'll tick them off very quickly.

We can consider ways to continue to streamline the education system by doing cohering the Department of Education and the State Board, as most states do.

The board is developing a North Star to guide policy with a portrait of a learner and a graduate, which will include some agreed upon aspirations for what learners should know and be able to do.

And then we can use that as a way to evaluate and guide our work so that what we do in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability is more coherent. We can, as many have noted, create more efficient processes for grant management.

And some of that has been identified both in the reports that were mentioned from the CSBA and others, and as CDE is evaluating how to do at the moment.

This could include an online unified application and reporting process for many programs and a single place where you have a core reporting structure online, where much of that redundant information is asked for once.

And then you add the paragraphs that may be needed to explain what is going on in a particular program doing that one time, keeping it online. Right now, these things often sit in PDFs on somebody's desk that are not really even accessible for later use. So I think that's a high priority.

We could consciously plan for integration in program design and regulation, create a process by which the Legislature, the Department, the State Board could engage in more planful coordination of each new program and its reporting and auditing requirements and how it could be enabled to fit into existing programs.

Not just what should be integrated, but what could be eliminated and what could be folded in from past policies rather than just layering on. And then, of course, recognizing the need for flexibility in implementing the policies. Finally, we can continue to remove unnecessary barriers to innovation that hold schools back from responding effectively to current needs.

We are in a rapidly changing economy. We're in a rapidly changing environment for everything, including our careers. We've got schools that are trying to redesign to meet the moment, but we have a geological dig of 100 years of regulations that are holding the old model in place.