Teach Plus California supports Governor Newsom’s Budget Proposals to Reinforce Efforts to Build an Excellent and Diverse Education Workforce and Realize the Promise of Educational Equity in LCFF, and Urges State Leaders to Elevate Positive School Climate in the State Budget.

May 17, 2023

Dear Budget Committee Chairs:

As classroom teachers and Teach Plus Policy Fellows, we are writing to share our insights about opportunities we see in this year’s budget to build and sustain an excellent, empowered and diverse teaching force in California and to lay the groundwork for transformational shifts in the climate, culture and instruction in our schools.

First of all, we are very appreciative that Governor Newsom continues to prioritize TK-12 education and in particular prioritizing addressing historic educational inequities, even as the state faces a budget shortfall. We appreciate the governor’s attempt to enable school districts to follow through on implementing the recent investments to address historic inequities and the impact of the pandemic.

Ensuring the Promise of LCFF

For the last ten years, California leaders have initiated myriad policy changes in an effort to advance educational equity. With a focus on local control and continuous improvement, the state has invested billions of dollars in new initiatives. These efforts rely on intentional, effective, and reflective implementation to truly improve opportunities for students. While the success of these initiatives relies heavily on local leaders, we believe that state leaders must also establish the necessary infrastructure to support the success of these gap-closing efforts. We believe that there are some key elements of the Governor’s proposal that make progress toward that end. Specifically, the proposed changes to the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) accountability system and a statewide system of support take critical steps toward ensuring that the LCFF fulfills the promise that was made ten years ago to address historic inequities and focus resources on helping California’s most marginalized students. In particular, we support the additional funding for county offices of education (COEs) to provide differentiated assistance.  We also support the addition of focus goals rooted in Dashboard data. But as we have seen LEAs continue to pursue the same actions over and over despite a lack of progress in the outcomes for targeted students, we recommend that you utilize the January Budget language, which requires focus goal actions to be new or modified.

In addition to these updates to the LCAP that provide essential guidance to local leaders as they lead local engagement and improvement processes, there is also an opportunity to ensure local leaders are prioritizing positive school climate in local improvement efforts. Our hope is that as local leaders are developing focus goals to address inequitable outcomes for different student groups, they will be able to address drivers of those outcomes that are rooted in their school climate and culture. When those within school communities feel safe, valued, cared for, respected, and engaged, learning increases. Additionally, school climate strongly influences educator recruitment, well-being and retention.  The state can help ensure that local education leaders prioritize this data and use it effectively to meet the needs of their students, teachers, and community. We recommend that the Legislature invest in building out the state data system on school climate surveys to enable LEAs to set meaningful goals related to improving school climate. The first step to do that is to identify standardized items for local educational agencies to use as part of the school climate survey for pupils and to support evaluating the feasibility of developing standardized items for surveys of parents, teachers, and other school staff. The 2021-22 Education Trailer Bill included $150,000 to begin that process. That amount proved inadequate. Teach Plus recommends that the state invest $500,000 to move this work forward. We believe that this is a critical step that the state must take, to allow for statewide comparable school climate data and local goals and actions focused on addressing how school culture and climate affects our students and educators.

We are also pleased to see an ongoing investment in the Local Control and Accountability Plan eTemplate and Query Tool and additional refinements to the Educator Assignment Monitoring and reporting system.

Building and Sustaining an Excellent, Empowered and Diverse Teaching Force in California

We are pleased to see the Governor’s proposals that refine and expand previous programs to foster a sustainable, diverse educator workforce. We support the proposals in the May Revise that help address the barriers into the profession that have disproportionately affected candidates of color. In particular, we support Governor Newsom’s proposals to:

• Update the Teacher and School Counselor Residency Grant Program to increase the allowable salaries or stipends amount for residents to $40,000, expand the use of funds for compensation packages, and extend the service requirement deadline.
• Increase the investment in the Golden State Teacher Grant Program with $6 million of federal funds for candidates enrolled in special education preparation programs, as well as maintaining the focus of the grants on candidates who work at a priority school or a California preschool program.
• Direct the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to develop a teacher candidate transcript review process, determining how it can ensure that transcripts will be reviewed for all candidates requiring determinations of basic skills or subject matter competence in order to complete their credentialing requirements.

We also support the Governor’s proposals that will help not only support and retain diverse and effective educators, but also help ensure positive, culturally affirming school climate and and instruction, including:

• Investing $7 million for LEAs to implement best practices in Restorative Justice;
  Reinvesting $3 million in Professional Development and Leadership Training for education professionals related to anti-bias education and the creation of inclusive and equitable schools; and
  Reinvesting $20 million in the Bilingual Teacher Professional Development Program.

We appreciate Governor Newsom’s continued prioritization of TK-12 education in the 2023-24 budget and his proposals to reinforce that existing programs truly advance the needs of California students who have been underserved by our system for far too long. We support the governor’s proposals to continue to prioritize education and educational equity and we believe with these modest investments, we can more effectively lay the foundation for the transformation that our students need. If you have any questions about our recommendations, please do not hesitate to contact us. Our names and email addresses are below.

Sincerely,