California's education reform plan: A big puddle of snake oil?

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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger just signed a school reform bill that would help his state win $700 million from the federal Race to the Top program. According to a San Francisco Chronicle report today, Stanford University education professor emeritus Mike Kirst finds big similarities between President George W. Bush's education reform program No Child Left Behind and President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program.

A brief overview from the article on NCLB vs. the new program:

Here is brief comparison of how California's new Race to the Top plan compares with existing federal education requirements:

Academic standards

-- No Child Left Behind lets states establish their own academic standards. California's are tough, while some other states' standards are easier.

-- California's Race to the Top plan sets up a commission to develop new academic standards that would one day include not-yet-proposed national standards.

Qualified teachers

-- Under No Child Left Behind, schools may hire only credentialed teachers or those working toward a credential.

-- The state's new plan also lets schools evaluate teachers - and principals - using an array of data, including students' test scores.

School choice

-- Under No Child Left Behind, parents may withdraw their children from persistently low-scoring schools and enroll them, at district expense, at a higher-scoring school within the district.

-- California's new plan lets parents withdraw children from any of the 1,000 lowest-scoring schools, and apply for admission to any other public school in the state.

School improvement

-- No Child Left Behind requires that rising percentages of students at every school score at grade level in English and math, with 100 percent of students proficient by 2014. Along the way, schools that fail to achieve this are subject to corrective action, ranging from extra help from tutors and consultants, to replacing staff or closing the school.

-- Under the new plan, school districts will be required to overhaul a school if half of the school's parents - or half of its future parents - demand it.

Also, for higher education, the governor proposed a constitutional amendment banning the state from spending more on prisons than higher ed. Associated Press reports: "The governor's plan would guarantee that the UC and CSU receive at least 10 percent of the general fund budget, while the state's prisons would get no more than 7 percent." To save money, Gov. Schwarzenegger plans on privatizing prison services. However, courtesy of a Media Matters article, I found a 2001 Federal Bureau of Prisons study, "Growth and Quality of U.S. Private Prisons: Evidence from a National Survey", that found that private prisons had a higher escape rate than federal ones.

Uh-oh.