The accountability report card was born in California when Prop. 98 passed. The legal premise: The voters would give schools guaranteed funding of 40 percent of the state's tax receipts in return for school leaders sharing with citizens the facts about how schools were doing. This trade-off—funding guarantees in return for transparency—is well worth remembering as we enter the third downturn of this decade.
For the next academic year, most schools and districts are facing cuts in the range of $800 per student. This is the most dramatic one-year decline anyone can remember. Will SARCs be showing the impact of these cuts? Unlikely. Will they show changes in the financial condition of the school or district? No. Will they reveal year-to-year trends in funding at the school or district level for the last six or eight years? No. Will they show the change in compensation of teachers, principals, or superintendents? No.
Should this stop you from communicating the facts that you want your public to see? Of course not. The SARC is not a prison for information. It was never intended to limit you from communicating more. It simply defines the irreducible minimum amount of information you must share with your staff, parents, and community. If you want your public to be more aware of the impact of cuts on their kids' schools, simply open up the SARC and put those facts and your interpretation wherever you like.
DISTRICTS INVESTING IN SCHOOL REPORTS OUTSIDE THE SARC
Don't stop there. You can also publish those facts and your comments outside the SARC. Some districts are leading the way with brief annual reports about their schools, entirely separate from the SARC. Oakland and San Francisco have one-page reports that highlight what matters to them. Superintendent Ramon Cortines of Los Angeles USD created a report card and defended it against many critics. When he took office, he criticized the shameful way that districts report on dropouts and graduates and made a pledge to do better. Superintendent Cortines keeps his promises, and this report card, now in its second year, includes not just the facts that are easy to report. It includes the opinions of parents and staff, gathered through a survey. The results aren't always pretty, but they are now out there in the light of day. This gives the leadership of Los Angeles USD a way to get in front of their own story, to own it as they tell it their way.
WHY WOULD SUPERINTENDENTS WANT A MORE INFORMED PUBLIC AND STAFF?
There are three reasons many superintendents want the public and their staff to be better informed of the district's financial vital signs, as well as each school's academic vital signs.
The first reason that districts need to communicate their fiscal condition is to insure that the public is hearing their story directly from the district. Parents are reading newspaper reports about the dire state of district funding and have questions. Is the district going out of business? Will they have enough money to keep my kids' teachers in the classroom for the whole year? Will my children be in classes with 40 students? Parents with questions like these may pull their kids from school altogether and enroll them elsewhere. Each family that secedes from the district with three children in tow reduces the district's per-ADA funding by roughly $25,000. Every superintendent who wants to moderate the impact of these cuts is going to be using every resource to calm parents and give them reasons to trust their kids to the care of principals and teachers. Every superintendent is going to be reassuring parents that she can, indeed, run the district on a shoestring if necessary. Reassurance comes in many forms. The easiest reassurance comes from facts. Let parents see for themselves.
The second reason is to show proof of financial responsibility and actions. Superintendents may want to turn to voters to approve a parcel tax this November. This is, no doubt, a bold decision. Asking citizens to tax themselves in a downturn requires trust and courage. Trust is built through candid communication, including reports about the district's financial condition. Passing a parcel tax is not a faith-based initiative. Voters want evidence—ten-year histories of district revenues and expenses; full disclosure of teacher compensation from salary to benefits; the cost of district contribution to retired teachers' pension and health benefits. That evidence is best conveyed in direct written communication to the community and parents, such as the superintendent's newsletter, on the district Web site, in flyers mailed home with report cards, and yes, in SARCs.
Finally, in one-third of the districts in California, labor and management are facing lapsing contract negotiations. Collective bargaining in a downturn is tough work. Management is likely to need all the help it can get. In order to keep any district on an even financial footing, management will be looking for unusual concessions: salary cuts across the board, suspension of step-and-column raises, furlough days, and reductions in the school year. This will get heated, as both sides bring their facts and opinions to the table. If management has already published their own facts in the public record, less heat and more light is likely to result. Your SARCs already contain a partial picture of actual site-by-site teacher gross salary. Why not show the full picture, and include the value of benefits?
COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE
Annual reporting can be a numbing experience, but the pain of the current year should cut through whatever numbing your team suffers. It is time to remember why you are communicating. You need your public's support, especially in hard times. It no longer comes to you automatically, without effort. The days of "Our Miss Brooks" are long gone, along with "Ozzie and Harriet." It is the era of choice. Parents have choices and they exercise them. Whether it's parochial school or charter school, your district or the district where the parent works, kids need to go to school. If they are to enroll in your schools, this is the time to communicate the reasons why they should choose you.
REFERENCES
Los Angeles USD School Report Cards—Cahuenga Elementary School
Background about Los Angeles USD School Report Cards
Oakland USD school reports—Bret Harte Middle School Scorecard
"City Tries New Tactic to Convert Catholic Schools to Charter Schools," New York Times, April 22, 2009
The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. Archive of research papers.