Nordic Success.

"International: The Lottery of Life"
The Economist, November 21, 2012
available at http://tinyurl.com/bvp45uj

From time to time I take on blogging topics that are bigger than a single post. A friend asked me a couple of months ago "where do you think California is headed?" That's definitely one such topic, and this post is the start of an effort to answer that question.

When thinking about California's future, it's not unusual to draw comparisons concerning the recent experiences of other countries. In such conversations, the "Nordic" countries of Europe -- Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark -- usually get discussed. I don't think these are ultimately the most relevant international comparisons, but they're not a bad place to start.

The Economist recently ranked Switzerland as the best place to be born in the world in 2013. Their survey of the country in 2004 pointed out why -- for a small, landlocked country of 7 million, the Swiss have done well.  The country is known for democracy, fairness, stability, quality, meticulousness, punctuality, thrift, efficiency, openness, reliability (whether a watch or a bank), good hotels, and great chocolate.

Indeed, all the Nordic countries do well in the Economist's rankings. The Economist ranked countries in the world in 2012 on competitiveness, and, surprise of surprises, Sweden is the top of the list, followed by the four other Nordics.

"Lessons: The Secret of Their Success"

The Economist, February 2, 2013 

available at http://tinyurl.com/mybjbkk 

"Why has this remote, thinly populated region, with its freezing winters and expanses of wilderness, proved so successful?" asked the editors?

There was one factor in these countries' success that stood out, at least to me, and which is relevant to the future of California.  The Economist noted that a key feature in the success of each of these countries is the quality of their governments:

"[T]he Nordic talent for government is sui generis. Nordic government arose from a combination of difficult geography and benign history. All the Nordic countries have small populations, which means that members of the ruling elites have to get on with each other. Their monarchs lived in relatively modest places and their barons had to strike bargains with independent-minded peasants and seafarers... [t]hey embraced liberalism early. Sweden guaranteed freedom of the press in 1766, and from the 1840s onwards it abolished preference for aristocrats in handing out top government jobs and created a meritocratic and corruption-free civil service ..."

Like the Nordics, California has had a combination of difficult geography and benign history.  California has, for practical purposes, not been a theatre of war since statehood in 1850, and the State was initially cut off from the rest of the United States, a problem addressed in degrees by the  Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal, the Interstates, and the advent of cheap consumer air travel.  California's internal geography presents its own challenges, still not resolved.  Further, population growth was, is, and will continue to be constrained by water shortages, notwithstanding the construction of massive dams and aqueducts.

Sather Tower, UC Berkeley, with view of San Francisco.

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/mxqg3mf

California's history of "big projects," I (and a lot of other people) would argue, led to the creation of what the State calls its "Master Plan" for education.  Starting in 1960, the State essentially decided that cheap (indeed, oftentimes free) higher education would be available to everyone. The effect of the Master Plan has been profound -- I have no problem agreeing with the assertion that California's economic dynamism results from the implementation of the Master Plan. Indeed, the Master Plan (despite its faults) has been a sterling example of the success of California's government.

California has also ended up with a liberalism that, at first glance, appears similar to if not the same as that of the Nordics.  I don't generally think it's necessary to pull examples to support that argument, but here are a couple of strong data points. Yet this is where the comparison with the Nordics starts to break down.  The Economist argues that the experiences of the Nordics had an important cultural impact, which makes them different from many other countries to this day:

 "The combination of geography and history has provided Nordic governments with two powerful resources: trust in strangers and belief in individual rights ... Economists say that high levels of trust result in lower transaction costs—there is no need to resort to American-style lawsuits or Italian-style quid-pro-quo deals in order to get things done. But its virtues go beyond that. Trust means that high-quality people join the civil service. Citizens pay their taxes and play by the rules. Government decisions are widely accepted." 

This does not describe the popular perception of California. There are few people that would agree that California, in the last 40 years, has been a place high in trust in strangers.  The State, in general, has very high quality civil servants (per the Economist, "it has never paid to bet against a state with as many inventive people as California"), but the voters of the State nonetheless undertook an effort to write tax avoidance into law. And California became an example of the most litigious State in America.

To try to understand how California enjoys a similar economic dynamism to the Nordics, but not their cultural advantages, it seems to make some sense to look for California's foil.  That country would be a place every bit as technically advanced as California, that has similar cultural advantages to the Nordics, but at the same time, would be a country that would (tragically) lack economic dynamism.  Sadly, there is such a place in the world.  Since 1990, that country has been Japan.

And that is a post for another day.

Sonoma County's Pyrrhic Victory on Redevelopment.

The Sacramento County Superior Court has issued its tentative ruling concerning whether the Highway 12 and Roseland Village redevelopment projects are (were?) enforceable obligations, and whether the County's "Successor" Agency is entitled to have ~$2.2 million returned.

I think it'd be easy to conclude that the County won, because the tentative ruling is that the projects are enforceable obligations.  But it doesn't take 11 pages to say someone won and someone lost if it's clear.

Charles Dickens had a
thought or two about
legal Pyrrhic Victories.

As you'd expect, the County gets its bad news at the end of the tentative ruling, because the Court found that the County has not met its burden to show that it is entitled to reimbursement. Further, the "administrative expenses" that the County claimed didn't pass muster.

The Court does note that the County may have self-help remedies it could try to use to obtain the approximately $2.2 million redistributed to the "taxing entities." However, I think the Court is well aware that the "taxing entities" here are not faceless. Most of the $2.2 million the County seeks would merely be money moved from one County pocket to another -- with one important exception. When redevelopment ended, 34% of the dollars at issue for the Highway 12 project went to Sonoma Valley's schools -- in this case, probably about $400,000 (about another $400,000 went to schools in Roseland due to the Roseland Village project).

There are any number of ways to try to conceal that basic point, but the "bonus" money funding redevelopment was always coming from somewhere, and school budgets are that place, given Sonoma Valley's basic aid status.

The idea that the Court is going to order Sonoma Valley's schools to pay a $400,000 "reimbursement" to the County of Sonoma is ridiculous. As a practical matter, the Court is just not going to do that, if only due to the consistent failure of the State to meet its Prop. 98 constitutional funding requirements for years on end. Which means the County's suit was pretty much pointless, if the tentative ruling (you can read it here and the final ruling will be here) stands.

34 Cents of Your Property Tax Dollar Goes To Our Schools.

So, this post is about increasing the resources available to Sonoma's public schools. There's background here and here. Due to Sonoma Valley's basic aid status, local property tax revenue controls our school funding, and 34 cents of every new property tax dollar goes to our schools.

The Lodge at Sonoma

image available at http://tinyurl.com/mg2dku9 

This post is a long one, and it's in four parts.  The first part explains a bit of the history of school finance since 1971.  The second explains the impact of redevelopment.  The third part describes how property tax revenues can increase.  The fourth gives an example of a specific project, The Lodge At Sonoma -- for were the Lodge to be built today, the school district would get nearly $100,000 each year in additional revenue.

Because of the dramatic impact of property taxes on local schools, this issue should come up in every planning decision made by the City of Sonoma. 

---

"Education is a unique influence on a child's development as a citizen and his [or her] participation in political and community life ... '[t]he pivotal position of education to success in American society and its essential role in opening up to the individual the central experiences of our culture lend it an importance that is undeniable' ... [e]ducation is the lifeline of both the individual and society." Serrano v. Priest (1971), 5 Cal.3d 584 (Serrano I)

California State Supreme Court Chambers.

image available at http://tinyurl.com/k3ewj4k

In 1971, by far, the major source of school revenue was the local real property tax. The amount of revenue a district could raise depended largely on its tax base -- on the assessed valuation of real property within its borders. Then the California State Supreme Court ruled in Serrano v. Priest (1971), 5 Cal.3d 584 (Serrano I), finding that the funding scheme invidiously discriminated against the poor because it made the quality of a child's education a function of the wealth of his parents and neighbors.

The California Legislature responded by establishing a formula that calculates a ceiling on how much local property tax revenue each district should receive. If a K-12 district's local property tax revenue is not sufficient to meet this "revenue limit," the state provides additional funds up to that level. Today, we call most of the ~1,000 school districts in California "revenue limit" districts, because this formula applies to them, and their funding is determined by a (heavily modified) variant of the system created in response to Serrano I. 

The courts ultimately approved the State's plan, which continued to allow a relatively small number of districts to retain a higher level of funding, based on well-above-average local property taxes.  The rub was that if there was other State aid those districts were to receive, that aid would be reduced, dollar for dollar, by the amount that local property taxes exceeded the revenue limit.  These districts became known as "basic aid" districts, a term that comes from the State Constitutional requirement that all students receive a minimum level of state aid, defined as $120 per pupil, regardless of how much local property tax revenue their district receives.

Thus, we ended up with a naming system whereby the "revenue limit" districts are poorer than the "basic aid" districts.  Which is a wonderfully delightful piece of counterintuitive nomenclature.

The initial number of basic aid districts was small -- places like Pasadena and Beverly Hills. In the intervening decades, the number of basic aid districts has continued to increase, to the point now where nearly 15% of all districts are basic aid, and some of those districts are quite large indeed.  After forty years of trying to equalize school funding, places like Sonoma find themselves right back where they were before Serrano I -- that they are entirely dependent on local property tax revenue -- and for such districts, the exception has swallowed the rule.

---

For nearly a generation, local property taxes were essentially irrelevant to school funding in Sonoma Valley.  This was not merely due to the consequences of Serrano I.  Redevelopment also played its part.

As California's Legislative Analyst points out, prior to the dissolution of redevelopment agencies in 2011, most of the growth in property taxes from redevelopment project areas went to the redevelopment agency, rather than other local governments like school districts. In Sonoma, this meant that any significant commercial development, most of which took place inside city limits, almost always saw the increased property tax revenue redirected exclusively to the City of Sonoma, rather than SVUSD.

I don't think that any local leaders were intending that the consequence of this policy would be that the School District would thereby qualify for additional State assistance as a revenue limit district, but that was the actual consequence.

Along came ABX1 26 in 2011, which dissolved all redevelopment agencies. Under the dissolution process, the property tax revenue that formerly went to redevelopment agencies is first used to pay off redevelopment debts and obligations, and the remainder is distributed to local governments, and the school districts receive their share.

When redevelopment went "boom," this was thus a stark change.  It's difficult to point out just how significant the change was.  Indeed, many individuals who are quite knowledgeable regarding California's school system had no idea at all how much property tax was being diverted from the schools through the use of redevelopment, and City officials themselves hotly disputed that money was being redirected away from schools at all -- a point that is now nearly universally recognized to have been incorrect.

---

I've touched on the importance of increased funding for schools in previous posts here and here.  Because local property tax revenue controls school funding for Sonoma Valley due to the district's basic aid status, more revenue depends on increasing local property tax revenue.

How can that happen?  California's Legislative Analyst, as usual, has a nice explanation.  There are three mechanisms -- recently sold properties, newly improved (or newly built) properties, and then Proposition 8 "decline in value" properties.

• When a property sells, its assessed value resets to the purchase price. This represents additional value that is added to the tax base because the sale price of the property is often much higher than its previous assessed value. 
• Newly built property and property improvements add new value to the county's tax base when new construction takes place or improvements are made — mainly additions, remodels, and facility expansions — because structures are assessed at market value the year that they are built. 
• Finally, Proposition 8 "decline in value" properties contribute significantly to growth or decline in a county's tax base because their assessed values may increase or decrease dramatically in any year. A particularly large impact on assessed valuation tends to occur in years when a large number of these properties transfer from Proposition 13 assessment to reduced assessment (due to falling real estate prices) and vice versa in a rising market.

What do these changes in revenue look like, and how can someone determine how much property tax revenue will change?  The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice overview of calculating the numbers for a home purchase, and the rules generally hold up for commercial properties, too.  If you pick a typical Sonoma Valley tax revenue area (TRA), like, say, 006-032 (which covers part of the City of Sonoma), the rate's easily determinable by checking Sonoma County's table here. 

There's one piece of data that I've not been able to find, though, and that's the portion allocated to each entity of the property tax collected.  If a reader happens to know where Sonoma County's put that data, please forgive this bleg and let me know. 

However, the number (ratio) is not too difficult to determine for a particular entity for a particular year.  For Sonoma Valley Unified, the numerator is the property tax received for a particular year (in 2012-13, that appears to have been $25,176,110).  The denominator is the total assessed value of all real property in the school district ($7,176,806,784) multiplied by the rate (1.108800%). 31.44% of each property tax dollar thus ends up going to SVUSD.

"Allocation of Ad Valorem Property Tax Revenue"
"Understanding California's Property Taxes"
California Legislative Analyst
available at http://tinyurl.com/ljkr59b

That's not the end of the story.  As the Legislative Analyst's graph on the right shows, about 40% of property tax revenue is allocated to K-14 (not K-12) education; about 8% of every property tax dollar heads to the Santa Rosa Junior College.

Further, there's another 8% marked as "redevelopment," which is ending.  The school district will end up with about 3/9ths of that money.

When redevelopment is wrapped up, the school district will therefore receive ~34% of each property tax dollar.

---

So how much money is at issue with a particular project?  Well, consider, for a moment, The Lodge At Sonoma. It's a good example, because the development is unitary -- it's on one piece of land for tax purposes -- and because its development was relatively recent (opening in 2000, IIRC).

The land that the Lodge sits on is valued at $7.2 million for property tax purposes, and the improvements (the structures) are valued at ~$19.2 million.  The total assessment is thus $26,387,300.   Knowing that the effective tax rate for the parcel is 1.108800%, we just multiply those two numbers and get $292,582.38 per year.  The official "bill" is $381,108.52, but that includes non-property tax water charges, among other things.

City of Sonoma GIS, APN 128-261-009
"The Lodge at Sonoma"
1325 Broadway, Sonoma CA
available at http://tinyurl.com/nxfz9rk  

So how much does the school district get? You'd think $91,987.90 if you just applied the rules I posted above. You'd be completely incorrect, but at least you'd have followed instructions properly.

The reason you'd be wrong is due to redevelopment.  As Bob Klose reported in the Press Democrat on June 14, 1998, the Lodge was built in part with money from the City of Sonoma's Redevelopment Agency. Thus, the entire increase in property tax went to the City of Sonoma.  The school district's share was limited to the assessed value of the parcel prior to the project.  I've looked at the records, and it looks like the assessed value of the parcel before the construction of the Lodge was $425,000.  The assessed value may have been higher than that due to some increase over time under Prop. 13, so call it $600,000 as an estimate.  The school district's share of the property tax collected is ~$2,091.64.

It is probably therefore unsurprising that people have rarely brought up the school district budget at planning commission meetings in the City of Sonoma.  But they probably should. Because were the Lodge to be built today, the school district would get approximately $100,000 each year.  That's equivalent to an Impact 100 donation every twelve months.

---

A final point: because Preserving Sonoma is under discussion in town, I can certainly see how someone like Darius Anderson would try to use a post like this to his advantage. This post, though, is about more than the debate about any single project.  It's about a factor that's just not being weighed at all in the planning process in Sonoma. 

Because commercial development (and, increasingly, tourist-oriented development) is concentrated in the City of Sonoma, the impact on our schools of planning decisions in the long run is profound indeed. To paraphrase Serrano I, education is a unique influence on a child's development as a citizen and her or his participation in political and community life. The pivotal position of education to success in American society and its essential role in opening up to the individual the central experiences of our culture lend it an importance that is undeniable -- education is the lifeline of both the individual and society. Failing to consider education in the planning process is a disservice not least to our students, but to our entire Valley.  

Brown, Budgets, Prisons, and Contempt.

The enduring wild card in California's budget is the situation in California's prisons.  This one came up here in January and back in November. The failure of the Brown administration to regain control of California prison's mental health services (which came up in April twice) led most people to believe that the State's plan to deal with prison overcrowding would similarly fail when reviewed by the courts.

Thursday, the three judge panel supervising the State's reduction of prison overcrowding duly rejected the State's plan to deal with the problem. Jerry Brown narrowly avoided being held in contempt of court, but the panel made clear that, failure of the State to comply with the latest order "shall constitute an act of contempt."

Michael Bien

Image available at http://tinyurl.com/mmegjnc

It's interesting to contrast this case with the decisions that are expected in Perry v. Hollingsworth and Windsor v. United States (prior blog posts on that topic are here and here) on the 24th 26th of June. The consequences of the prison overcrowding litigation will easily be as far reaching as the Prop. 8 cases, and Michael Bien deserves a lot of credit for doggedly pursuing the issues for years.

The result in the prison overcrowding case also provides a nice explanation for an oddity that was in the back of my mind last week, when the Economist noted (with amazement) that Jerry Brown 2.0's conservatism was having unexpected consequences in dealing with California's budget:

"POLITICIANS seldom show the caution required of fiscal analysts. Revenue projections are too rosy, deficit targets are blithely missed and rash promises are lavished on voters. Yet last month California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, an independent fiscal monitor, rebuked the governor, Jerry Brown, for his 'unduly pessimistic' account of the state’s
economy. Mr Brown had predicted a $1.2 billion surplus for the coming fiscal year; the LAO put the figure at over $4.6 billion. This week the state’s leaders found themselves in the unusual position of agreeing a budget that did not include whopping cuts."

However, it makes perfect sense for the Governor to have been pessimistic -- the estimated amount necessary to address overcrowding by housing some prisoners out of state for 2013 is $1.9 billion.  The Governor and his advisors had to have known this kind of a ruling was coming, and that the difference between budgeted and projected revenues would probably need to be spent pursuant to the court order on reducing prison overcrowding ...

Soccer, And Astronauts, in Sonoma County.

One topic I return to from time to time is the unusual importance of soccer in Sonoma County.  For instance, back in December I noted that Sonoma County produces as many female Division I soccer players each year as you would expect of a city the size of Houston, Texas. 

The importance of producing exceptional female athletes is an easy thing to underestimate.  There are a number of national institutions where women are under-represented, and where such individuals can have a disproportionately positive impact. To name just a few of those institutions, I'd think, say, of the United States Naval Academy, the United States Marine Corps, the Stanford University Department of Mechanical Engineering, and NASA as candidates for the short list. 

The best, most recent example of how those soccer players can shake things up is Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35, a 1995 graduate of Rancho Cotate High School (Rohnert Park).  At the United States Naval Academy, she was a Trident Scholar, and was one of the most decorated women's soccer players in Patriot League history, serving as Navy's soccer team captain in her senior year, while being named Patriot League Defensive Player of the Year two-consecutive seasons by the league's coaches. In addition to her Patriot League accolades, she earned NSCAA All-Mid-Atlantic Region honors four-straight seasons.  Navy's premier defender, Aunapu's primary responsibility was to mark the opposition's top scorer. She anchored the Mids' defensive unit which set a school record with 14 shutouts in 1998 and was third in the nation for shutouts per game (0.67). The Navy defense was ranked eighth in the nation that season with its 0.56 goals-against average and allowed a league-low 12 goals, and Nicole Aunapu Mann was subsequently named to the Patriot League All-Decade Women's Soccer Team.

After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1999, she joined the United States Marine Corps as an F/A-18 pilot, and subsequently attended Stanford University, where she received her master's degree in mechanical engineering.  A test pilot for the Corps at Pauxtent, now-Major Nicole Aunapu Mann was selected today to serve as an astronaut by NASA.

Did soccer have anything to do with her success?  Here's her thoughts on the matter, from the Naval Academy Newsletter (2011, Issue 1, page 5):

"'Playing sports at the Academy forced you into situations where you had to learn leadership skills', Mann said. 'Getting ready to play a game equals the same kind of feeling I get before I fly. You're strapped into a 40,000-pound jet, headed for a mission over Iraq or Afghanistan. You're nervous and excited and it's game time. It's time to perform. Then, you take off and you're playing in the moment.'"

It bears repeating that you'd expect there to be a women's soccer magnet -- the equivalent of, say, Monongahela, Pennsylvania or Odessa, Texas.  The thing you might not expect (but probably should) would be the impact those women would have in their post-athletic careers ...

The LCFF Imperative.

For those of you referred by Lorna Sheridan's article on the Sonoma Index-Tribune's web site, the piece she references is located here.

Moving right along, one of the ongoing issues this year in California is the acronym "LCFF," which stands for "Local Control Funding Formula." Jerry Brown wanted to devote nearly all new tax revenue to schools, some of it to repay shortages in legally mandated levels of aid from past years and some to shift more money to districts with large numbers of poor and/or English-learner students. To quote Dan Walters, "[Brown] contends [it is] a moral imperative to help those disadvantaged students – Latino and black kids, mostly – catch up in academic achievement."

EdSource (a great web site) reported today that it appears there will be a compromise as part of the deadline to pass the California budget this week.

I've blogged about LCFF previously in February here and back in January here. As expected, wealthy suburban districts demanded changes (San Ramon Valley is the poster child in EdSource's article), and duly received them.  However, the change is still pretty good news.

"Complete District by District Breakdown"

Compromise Plan versus Pre-Recession (2007-08) 

California Department of Finance

available at http://tinyurl.com/kwkw9b4.

On the right is how Sonoma Valley Unified will fare under the plan. The table demonstrates exactly how important the concentration grant in the LCFF is; the threshold for the grant is 55%. For example. Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified, whose funding at the moment is roughly similar to SVUSD, and which is listed immediately below SVUSD on the chart, falls below the threshold, at 51%.  Sonoma Valley clears the hurdle, at 62%.

SVUSD will therefore receive a year-on-year increase in funding of $1,183 per student; Cotati-Rohnert Park's will be only $266. The difference will continue as overall funding rises through 2019-2020.  The total increase in the next fiscal year for SVUSD, under the plan anticipated to be passed this week, will amount to $4,826,640. 

Thank-you, Governor Brown.

Similar Schools, eh?

I took a look at the Sonoma County Office of Education ("SCOE") press release regarding "Similar Schools" rankings in Sonoma County yesterday. For Sonoma Valley parents reading the headline, these numbers feed a low level panic about the perceived "decline" of the Sonoma Valley public schools.  I've blogged about this before, looking at the Base API scores, but this uses the second measure, and SCOE touts the standard as more persuasive for year-to-year measures.

Since this is an issue that I am (intensely!) interested in, I decided to take a thorough look.

The Similar Schools ranking is based on a detailed assessment protocol that is explained here. I could delve into the mechanics of the standard, but for a blog post, or for working purposes, the important takeaway from the Similar Schools ranking is that it all comes down to a number, the SCI, or "School Characteristics Index."  The state lines these numbers up, from highest to lowest, and then takes the 100 schools closest to any given school -- whatever 100 come closest on the SCI measure -- and that's the comparison pool for the Similar Schools ranking.

OK, obviously, the entire Similar Schools ranking depends upon the SCI producing good results.  You'd think that the SCI for any given year, for a school, would be a really easy piece of data to get at.

You'd be wrong.

Getting at the SCI measures of California's schools requires you to take a look at this page, which has the raw data for the California Department of Education's calculations of all these scores.  The data itself is either in a text file (have fun trying to work with that, it's not even comma delimited, it's fixed width, seriously, who made that decision?) or a DBF.  What is DBF, you say? Why, that's dBase, for all you old Ashton-Tate fans in the audience.  Yeah, a database product where the vendor went out of business in 1991. 

Thankfully, the computer software industry is full of people who, on their own time, work on software tools and provide them for free to the community, to deal with problems precisely like this one.  For a DBF file, I was able to grab Apache OpenOffice, whose open source product can read DBF files.

Of course, that's only part of the problem.  The minute you've actually got the DBF file working, you're immediately confronted with 22,000+ rows of data, each with 150 different fields of data, and let me tell you, the fields themselves don't exactly have the most descriptive names ever.  Does anyone know what "CWM2_91" is just by looking at it? Of course not. You need this translation table.

SELECT "SNAME", "SCI", "DNAME", "CNAME",
"ST_RANK", "VALID", "SIM_RANK", "API12B", "STYPE"
FROM "apiB12db" WHERE "STYPE" = 'H' ORDER BY "SCI" DESC

database available at http://tinyurl.com/k96x83z.

So after all this searching, and working with a custom SQL query, I ended up with the query in the diagram on the right, which gave me all of the High Schools in California, ordered by their SCI.  As a human being, I am not going to work with the 100 schools closest to Sonoma Valley high -- I cut it down to the 20 closest.  There's a good reason for that, of course -- I am not going to merely rely on the SCI, but I am going to examine those schools that it says are similar, to see if the real world characteristics of those schools allow the SCI results to be validated by common sense. The table of the 20 schools most similar to Sonoma Valley High, according to SCI, is on the right.

Yeah, you know where this is going.

Ethnicity of Students, Hispanic or Latino
Petaluma High, Sonoma Valley High Schools
"Education Statistics of California,"
Google Public Data Explorer

available at http://tinyurl.com/mnw8fyr.

First, I want to point out that the only North Bay school that the SCI says is similar to Sonoma Valley High is Petaluma High.  I've blogged about which Marin-Napa-Sonoma high schools are most similar to Sonoma Valley High before; the ones that are actually similar based on population are Vintage, Napa High, Piner, Windsor, Healdsburg, and Cloverdale. There's a really simple reason I exclude Petaluma High from that list, and the graph of why is on the right.  Petaluma High's student population is an ethnic monoculture -- there's no way you could do dual immersion there.  Petaluma High, like Sonoma Charter, is really more about the past of California education, not its future.

That's only the first problem with the "similar schools" to Sonoma Valley High.  Looking closer, the SCI puts four schools with under 200 students in the 20 closest to Sonoma Valley High.  These schools are all either "10" or "1" on the similar school ranking -- they're at the extremes. I tossed them all because schools that small are just obviously different from a high school with ~1,000 students.  The SCI index creators should have tossed these schools too -- when the SCI was created in 1999, it deliberately excluded all "small schools" and it drew the cutoff at 100 students.  There really weren't that many schools between 100-200 students in those days, but the proliferation of customized charters in the subsequent ~15 years has changed that (and I bet the SCI, if they redid it today, would exclude them).

Ethnicity of Students, Hispanic or Latino
Selected Schools
"Education Statistics of California,"
Google Public Data Explorer

available at http://tinyurl.com/mwjnvzf.

The schools I really want to see the SCI expose for me are those schools that, on a statewide basis, are similar to Vintage, Windsor, Healdsburg, and the other Marin-Napa-Sonoma schools like Sonoma Valley High.  So I went and used the Google Public Data Explorer to show me the graph of the changing population at each of these 20 schools since 1999.  That graph is on the right.

Three of the schools have a similar pattern (a change from an ethnic monoculture to diversity) similar to Sonoma Valley, but are "9's" on the similar schools ranking.  They are Paloma Valley High, Eleanor Roosevelt High (what a great name for a high school!), and Etiwanda High. Each has nearly 2,000 students, so they're nearly twice the size of Sonoma Valley High (other end of the spectrum from the small-fry problem), but I still think intuitively that their experiences are relevant to Sonoma Valley ... a 1,000 student school and an 1,800 student school seem more like each other than either does to a 150 student high school.

So I took a look at these three high schools, and there are three shared characteristics that jump out right away.

First, the schools are new.  Eleanor Roosevelt High opened in 2007.  Etiwanda, the oldest, is still a relatively young school, as it opened in 1983. All thus benefited from something we now know as Mello-Roos bonds, which are a funding device (really, an end run) used for schools to avoid the harsh consequences of Prop. 13.  So there's a maintenance advantage versus an established school, like Sonoma Valley High.    

Second, two of the schools are in Riverside County, and the other's in San Bernardino. They are in very, very rapidly growing communities.  The job growth in Rancho Cucamonga (Etiwanda) in the last decade has been 32.79%.  In Menifee (Paloma Valley) it's been 133.15%.  In Eastvale (Roosevelt) it's been 1,406.79%.  There aren't specific figures for Sonoma Valley, but in the surrounding communities the job growth has been 6.15% (Napa), 1.73% (Petaluma) and a whopping 0.67% (Novato).  So these are very rapidly growing communities, which really helps, of course, with the tax base.

Third, the character of the residents is different, too.  Sonoma Valley's economy is driven by agriculture, tourism, and services.  It's essentially a rural community.  San Bernardino and Riverside are exurbs, where the growth is being driven by the greater Los Angeles economy, as people seek a better ratio between income and home price.  The average wages in these cities show that -- for example, in Eastvale, the median family income is $112,145 -- that's on par with some of the most select communities in Marin County -- while the median family income in, say, Santa Rosa, by contrast, is $76,083.

This really does tell the story of why these schools, although the SCI might call them "similar," are anything but.

That brings me to a larger point, though.  It looks like there's two ways to "move the needle" on the Similar Schools Ranking.  The first is to implement the kind of growth policies that we see in Riverside and San Bernardino -- the kind of policies that we see in places like Houston, Texas, which I've blogged about previously.  When you have a rocking economy, it can really help the school system. The second way, what I think of as the Healdsburg model, is that you can simply spend more per student, whether through taxes, bonds, or otherwise, if your voters will give you the necessary support at the ballot box.

One of the interesting things about Sonoma, is that we're in the middle of a debate that touches on this issue.  The supporters of Preserving Sonoma would (I'm just guessing now, but it's a good guess) find the development policies of, oh, Rancho Cucamonga, say, alien at best.  That's not to argue that we can't match the performance of those cities without adopting, wholesale, the policies of Orange County Republicans, but it requires us to recognize a basic unity between the different parts of our local government -- that the growth of the tax base (which is really regulated and controlled by cities and the counties) has a very significant impact on the school system. While the cities and counties may be able to provide for themselves (barely) while holding down growth, that policy can prove fatal for a local school district absent an increase in taxes.

There was a nice opportunity provided by the Press Democrat to illustrate that issue earlier this week. On the same day, the paper reported that Windsor's Town Government's finances are recovering, while simultaneously reporting that the Windsor School District is in the worst financial shape in Sonoma County, such that the State believes it could very well run out of money in the next 24 months.

The story is capped off by the final quote of the article about the Town budget, from Heather Ippoliti, the administrative services director.  In discussing the local economy, she notes that “[w]e’re starting to see signs of a recovery. But a full recovery will be slow and take many years.” While the Town's funding may have stabilized, the Town has been insulated from the true impacts of the economic crisis Windsor's gone through, which are ultimately being felt by the school district.  Windsor, as a community, is confronted by the fact that either the City can get growth moving, or the residents can vote to increase the burden on themselves as taxpayers, but that there are no obvious solutions to the problem short of those two choices.

But my final point is really about the credibility of the "Similar Schools Ranking."  Getting at the data was certainly not easy; it's not put in a publicly accessible form on the web, and you need knowledge of both twenty-year-old database software, and how to create SQL queries, to do any real analysis with it. Once the black box is pulled apart, it's pretty obvious that what the California Department of Education is considering "similar" is nothing like what common sense would dictate.  When measured against the area schools that actually are similar, like Vintage, Windsor, Healdsburg, Napa High, Piner, and Cloverdale, Sonoma Valley High (and SVUSD), given the resources we as a community have provided them, are doing pretty darn well.