Congrats to the world famous Real Bay Area high school! Let’s see where they placed this year in the US News and World report rankings!

Let’s look and celebrate the ones in the Top 20!

Uh… Santa Cruz at 19? Well, that’s sort of Bay Area, but not Real Bay Area.

Let’s look and celebrate the ones in the Top 40!

What the heck? Where are they? Maybe we should filter by state. Let’s look at California only:

There we go. Now, sure, you can say that these are 76th, 134th, and 169th ranked nationally… but they are in the Top 10 in California, which means… drumroll… that they are Top 10 in the world!

Let’s take a quick look at our arch nemesis, New York:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! These must all be lies!

Ok, let’s take a look at our other arch nemesis, New Jersey.

Hah. So it turns out those famous, good, New Jersey schools were just a lie. (This is pretty strange…)

What puts a house in rather than out of the Real Bay Area (RBA)?  A damned good school district.  Now watch some meddlesome busybodies try and ruin everything!

Consolidate Santa Clara County school districts to save millions, grand jury recommends

By Sharon Noguchi

Posted: 07/04/2010 07:15:28 PM PDT
Updated: 07/04/2010 10:24:07 PM PDT

When budgets are tight, businesses often consolidate — so why not school districts?

After all, Santa Clara County school districts are a hodgepodge of large and tiny agencies, each with its own administration, and with century-old boundaries that randomly join disparate regions while dividing other communities. Some superintendents oversee 25,000 students, while others supervise only a few hundred.

So the Santa Clara County civil grand jury has recommended unifying and consolidating the county’s 31 school districts, which it projects could save $51 million annually.

District officials dispute the estimated savings, and question the benefits. In past decades, similar suggestion have been shunned as politically implausible. Why should this time be any different? For one, schools are facing unprecedented cuts to their budgets now.

The grand jury released two reports on June 24th: "Achieving School District Efficiency through Consolidation" and "Looking at Policies Our Schools Use to Find and Place Employees."  These thrilling potboilers describe that "while the school districts in Santa Clara County are doing well in all areas, there are redundant administrative functions that can be made more cost effective through school district  consolidation."  I tell you, I couldn’t put it down!

By merging elementary and high school districts that share attendance areas, the county’s 31 distinct school districts could be reduced to 16, unless the county actually has 34 districts (per 2008-09 Grand Jury report “Who Really Benefits from Education Dollars? (Hint: It’s Not the Students)“).  That’s the fun of an official report; you just never know what alternate facts could emerge!  Last year’s report had six findings and suggested actions, and it’s number 6 that must have led to this year’s threat to school administrators:

Finding 6

The operation of 34 K–12 school districts and four (4) community college districts
creates excessively high management and administrative costs. Five K-12 school
districts have excessively high Superintendent costs per student which is reflective of
the district’s having only one or two schools.

Recommendation 6

A consolidation of districts should be considered to reduce the numbers and costs of
Superintendents/Chancellors, Boards of Trustees, administrative staff and overhead.

One piece of good news for administrators and board members is the grand jury didn’t recommend all 31 school districts be rolled up into one countywide nightmare like Los Angeles Unified.  Instead, they selected feeder elementary districts that could be merged with high school districts, creating "Unified School Districts" that serve the same boundaries.  These are the four "lucky" high school districts and corresponding K-8 districts singled out:

• Campbell Union HSD with Burbank SD, Cambrian SD, Campbell USD, Moreland USD and Union ESD
• Fremont Union HSD with Cupertino USD and Sunnyvale SD
• Los Gatos-Saratoga HSD with Lakeside JSD, Loma Prieta JSD, Los Gatos USD and Saratoga USD
• Mountain View-Los Altos HSD with Los Altos SD and Mountain View-Whisman SD

The civil grand jury’s reasoning is that unified school districts save money and can operate more efficiently than smaller districts with just a few schools.  The grand jury holds up these unified districts in Santa Clara County to support the concept: Gilroy, Morgan Hill, Milpitas, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Santa Clara.  And their gold standard of the benefits of school district unification is last year’s formation of Twin Rivers Unified.  In Sacramento.  Puh-leeeeeze!

Are they seriously suggesting that RBA cities such as Saratoga, Cupertino and Los Altos should emulate mediocrities such as Milpitas and Morgan Hill?  Seriously?  The only RBA city on the Unified list is Palo Alto, and they’re so Special none of the regular rules apply anyway.

Can you see parents who paid the RBA premium to live in Los Gatos wanting to share a school district with the hillbillies of Lakeside?  Or the families who paid the big bucks to live south of Fremont Avenue now finding themselves sharing a school district with North Sunnyvalers?  Wouldn’t every Los Altan sooner pull their kids out of public school than consort with those troublemakers from Latham Street?

Obviously I’m not going to comment about the proposed Campbell Unified District, because they aren’t in the RBA so nobody much cares.  The Grand Jury also wants to merge four East San Jose school districts into two union districts, and even fewer burbed readers would ask. (Berryessa + Orchard, Alum Rock + Mt. Pleasant, if you insist.  You’re welcome.)  All 21 school districts suggested for consolidation have 90 days to respond to the civil grand jury, and expect the replies to be even more thrilling reading.

Now, some of these recommendations make sense.  There is only one school in Lakeside, Luther Burbank and Orchard School Districts.  One-school districts are clearly wasteful, and the Grand Jury has already noted criminal behavior in Burbank SD.  But some of the proposed unified districts will be much, much larger than others.  The proposed Mountain View-Los Altos Unified would have 21 schools, and the proposed Los Gatos-Saratoga Unified, 14.  But both proposed Campbell and Fremont Unifieds would have 41 schools each, which isn’t much smaller than San Jose Unified’s 43.  All the other current Unified Districts (which the Grand Jury report specifies as an ideal model) have between 14-24 schools. 

41 schools?  Are they serious?  Does this fit the reasoning behind "Five K-12 school districts have excessively high Superintendent costs per student which is reflective of the district’s having only one or two schools"?  Cupertino USD, a K-8 district, already has 25 schools, which is more than all but one existing SC County unified district.  This is not a school district with excessively high costs, the complaint of the 2009 report.  This is a district that manages to produce perfect API test scores despite below-average funding.  But someone took the idea of merging feeder schools into high school districts and ran all the way to Twin Rivers Unified with it.

At a certain point, large school districts lose the ability to respond to parental concerns, and nobody could call a 41 school unified district anything but large.  Effective and responsive school districts are exactly what parents expect when they spend the big bucks to buy in the RBA.  So recognize this plan for what it is: a recipe to remove Cupertino from the RBA forever. 

It’s clearly a plot by Palo Alto real estate agents.

And now, may I present a guest post.  Take it away, madhaus.  Why thanks, madhaus, don’t mind if I do.

Sacramento Bee: Education Coalition Sues California Over School Funding

California’s system for funding public schools is irrational, unstable and in need of overhaul, a lawsuit filed Thursday asserts, and prevents 6 million students from receiving the education they are entitled to under the state Constitution.

The lawsuit, filed by a coalition of students, parents and education groups against the governor and the state, puts California on a growing list of states slapped with what lawyers call "adequacy" suits

Thirty-three states have faced adequacy lawsuits, in which plaintiffs argue that a state does not give schools enough money to achieve that state’s academic standards. In most cases, experts said, the states have lost in court and been forced to come up with more funds and a new way of paying for schools.

Now that’s the American way.  Something’s broken?  Sue ‘em.  The lead plaintiff in this case, Robles-Wong v. California, is a junior at Alameda High School.  Yay, Bay Area, We’re #1!  We’re #1!  And despite a press conference in Sacramento, the suit itself was filed in Alameda County.

A spokesman for the group noted California had some of the highest educational standards in the country, with some of the lowest funding rates.  Yeah, take that, New Jersey!  We do more with less!  We’re the best at writing standards, and the best at failing to meet them!  Boo-yah!

The article also described the method of determining each California school district’s unique funding as “a complicated funding formula.”  This is akin to noting that the General Theory of Relativity is “kind of tough,” as there are only four people in the entire world who understand how the state school funding algorithm actually works.  One of them has an unlisted phone, one refused to respond to repeated requests for comment, and the other two were driven insane by the process of mastering it.

Okay, assuming you were actually reading any of this, by now you’re saying, madhaus, you are just making that part up.  Am not.  See?

San Jose Mercury News: Schools, PTA sue California over education funding

For most of California’s roughly 1,000 school districts, the state budget crisis has caused per-student funding to fall for two years. But the complaint reaches beyond current cutbacks. For decades, California schools have budgeted according to a complicated funding mechanism determined by multiple laws and court rulings and resulting in unpredictable and different per-student amounts for each district. For example, in 2008-09, Evergreen Elementary School District in San Jose received $7,787 per student, but Palo Alto Unified received $14,214.

The suit contends that the state has neglected to do what the constitution requires: prioritize school funding.

See?  See?  “Complicated funding <miscellaneous noun>.”  Told you so.

Can’t get enough of this?  Read the lawsuit (PDF, 59 pages) by clicking here.

Their Future is Now:  Support Our Children and Protect Our Schools

State budget cuts are undermining the Cupertino Union School District’s quality of education. The School Board must now make cuts to core
instructional programs. Among the actions planned, our District will lose up to 115 teachers in Kindergarten through 8th grade across the
district. (This is equivalent to losing 4 schools!) Students in every grade level at every school will be impacted.

The time to act is now! With a $375 contribution per family – about $2 per day of instruction – we can save our excellent school programs
together!

The campaign is ready to accept donations for the District-wide fundraising effort.http://www.savecupertinoschools.org/

1.  We need a large number of donations by this week (Wednesday evening) so that the fund raising team can get others
vested in the district to donate on Thursday morning in preparation for the Official March 16 Kickoff press conference.

2.   In addition this week, you can take advantage of the installment plan so that your donation can be divided by 2 monthly payments. Donation is tax
deductible. Sponsored by CEEF, 501(c)3 Feel free to share the informationwith other parents and friends.

Thanks to an anonymous Burbed reader for sending this in!

To all you cynics who claim that Prop 13 needs to be repealed to save our schools – take a look at this and weep!

We don’t need to raise taxes at all! Parents are more than willing to tax themselves directly to pay for the education of their children. This enables more of our precious tax dollars to go support the true hope for the future: retiring baby boomers.

This is win win. Property taxes stay the same for retiring baby boomers who pay 1/2 to 1/10 the property tax of their neighbors. Parents with their annoying children who are destroying the state with their greedy need for services pay for schools. Schools improve. House prices go up for everyone – including the baby boomers who pay 1/2 to 1/10 the property tax of their neighbors.

It’s clear – the next step is to cut school funding even further, and rebate residents based on how long they have owned their house. And keep those kids off the lawns!

It’s search engine Thursday!

The other day, I noticed a dramatic uptick in lottery related searches

ohlone mandarin school lottery 

"mountain view" schools lottery elementary 2010 

cupertino school district are all students enrolled?

cupertino union school district lottery date 2010 

Wow. That’s a lot of lottery searches!

I touched upon this last week, and I think that it’s now time to discuss this.

So what are these searches all about? Now, you might guess that this is because Bay Area Schools are so packed because voters in the late 1970’s decided to close many of them to save money because children aren’t the future… or that some districts are dramatically better than others voters in the late 1970’s decided to defund schools believing that children aren’t the future so districts rely on direct parental donations…

Or, these searches could be about how enrolling your child into a Bay Area school is like buying a winning lottery ticket! You’re guaranteed to get back a huge reward on your investment – even if you need to bring $2000-$10,000 in cash to class. Your child will go to Stanford, and then booom start the next Google.

I think it’s the latter… not the former. But that’s just my guess.

It’s search engine Thursday!

Usually an actual search query is featured.However, lately there has so many “cupertino union school district lottery date” and “cusd lottery” (what’s that all about?) in the logs that it wasn’t particularly interesting. So, let’s examine a different potential query: is new york too expensive compared to california

The answer is a resounding yes. New York is absolutely too expensive compared to California… the Bay Area should definitely be more expensive. We’ve got sushi, world class universities, El Camino Real – what do they have? Jersey Shore?

Now let’s give credit where credit is due – we are certainly getting there. Out in the suburbs, we’re beating them soundly. Take this for example:

1.47 acre house – with access to Wheatley Schools

versus this:

Duc & Elliot built good houses in Cupertino

Oh yeah. Beaten.

More importantly, I think we’re even making progress against Doomedhattan with its Doomed Bankers.

For example, some of you may recall that the “smallest apartment in the city” at 175 sqft sold for an astounding $150,000. At the time, it made all the headlines!

Do the math people. Is it any wonder why all those Bankers failed and our VC succeeded? $150,000/175 is a mere $857 per square foot. Palo Alto… even Cupertino can beat that on most days!

Great work everyone! Don’t worry… 2010 is the year we’ll beat Manhattan and take the reign of “most expensive”! It’s our destiny!

It’s Search Engine Thursday!

Recently someone found this site by searching for: When do Cupertino school district office start residency investigation

What a peculiar question!

My guess as to why someone was looking for this information was because it was some jealous school district that wanted to capture Cupertino’s best practices. I mean, after all, why would someone in Cupertino be looking for this information?

What are your guesses as to the intent? Are you familiar with these sorts of investigations?

UPDATE: Yeah, I posted this on the wrong day. Oops. Thanks Herve for flagging it.

Should Money Buy You Privileged Access to a Public School System?

Schoolhouse In Palo Alto it does. Give Palo Alto Partners in Education — the district-wide foundation that supports all schools in the Palo Alto Unified School District — $2,500 and you get priority notification about middle and high school tours along with an invitation to a cocktail party with other wealthy donors to the district.

Give $5,000 and you get the same privileged access to information and the same exclusive chance to network with the community’s financial elite, plus an invite to a "special group event with the PAUSD superintendent."

Give over $10,000 and you get all the above, and an "invitation to individual discussion with PAUSD superintendent."

The message here is clear: in Palo Alto wealth buys differentiated access to the Superintendent of a public school district, membership of an inner ‘circle’ of local influencers and priority over the less well-off in visiting publicly-owned facilities.

Thanks to Burbed reader Herve for this find. A great post on SVMoms!

Personally I think this is a great idea. Let’s face it, we live in a market driven economy. Not a planned, socialist economy. It makes sense that if you invest more in your children, you will get better results. I don’t think there should be any outrage here.

Personally, I think you should be able to buy your grades, and even college acceptances – but let’s just start at buying good teachers and principals, without having to be all flashy and sending your kids to private school.

What? You don’t agree?

I’m tagging this post with the “Bay Area Schools” category. I’d appreciate it if you could help me find some older posts that should also get this tag.