Note: Starting next week School Beat will be on summer vacation until school starts again in mid-August.

The 2009-2010 school year is finally at an end. This has felt like a long one, mostly due, as it usually is, to the external pressures and challenges facing our schools. In the midst of the worst financial crisis in years and a political climate that is almost equally as turbulent, students, educators, families and other public education supporters have struggled with some success to keep our schools going and to push them higher on the list of priorities of things to be maintained, if not strengthened. With leaders like Governor Schwarzenegger, who continues his efforts to strip public schools of resources, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who enthusiastically promotes standardized testing and competitive grant-based learning models, California’s K-12 system has been hit hard from all sides.

The recession and related budget crisis have been felt strongly throughout this year. After tense negotiations, our district ended up having only four furlough days for teachers and just under two hundred pink slips ultimately issued. Hopefully this will be reduced even more if the emergency funding for education jobs finally comes through Congress. Even with that, it’s a clear measure of just how bad things are that the loss of that many teachers and the reduction of even a few educational days can feel like an aversion of disaster.

Discussion of where to cut took up much of the year and can be tracked through various documents and timelines on the San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) budget page. The deficit action plan laid out a set of proposed cuts that were presented and discussed at community meetings and were ultimately accepted by the Board of Education (BOE) as options Superintendent Carlos Garcia could put into place as needed.

Two positive outcomes around the budget also occurred this year. The first was a fantastic Town Hall meeting organized by some SFUSD parents in an effort to galvanize action around the perpetual underfunding of California’s schools in both boom and bust times. The Funding our Future event, attending by elected officials, and hundreds of parents and public school supporters is now evolving into a new effort, called Educate Our State, the specific goals of which will hopefully be unfolding soon, revealing tasks we can all join in on.

Similarly, SFUSD is a part of a statewide lawsuit that aims to restructure public school funding, both in amounts distributed and allocation methods. This effort promises not only to restore a solid, more equitable financial footing to our schools, but also has the potential to raise a number of key issues about the mess of California’s public school budgeting.

Although it often felt like it, not everything that happened this year was about the budget. A major event was the adoption of a new student assignment policy, something that had been in the works for years. The new rules will apply to students entering school in the 2011-2012 school year and will most dramatically affect kindergarten and middle school students. Among the number of changes are the establishment of new attendance areas, meaning the association of a particular elementary school for families living in certain areas (however this does not guarantee a spot in that school); preferential weighting for children living in areas associated with low test scores; and the creation of feeder patterns from elementary to middle school.

District staff will be working over the summer to develop draft assignment boundaries and updated enrollment information, which will be presented at the end of August. The next key meeting date of the BOE’s student assignment committee will be on August 18th, from 6 to 8pm at 555 Franklin Street. Those who want to provide some input about the number of choice options that should be allowed on the application can fill out a survey now.

Another decision just recently formalized and the source of some debate and consternation is the adoption of a new academic calendar. The upcoming school year will start and end much earlier, with the first day on August 16th and the last day on May 27th. This new schedule may feel somewhat odd, but the declared motivations for the change — ending the fall semester before the winter break and being in sync with City College for students taking classes there — don’t seem that much more arbitrary in contemporary times than the tradition of ending the school year in June.

Moving from the somewhat quotidian realm of schedules to the extraordinary world of politics finds us caught in the machinations of federal policy makers as they tackle national education policy. Unfortunately for us, the vision of these leaders is rarely informed by any personal participation in public education, which makes it all the more easy for them to become enthralled by standardized testing, destructive strategies for dealing with underperforming schools, and the false-promise of market approaches to developing new educational strategies. In a notable event of this year, the many flaws in this perspective were effectively unveiled by former conservative education scholar and pundit Dianne Ravitch, who has now completely revised her thinking.

Sadly, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama don’t appear to be interested in this type of analysis, even when it comes from one of their own. While Diane Ravitch was detailing the serious and inherent flaws in the approaches of the last many years, Secretary Duncan launched his “Race To The Top” (RTTT) program that cost states huge amounts of dollars and political churn to compete in and that resulted in two “winners” whose qualifications are a mystery. This program is not fair, effective, or efficient and yet because it has some sort of market aura about it, somehow it is good.

Earlier this year Duncan released his Blueprint for Education, which encapsulates the administrations vision for a new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known now as No Child Left Behind. The Blueprint proposes that we stay on essentially the same path, but that we make states and districts compete more often for scarce dollars, in a continuation of RTTT type of activities. For parent activists, the Blueprint was disappointing on another level as well, since the role of families in ensuring quality education is scarcely mentioned. The Blueprint also puts an emphasis on shared standards, which has given support for a movement to create a set of “common core standards,” that have just recently been released.

The tasks that will face us in the fall will be much the same as those we have closed out the year on. A new assignment plan will be implemented and parent volunteers across the City will be working to help other families understand how to make the best choices for their children and get the most out of the new system. The financial situation will be volatile and maddening, and initiatives such as the statewide lawsuit, closing the Proposition 13 corporate loophole and other state advocacy efforts will unfold and provide opportunities for those interested in making change, but will not yield results in the short term. A new governor will be elected along with a new State Superintendent of Schools and no doubt we will be called on to defend Proposition 98 and basic school funding. And, as always, we will continue to have to explain to elected officials what quality schools look like and what we need to ensure that all children have access to them.

Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.