SACRAMENTO, CA - While the state budget deficit, the electricity crisis aftermath, and the slow economy will be important topics for the upcoming general election campaign, education issues will still share center stage. Consider, for example, the possibility that the state Board of Education could undermine Proposition 227, the successful 1998 anti-bilingual-education initiative that required English immersion for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students.

Under the proposed rules, teachers and principals could recommend that LEP students continue in bilingual education. Although parents would still have the final decision, the worry is that immigrant parents will feel pressured to heed these recommendations. The new rules would also restrict the English-only classes that LEP students must attend at the start of each school year. Prop. 227 author Ron Unz says that “the proposed regulations would nullify some of the core provisions of 227 and restore a system of bilingual education California had prior to the passage of the initiative.”

Accountability has become a political buzzword. California has a school accountability system, but it’s full of holes. Participation of failing schools in the accountability program is voluntary, with many rock-bottom schools not part of the program. Also, the student achievement growth targets set by the state are so minimal that it could take 20 years or more for a very low-performing school to meet the state-suggested achievement level. Further, the worst school in the state may not be eligible for the accountability program if it meets its incremental annual growth target. Even schools chosen for the program won’t suffer penalties for years under the program’s rules. Not only must these holes be plugged, the state should emulate Florida and provide school-choice vouchers to students at failing schools.

Everyone seems to love reduced class sizes, but research shows there’s little to love. A recently released report by a consortium of research organizations found no strong relationship between class-size reduction and student achievement. Yet, the state continues to spend billions of dollars on this program.

In higher education, the University of California is allowing its campuses to use subjective “comprehensive review” admissions systems that give preferences to students with certain life experiences versus those who simply do well academically. A UC Santa Barbara professor says that his campus’s admissions criteria place three times as much emphasis on life challenges as on academics. National merit scholars and students with SAT I math scores above 700 have been rejected because of too high family income or not overcoming difficult life obstacles. In their place, one math-oriented department at UCSB has accepted students with SAT I math scores below 500 if they have the appropriate life challenges. A soon-to-be-released PRI briefing paper by my colleague Matt Cox details similar goings-on at UCLA where students were given extra points if their parents didn’t graduate from high school or attend college, if they came from single-parent households, or if they came from low-income families. The purpose: race preferences through the backdoor.

Other important education issues include value-added testing of students, teacher merit pay, teacher testing, mismanagement at the state Department of Education, and reforming the collective bargaining process. PRI will soon be releasing studies and papers addressing these and other key education issues. One can only hope that California’s candidates will address all these issues as well.