Dan Walters, veteran reporter and author covering California politics
Dan Walters, a veteran reporter covering California politics, including education, has 57 years of experience under his belt. He’s developed a sharp eye for the slow-moving, big stories that many others miss because it is not an event…. and a finely tuned b.s. detector for passing fashions. When he left the Sacramento Bee about 18 months ago, he could have hung up his spurs. Lucky for us, Dan has continued writing, joining the team of CALMatters, an online reporting venture.
His column of August 16, “California has big void in educational information,” notes that California is missing something that 38 states have built: a student data system that keeps track of their states’ investments in making students smarter, from pre-kindergarten through college and into the workforce. These systems, called Student Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS), make it possible to answer questions that cannot be answered when student level data isn’t held in common across the institutional silos of “lower” ed and “higher” ed. Florida even has a system that spans into the workforce. Why don’t we?
Dan Walters’ memory is sharp, and he reminds us that only seven years ago, we at least had a higher ed info system that stitched together the data on what happens to California’s high school grads as they enter community colleges, CSU and UC campuses. This small but hardy team, the California Post-Secondary Education Commission (CPEC), ran on a slim $2 million budget, and made it possible for high school leaders to see what portion of their grads entered any one of 143 public institutions of higher ed, and what pathways they followed through them. CPEC was defunded by Gov. Brown, and when it closed its doors, we Californians lost knowledge of what happened to our collective investment in education.
California also had a teacher information system called CALTIDES. But that, too, was defunded at the Governor’s request, a red-lining that was championed by the California Teachers Association. (Big surprise.)
Dan Walters defines the problem this way: “… information on how well those millions of mostly young Californians are being educated is at best scattered among several non-integrated data systems and at worst not available anywhere.”
The cause, says Dan Walters, is that “The education establishment and its political allies are not eager to disturb the status quo of ignorance.” Unlike most reporters with his 50+ years of experience, he is not a grumpy pessimist. Dan points to a bill now in the Legislature authored by Steve Glazer, an Orinda Democrat, that calls for creating a student longitudinal data system. He points with hope toward the bill’s likelihood of becoming law after Gov. Brown leaves office, and is replaced by Gavin Newsom, the current Lt. Governor and the Democrat who is highly likely to win the race.
