A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: A Critical Race Theory-Informed Critical Policy Analysis of the Local Control Accountability Plans of Two Southern California School Districts
Creators: name: Allen, Darrell
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Critical Policy Analysis
subject: education funding
subject: Local Control Funding Formula
subject: Local Control Accountability Plan
subject: Critical Discourse Analysis
subject: race and education
subject: Education
subject: Social Sciences

description: Through a multi-disciplinary and complex analysis, this study offers new ways of seeing how school districts are (not) able to address the social wrong of Black and Indigenous students’ continually having inequitable access to education opportunity and displaying lower education outcomes. Research positions California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) as an important policy with potentially transformative components for children who could benefit from more assistance under current educational conditions, but also raises issues with respect to the clarity of the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) companion document. While most policymakers and school systems contend that schools are making positive progress given systemic constraints, there is little work attending to school districts’ use of local control opportunities to faithfully address the social wrong. The study answers the following questions: “How does the historicity of California public school funding, specifically key moments, social actors, and laws like the Local Control Funding Formula, contribute to an understanding of the documents and students’ educational opportunities and outcomes?;” “How do two neighboring California school districts’ education planning and accountability documents reveal the goals, funding allocations, and educational opportunities and outcomes for Indigenous and Black students considering the historicity of California public school funding?;” “What does a quantitative critical analysis of district accountability data reveal about the (in)equity of funding for Indigenous and Black students?;” “What types of messages regarding Black and Indigenous children are communicated through California state level discourse, as evident in the districts’ planning and accountability documents?;” and “How are Black and Indigenous children discursively positioned in these messages and how may that positioning be relevant to their access to equitable educational opportunities and outcomes?” This study’s analysis situates important systemic issues contributing to a continuation of the social wrong and uses Critical Race Theory as a theoretical foundation to guide the analysis and approach to the data, simultaneously relying on Critical Policy Analysis to investigate the LCFF policy. To evaluate the data, Long Beach Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District LCAPs and School Accountability Report Cards, this study uses Critical Policy Analysis, Critical Quantitative Analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis with Systemic Functional Linguistics as analytical methods. The findings produce five claims: 1) California’s historicity of education funding and attention to race has shaped the LCFF and how school districts complete their LCAPs; 2) state level discourse uses race to report on outcomes for Indigenous and Black children while simultaneously implementing superficial approaches to addressing racialized issues; 3) analysis of the district accountability plans reveals that both districts provide surface-level attention to Black and Indigenous students without meaningful goals, actions, or services to address acknowledged conditions; 4) both districts hold their actions in high regard while simultaneously holding children responsible for achieving district goals; and 5) low population percentages of Indigenous and Black students in most schools in both districts make them invisible in accountability data and specific approaches for effectively serving these children and school accountability measures are not articulated in the LCAPs. Through this research, I offer a contribution to the field by critically engaging with qualitative and quantitative data to present findings with a nuanced perspective that centralizes the disparate impact of a race-evasive policy on Black and Indigenous students. This dissertation offers considerations to the districts studied, California, and education systems seeking to be more equitable.