Confused Columnist
I guess is shouldn’t surprise me that Daniel Borenstein is confused about California’s accountability system. In this article, he actually talks about how confusing this have become.
Welcome to the perplexing world of academic performance measures. California public schools are caught between two masters, the state and federal governments.
Across California, 40 percent of kindergarten through 12th grade schools have been deemed failures under one system and successes under the other, while 23 percent are failing both standards.
The system confuses parents, exasperates school administrators and wastes millions of dollars that are spent on overlapping reform efforts.
School officials have known for years about the problem but have been unable to get the state and federal governments to agree on a single set of measurements and remedies.
The seriousness of the problem was outlined last month in a report by the state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, which concluded that “the state and federal systems form a labyrinth of duplicative and disconnected program requirements that send mixed messages to teachers, parents, schools and districts.”
Where Daniel is really confused is where he talks about some of the confusing aspects of the having dueling state and federal accountability systems.
Nevertheless, let’s try to understand some of the highlights, starting with the testing system. The good news is that the state and federal programs both use the same set of results from the Standardized Testing and Reporting assessment. But that’s where the symmetry ends.
The state sets a target average score of 800 for individual schools, while the federal government’s “proficiency” benchmark is 875 and applies to schools and districts.
Failure to attain the required targets pushes schools or districts into reform programs, under which their progress is reviewed annually. But the programs and penalties are different.
Under the state program, failing schools can volunteer to receive funding, but, if they do, they face state monitoring and sanctions, including ultimately the appointment of a state trustee, if they fail to improve. Under the federal program, low-income schools and districts that fail to meet the requirements are placed in an improvement program.
Students attending those schools must be given the option of transferring to better schools in the district.
Under both programs, schools or districts can exit the reforms if they show improvement. But, of course, the measurements for improvement are completely different. The state gives schools credit for making incremental progress toward the 800 score. The federal system, on the other hand, sets rigid benchmarks for the number of students who meet the 875 threshold: By 2014, all students must reach that level.
That federal goal, of course, is absurd. It can’t be reached because, no matter how good the program, some students are bound to fall short. Unfortunately, there’s resistance in Washington to relaxing that requirement for it might be perceived as backing away from school reform.
Don’t blame just the feds. State officials are making the problem worse. The federal government allows each state to define proficiency. And it was California policy makers who set the 875 score as the measure of proficiency. (In other words, the state is setting a higher bar for meeting the federal standards than it set for meeting its own state standards.)
It’s a ridiculously high level that represents college entrance level preparation. Most other states have set lower measures for proficiency. And many of them, as a result, have fewer schools failing the federal requirements.
While Daniel’s 800 vs. 875 argument might be interesting, it is pointless. The Federal Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals have nothing to do with the 800 or 875 scores, which are part of the Academic Performance Index (API), California’s system. What AYP is concerned about is the percentage of students who score proficient (at grade level) on the California Standards Test (CST) Language Arts and mathematics tests. The API uses a combination of measures, including those scores, as well as science, history/social science and even the California Alternate Performance Assessment (CAPA), and the California Achievement Test, Sixth edition (CAT/6) (which by the way is a norm-referenced test — think bell curve). For high schools, both systems actually use the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) from 10th graders as the measurement of choice. The weights of these various tests in the API change frequently and the Scale Calibration Factor (SCF) gets changed each year to further confuse even the single API measurement.
On the other hand, the AYP system looks only at the percentage of students reaching grade-level on two individual CST or CAHSEE tests. Being at grade-level is a concept that most parents can understand. They want to know if their student is at grade-level or not. The advantage of the AYP is that you can compare the percentage of students at grade-level from year to year while the API’s complex formula prohibits those year-to-year comparisons.
Contrary to what Daniel suggests, the AYP isn’t some “rigid benchmarks for the number of students who meet the 875 threshold”, but instead has minimum percentage of students that need to reach grade-level. That minimum percentage was actually determined by the California Department of Education as part of their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) implementation plan.
Also contrary to what Daniel suggests, the goal of getting all students to grade-level is not absurd. California set academic standards, created tests to measure students’ mastery of those standards and asks school districts to work to get students to meet those standards. That’s grade-level proficiency.
Further, research has found that the skills necessary to be ready for work are the same as those required to be ready for college. So, contrary to what Daniel suggests, proficiency or being at grade-level is not too high of a bar to expect from our students. If we want students to leave high school prepared for either college or the world of work, meeting California’s academic standards is where they need to be.
Daniel seems to think that California should follow the lead of other states, who rather than improving the education of their students, have lowered their standards in order to allow more students to be proficient. Those fudging of the number schemes are dishonest and immoral. They’re doing their students a huge disservice by making them believe that they’re prepared for life when in fact they’re not. The answer isn’t lowering the standards. The answer is improving our teaching strategies.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (that’s like a CD kids), there are schools across the state that are getting much higher percentages of their students to grade-level. Many of these schools have high minority and high poverty populations. They’ve found the strategies that work. They’re not making excuses. They’re doing what is required to help their students be prepared for work or college. The answer is modeling the practices of these high-performing environments at more schools.
In the real world, people learn from the winners. Auto racing is a good example. The cars are fundamentally the same. There are strict rules which prevent “cheating” and give everyone a pretty even playing field. If one car is winning consistently, the competitors don’t make excuses or ask for the bar to be lowered. They look to see what that team is doing differently. They make changes in their strategies to incorporate new ideas. That’s what needs to happen in public education. Rather than making excuses for why students aren’t learning, school districts need to learn from the winners and incorporate their strategies. That’s what will allow all of our kids to leave school ready for college or the world of work.
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