BILL ANALYSIS SB 1357 Page 1 Date of Hearing: June 16, 2010 ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION Julia Brownley, Chair SB 1357 (Steinberg) - As Amended: June 10, 2010 SENATE VOTE : 35-0 SUBJECT : California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System SUMMARY : Requires the California Department of Education (CDE) to include pupil attendance data and data on chronic absences in the Annual Report on Dropouts in California and in the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS), and to provide related reports to local educational agencies (LEAs) on demand. Specifically, this bill : 1)Makes legislative findings and declarations about the causes and prevention of dropping out of school, the relationship between school attendance and dropping out, and the collection and reporting of attendance, graduation and dropout data. 2)States legislative intent: a) To improve the state's ability to support local educational agencies in their efforts to increase academic achievement and prevent dropouts by making the state's education data system capable of collecting pupil level data on chronic absenteeism. b) To support the development of early warning systems to enable the identification and support of individual pupils who are at risk of academic failure or dropping out of school, and to develop interventions to improve pupil attendance, retention and achievement. c) That schools identified on the list of persistently lowest-achieving schools, as approved by the State Board of Education (SBE) for the purposes of receiving funding under the federal School Improvement Grant program, will fully utilize early warning systems d) That the Annual Report on Dropouts in California, that is required to be submitted to the Governor, Legislature and SBE, be used to foster the development of effective SB 1357 Page 2 supports and interventions to improve school attendance and prevent pupils from dropping out of school. 3)Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), when data are available, to include "chronic absence rates" in the Annual Report on Dropouts in California. 4)Requires the CDE, contingent upon the receipt of federal funds for this purpose, to prepare the CALPADS to include data on pupil attendance by developing additional fields to facilitate data transfer, business rules and definitions that would be needed to improve the quality and consistency of the data, and processes for the transfer of data from LEAs. Also requires the CDE to consult with organizations representing school, district, and county education administrators, classified and certified staff, and parents in this process. 5)Requires CALPADS to: a) Support LEAs in efforts to identify and support pupils at risk of dropping out. b) Be capable of issuing periodic reports to LEAs that include district, school, class, and individual pupil reports on rates of absence and on chronic absences. 6)Defines "chronic absence" to mean that a pupil is absent on 10 percent of the schooldays in the school year. 7)Requires early warning systems, that may developed with the intended support of the Legislature, to: a) Utilize highly predictive indicators, including attendance, course grades or completion, performance on assessments of pupil achievement, suspensions, and expulsions. b) Have the predictive reliability of the systems ensured through a thorough validation process. c) Provide periodic early warning reports that inform principals, teachers, and parents in a manner that enables timely identification and support of individual pupils who are at risk of academic failure or dropping out. SB 1357 Page 3 8)Authorizes a LEA to submit data on pupil attendance and other indicators as identified by the CDE, when CALPADS is prepared to accept data on pupil attendance. Also authorizes a LEA to request, and requires the CDE to provide, early warning reports up to four times each school year. 9)Requires the CDE to notify LEAs that reporting pupil attendance and chronic absence data pursuant to this section is voluntary; also requires the notification to include the benefits of reporting pupil attendance and chronic absence data, and in developing effective supports and interventions for at-risk pupils. EXISTING LAW : 1)Requires the CDE to develop CALPADS in order to provide state and local educational agencies with the data necessary for compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, a means for evaluating educational programs and progress, information needed to improve student achievement, and a common means for maintaining longitudinal pupil-level data. 2)Establishes the California School Information Services (CSIS) program for the purpose of developing and implementing an electronic statewide school information system, including the assignment of non-personally identifiable student identifiers (SSID) to all public K-12 students in California, so as to facilitate the exchange of student data between LEAs and with the CDE. 3)Requires LEAs to retain individual pupil records, including attendance, demographic and pupil achievement data, use the SSID to ensure the accuracy of information on state tests, retain all data necessary to compile reports required by NCLB (including dropout and graduation rates), and provide other data elements deemed necessary by the SPI. 4)Establishes School Attendance Review Boards (SARBs) at the local and county level to create a safety net for students with persistent attendance or behavior problems in order to keep students in school, provide them with a meaningful educational experience and, when necessary, to refer students and their parents or guardians to court. 5)Defines a truant as any pupil subject to compulsory full-time SB 1357 Page 4 education or to compulsory continuation education who is absent from school without a valid excuse three full days in one school year or tardy or absent for more than any 30-minute period during the school day without a valid excuse on three occasions in one school year, or any combination thereof. 6)Specifies that a truant shall be reported to the attendance supervisor or to the superintendent of the school district, and requires the school district to notify the pupil's parent or guardian, as specified, by first-class mail or other reasonable means. 7)Authorizes school district officials, a peace officer or a probation officer to arrest or assume temporary custody of any minor found away from his or her home and who is absent from school without a valid excuse. FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Senate Appropriations Committee analysis of this bill, the CDE estimates that the one-time state costs of adjusting CALPADS to collect attendance would be approximately $300,000. That analysis also notes that the costs of CDE workload related to the reports that LEAs are authorized to request from the CDE are speculative as it is unclear exactly what information local agencies would request or how many districts would request the reports; the Appropriations Committee analysis states that, "With over 1,000 [LEAs] in the state, it is reasonable to assume these costs are significant, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, annually." COMMENTS : According to the author, this bill will support California schools in identifying "students who are most at risk of academic failure or dropping out, before it's too late. The bill enables the collection of new data on student absenteeism and combines that data with other predictive indicators already collected by our education data system. These combined indicators will become the foundation of an "early warning system," so that critical education, health, and community supports can be strategically targeted before students abandon school." The author also states that, "Earlier efforts to build an early warning system have stalled for lack of funds. SB 1357 renews the effort at a time when federal funds are available to invest in improving state data systems to identify students with the greatest needs. Chronic absence from school, even in the SB 1357 Page 5 primary grades, is one of the most accurate predictors of later high school dropout. Our education data system, however, is not equipped to collect data on absenteeism. California must do more to support districts and make sure that individual students, and schools, are identified when they show clear signs of distress. Once identified, districts, parents, schools and communities can do a better job of providing the supports needed to address the problem." The broad vision of this bill is conceptually sound and attractive. Research clearly links, in the aggregate though not necessarily in every individual pupil, both attendance and achievement, and lack of attendance and the probability of dropping out of school. So any policy change that leads to more and earlier information about pupil attendance being made available to parents and educators is good policy in terms of leading to increases in pupil achievement and decreases in the number of drop outs. It is not completely clear, however, whether the complete vision of this bill and its benefits will be realized by the bill's enactment, since most of those benefits depend on actions or occurrences that are beyond the requirements of the bill or outside of the control of the state. Three examples of requirements in the bill are illustrative of this sort of contingent or dependent benefit. 1)The bill requires the SPI, when data are available, to include "chronic absence rates" in the Annual Report on Dropouts in California, thus providing the benefit of increased information on this problem; however, this data will not be available until data on chronic absenteeism is included in CALPADS (which ties to the second example below), or until LEAs voluntarily choose to submit attendance data to CALPADS (which ties to the third example). 2)The bill requires the CDE, contingent upon the receipt of federal funds for this purpose, to prepare CALPADS to include data on pupil attendance; this would, among other effects, enable the SPI to report on chronic absenteeism. However, any benefits from this expansion of CALPADS are contingent upon the receipt of federal funding for this purpose. Earlier this year the CDE applied for a $19.9 million federal grant, through the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems Grant Program, that would have included funds for this purpose; in late May the state was notified by the federal government that California was not being awarded those grant funds. SB 1357 Page 6 3)The bill requires the CDE to provide, up to four times each school year upon a request from an LEA, early warning reports that include pupil attendance data and enable timely identification and support of individual pupils who are at risk of academic failure or dropping out. However, there is no mandate on LEAs to provide this attendance data to CALPADS; the bill only mandates CDE to develop the capacity for CALPADS to hold this data. It is unclear whether the receipt of early warning reports would be enough incentive to move LEAs to voluntarily incur the cost of submitting the data to CDE, when those reports are based on pupil data, including attendance data, that were submitted by the LEA itself. With contingencies such as these in place, attainment of the full vision and benefits of the bill are uncertain. Given the state's current fiscal situation, however, a staff recommendation to eliminate the contingencies in this bill by placing direct mandates on the SPI, CDE, and LEAs would be irresponsible. However, this bill does establish a long-term vision and take steps toward that vision, and the bill generates a number of clear policy benefits in doing so. Those benefits include that the bill will: 1)Make it easier for some LEAs to focus on the attendance problem, and react to the early warning that they may get from state reports. If CALPADS is expanded to accept attendance data, then some districts, particularly small and mid-sized districts who do not have large scale data capabilities, may find it beneficial to submit attendance data and request early warning reports from the state. 2)Move the attention that some LEAs pay to attendance issues beyond a focus on truancy only. Currently compulsory education laws, requirements on LEAs to react to truancy, punishments and fines for parents of truant pupils, and the School Attendance Review Board (SARB) process place the focus on truancy. There are, however, issues with pupil attendance that do not lead to truancy. This bill places the focus on attendance, and not exclusively on truancy; since no early warning or intervention system is in place to deal with non-truant chronic absence, this may help some districts address attendance issues more comprehensively. 3)Provide a foundation upon which the complete vision of a SB 1357 Page 7 comprehensive data system and pupil attendance early warning systems could be fleshed out, once sufficient federal or state funds are available. For the time being, activities in the bill that the SPI and CDE are able to complete, or that LEAs voluntarily undertake may provide opportunities for some LEAs and their pupils to benefit from the development of these systems. 4)Provide benefits in terms of moving the state's educational data system to be more comprehensive in nature; any inclusion of information on pupil attendance in the state's educational data system will provide benefits in terms of public policy and program evaluation, educational research, and public transparency. 5)Provide, potentially, a summary of attendance data to receiving LEAs when pupils transfer from one LEA to another. Complete attendance data does not always move with transfer pupils, even though information on truancy, suspensions and expulsions, and attendance-related behavior problems generally do. Background on CALPADS: CALPADS is the foundation of California's education data system. CALPADS collects student level data on demographics, program participation and course completion, and teacher level data including course assignments. When fully implemented, CALPADS will provide the state and LEAs with the data necessary for compliance with the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently NCLB), with a means for evaluating educational programs and progress, with information needed to improve student achievement, and with a common means for maintaining longitudinal pupil-level data. The first software release for the system occurred in August 2009, and included only administrative functions of the system; a second release in October 2009 included those parts of the system involved in the collection of data from local educational agencies. The initial 2009 releases of CALPADS system software generated concerns over the stability of the system. These concerns led the CDE to temporarily halt further development on additional CALPADS software functions, to suspend an additional procurement for the development of the California Longitudinal Teacher Integrated Data System (CALTIDES), and to a decision in December 2009 to ask the project's independent verification and validation contractor to conduct an assessment of the CALPADS SB 1357 Page 8 system architecture and technical processes. That assessment exposed system stability problems, including: "Outages- where the system is unavailable to all or a significant segment of the user base; Crashes - where users who are logged into the system are kicked out or the system 'locks up' stopping the users' workflow; Slow performance - where the system is slow to respond or 'times out' for one or more users performing a variety of functions with the system; Defects - where the system does not provide the functionality or return the results as expected." During January 2010, CDE and its development contractor, IBM, reacted to the assessment, and CDE communicated their intention to hold IBM accountable for remedying the system's stability and getting the project back on track. CDE also asked IBM to develop a plan to stabilize the system; IBM responded by developing such a plan to stabilize the system by March 29, 2010. The stabilization effort has shown positive results. These issues were the subject of an oversight hearing held by this Committee on May 12, 2010; at that time the Committee heard testimony from the CDE and its independent verification and validation contractor on these issues and received an update on efforts to improve the stability of the CALPADS system software. Committee amendments: Committee staff recommends the following amendments to the bill. 1)The bill states legislative intent that schools on the list of persistently lowest achieving schools, approved by the SBE for purposes of identifying eligibility for federal School Improvement Grants, fully use the "early warning systems" that may be developed as a result of this bill. Since schools may be identified as persistently lowest achieving for other reasons under current law, this statement of legislative intent should be more general, so as to apply to any identified persistently lowest achieving school. 2)The bill proposes to include "pupil attendance" data in CALPADS, but does not clearly define what form that data should take. If the intent of the bill is to include daily (and at the middle and high school level, period-by-period) attendance information on individual pupils, this would create a huge amount of very fine-grained information that may not be particularly useful at the state level, but would be costly and burdensome in terms of changes to CALPADS necessary to include such data. For example attendance for a pupil over 180 instructional days in each of 13 years of school plus up SB 1357 Page 9 to seven periods in grades 7 through 12, could mean as many as 8,800 additional fields of data added to CALPADS for each pupil record. The purposes of this bill can instead be served by including data on the rate of attendance over some limited time span for a pupil (e.g., percent absences for the month or percent attended during each quarter), without incurring the costs and technical burden of collecting daily attendance in CALPADS. Committee staff recommends that the "quarterly rate of pupil attendance" be specified as the measure of pupil attendance that is included in CALPADS for each individual pupil. 3)Technical amendments that include citing the "exit examination adopted" pursuant to law rather than the currently adopted California High School Exit Examination, clarifying that the definition of "chronic absence" is actually a definition of a "chronic absentee" and making conforming changes, conforming the denominator used in the definition of "chronic absence" to that use in other sections of law (e.g., calculation of ADA), clarifying that the definition of "chronic absence" applies to a pupil who is absent for 10% or more of the instructional days and not only to a pupil who is absent exactly 10% of the time. Related legislation: SB 1317 (Leno), pending in the Assembly Public Safety Committee and referred to the Assembly Education Committee, creates a new misdemeanor for parents of children in grades 1-8 who are "chronically truant", where that offense is punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 and/or one year in county jail; the bill also authorizes courts to establish a deferred entry of judgment program for cases involving parents or guardians of chronically truant elementary school students. Previous legislation: AB 1446 (DeSaulnier), held in the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2008, would have required a school district, upon a pupil's initial classification as a truant, to notify a parent or guardian within one week of a pupil's last day of being absent from school without a valid excuse, or tardy or absent for more than any 30-minute period during the school day without a valid excuse. SB 1298 (Simitian), Chapter 561, Statutes of 2008, establishes processes by which local education agencies and public institutions of higher education issue, maintain, and report information using the unique SSIDs required under current law. SB 1614 (Simitian), Chapter 840, Statutes of 2006, requires the development of CALTIDES to serve as a central SB 1357 Page 10 state repository of information on the teacher workforce, and specifies that the existing California Education Information System include CALTIDES, CALPADS, and the California Basic Educational Data System. SB 1453 (Alpert), Chapter 1002, Statutes of 2002, authorizes the longitudinal data system in its current form, and specifies that the system be known as CALPADS. REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION : Support Association of California School Administrators Bay Area Council California Family Resource Association California Federation of Teachers California School Health Centers Association California School Nurses Organization (seeking amendments) California State PTA Children Now Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Public Advocates San Francisco Unified School District Silicon Valley Leadership Group The Education Trust-West Opposition None on file Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087