BILL ANALYSIS Ó AB 180 Page 1 Date of Hearing: March 16, 2011 ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION Julia Brownley, Chair AB 180 (Carter) - As Introduced: January 24, 2011 SUBJECT : Education: academic performance SUMMARY : Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) and the State Board of Education (SBE) to allow dropout recovery high schools (DRHS) to report the results of an individual pupil growth model, meeting specified criteria, in lieu of other indicators under the Public School Performance Accountability Program. Specifically, this bill : 1)Makes Legislative findings and declarations concerning the benefits of DRHS and of reducing school dropouts, the challenges that DRHS face, the characteristics of successful dropout recovery schools, and the difficulty in assessing dropouts using standardized testing. 2)Requires the SPI and SBE, as part of the Public School Performance Accountability Program and in lieu of other reported indicators, to allow a DRHS to report the results of an individual pupil growth model that is proposed by the school and certified by the SPI. 3)Requires the SPI to review the individual pupil growth model proposed by the school and to certify that model if it: a) Is based on valid and reliable nationally normed or criterion-referenced reading and mathematics tests. b) Measures skills and knowledge aligned with state standards. c) Measures a pupil's score against expected growth over time. d) Demonstrates the extent to which a school is able to accelerate learning on an annual basis. 4)Defines a "dropout recovery high school" to be a high school where at least 50% of the enrollees are dropouts pursuant to California Department of Education (CDE) designations, and AB 180 Page 2 where the school provides instruction under the federal Workforce Investment Act, federal Youthbuild programs, federal job corps, or the California Conservation Corps. EXISTING LAW : 1)Requires the SPI, with the approval of the SBE, to develop and implement the Academic Performance Index (API) to measure the performance of schools, and to include a variety of indicators, including achievement test results, attendance rates, and graduation rates in that measure. 2)Requires the SPI to establish an advisory committee to provide advice on all appropriate matters relative to the creation of the API. 3)Directs the advisory committee by July 1, 2005, to make recommendations to the SPI on the appropriateness and feasibility of a methodology for generating a measurement of academic performance by using unique pupil identifiers and annual academic achievement growth to provide a more accurate measure of a school's growth over time. 4)Requires the SPI, with the approval of the state board, to develop an alternative accountability system that may be used for schools under the jurisdiction of a county board of education or a county superintendent of schools, community day schools, nonpublic, nonsectarian schools, and alternative schools serving high-risk pupils, including continuation high schools and opportunity schools. 5)Authorizes schools in the alternative accountability system to receive an API score, but prohibits the inclusion of those schools in API rankings. 6)Defines DRHS, for the purposes of prohibiting the inclusion of graduation rates in the API and for calculating "full year" dropout rates, to mean a high school in which 50% or more of its pupils have been designated as dropouts pursuant to the exit/withdrawal codes developed by the CDE. 7)Establishes the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program to test academic skills in grades 2-11, and to report individual and aggregate results. AB 180 Page 3 FISCAL EFFECT : In a substantially similar bill carried by this author in the prior session, the Assembly Appropriations Committee found that the bill created General Fund administrative costs, likely less than $100,000, to the California Department of Education to review and recommend approval to the SBE of an individual growth model for DRHS, as specified. COMMENTS : Current law requires the SPI to develop and administer the school accountability system which assigns each school a score on the API that is based on measures of performance that are aggregated for all students in that school. Only achievement test results are currently incorporated into the API; however, having an API that focuses solely on achievement test results is overly narrow and does not reflect information about student outcomes (e.g., dropout and graduation rates, college readiness, preparation for the workplace) that is important in measuring the performance of districts, schools and subgroups. As a perverse example of this shortcoming, decreases in a school's graduation rate due to increases in dropouts could easily lead to an increase in test scores (based on the remaining students) and an increase in the API for a given school or district; clearly this API increase would not be reflective of an increase in the performance of that school or district. The Legislature foresaw this issue when it authorized the API in 1999 to be a broad-based measure of school and district performance based on a variety of indicators, including, but not limited to, achievement test results, attendance rates, and graduation rates. Opponents of including anything other than results on the state's achievement test results in the API argue that including data on other assessments, dropouts, graduation rates, and other non-testing dimensions of educational performance will both dilute the meaning of the API and skew its emphasis toward high schools, resulting in the focusing of more resources at that level to the detriment of elementary and middle schools. The dilution argument assumes that state achievement test results incorporate and reflect all aspects of school performance, or at least the only important aspect; the increasing incidence of high achieving pupils dropping out of high school is a counter example to the claim that test scores alone show how well a school is serving its pupils. Since the reliability of an API score based on small numbers of AB 180 Page 4 pupil test scores is questionable, current law instructs the SPI to compute an API score for schools with less than 100 pupil scores, but to not include the school's API in state rankings. Similarly, the API scores of community schools, continuation high schools and non-public schools that serve special education pupils are not considered reliable due to both small numbers of scores and the fact that most pupils are placed in the schools for less than a year. Accordingly, the SPI is directed in current law to develop an alternative accountability system under which these schools may receive an API score, but are not included in API rankings. The Alternative Schools Accountability Model (ASAM) is the alternative system developed by the SPI for this purpose. According to the author, this bill will support DRHS ability to serve students who "often are far below grade level standards and re-enter seeking to complete their diploma in a shorter period of time than necessary in the traditional high school. Additionally, even after enrollment, their active engagement in a school setting can take months. Most standardized tests do not measure individual student performance over time and therefore, and open entry exit education does not align with once-a-year testing. In contrast, an individual growth model can demonstrate the learning gains of a student to assess the value of the school's instructional program." The author also states that fewer "than 8,000 recovered dropout students enrolled in Federal or State job training programs are estimated to be Ýenrolled in dropout recovery high schools and] eligible for this alternative." The DRHS targeted in this bill are small in number and have a student population (effectively dropouts who are re-enrolling in an alternative school and jobs program) that is relatively unique, even among alternative school populations. For example, rapid turnover of pupil populations and short stays by students are common across many alternative programs, but DRHS typically have students who will enroll and dis-enroll through multiple cycles during the school year; the instructional program is also individually tailored to help speed-up the pupil's progress toward completion of the program in the short time that they may be enrolled. Between small populations, enrollment cycling and tailored instruction, any measure that either provides a point-in-time snapshot of student performance or that is aggregated across a cohort of students may have absolutely no meaning with respect to the school's student population at the AB 180 Page 5 time that the results of that measure are reported, since those results may not apply to any of the pupils enrolled in the school at that time. In these cases measuring the growth of individual pupils without aggregating those results and building an accountability model that is individually based and tailored to that school, rather than based on the aggregate performance of a cohort of pupils, may more appropriately reflect the progress that a DRHS is making. The state does not have such a tailored individual growth model for each school, and building such models at the state level would not be cost effective; a reasonable solution to this problem is to authorize this small group of schools to report pupil results from their own individual pupil-based accountability model in lieu of other required indicators. According to the bill's sponsor, this bill will strengthen ASAM by allowing that alternative model to address the accountability needs of the small community of DRHS. The bill specifies certain conditions that the model must meet in order to be certified by the SPI to be used by the DRHS. It should be noted that the Department of Finance, in its April 2010 Budget Letters to the Legislature, proposed the elimination of all federal funding supporting ASAM "in favor of folding alternative schools into existing federal accountability reporting" It did not appear that this proposal would result in appropriate accountability measures being applied to alternative schools in California, and thus contradicted the Legislature's earlier action to require the SPI to develop and implement an alternative accountability system for those schools. The Legislature appropriated funding for ASAM for the 2010-11 fiscal year; however, the former Governor vetoed that appropriation. It should also be noted that the CDE had begun a process for revising the current ASAM so as to make it more rigorous, academically-based and comparable across sites pursuant to a conceptual framework approved by the SBE. According to the CDE plan, the revised ASAM would have started operating in the current, 2010-11, school year. Due to the Governor's veto, however, the CDE eliminated reporting for the 2009-10 ASAM cycle and stopped all work on the revised ASAM. Under the continuing statutory authority for ASAM and with existing resources, CDE will continue designating schools as ASAM if the school meets the established criteria, provide all ASAM schools API reports under the API system, and continue to provide assigned graduation rates AB 180 Page 6 for ASAM schools for federal account purposes. Committee amendments: Committee staff recommends, and the author has accepted, an amendment to remove the tautology that is created by defining a "dropout recovery high school " to be a high school with specific characteristics. For clarification this definition should instead reference a school offering instruction in any of grades 9 through 12 and having those specific characteristics. Previous legislation: AB 2013 (Arambula), held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee in 2010, includes independent study programs in the alternative accountability system established by the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), requires all alternative schools serving high-risk pupils to participate in the alternative accountability system, regardless of the percentage of high-risk pupils enrolled, and requires the alternative accountability system to meet various specified components. SB 219 (Steinberg), Chapter 731, Statutes of 2007, makes changes in the calculation of and in the process for revising the API. AB 400 (Nunez), vetoed in 2007, would have required the incorporation of additional measures of performance into the API, including the rate at which pupils are offered a course of study that fulfills University of California and California State University admission requirements. AB 2167 (Arambula), Chapter 743, Statutes of 2006, establishes a specific methodology for including graduation rates, as previously required, in the API; also requires the SPI to report annually to the Legislature on graduation and dropout rates in the state. AB 1295 (Thomson), Chapter 887, Statutes of 2001, makes changes to the API to allow small school districts to receive an API score, receive growth targets, and performance awards. SB 1 X1 (Alpert), Chapter 3, Statutes of 1999-2000 First Extraordinary Session, known as the Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA), authorizes the state's current accountability program, including establishment of the PSAA Advisory Committee, development of the API and development of an alternative accountability system. REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION : Support American Federation of State, county and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO AB 180 Page 7 California School Boards Association School for Integrated Academics and Technologies (SIATech) (Sponsor) Opposition None on file Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087