BILL ANALYSIS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Gloria Romero, Chair
2009-2010 Regular Session
BILL NO: AB 429
AUTHOR: Brownley
AMENDED: April 29, 2009
FISCAL COMM: Yes HEARING DATE: July 15, 2009
URGENCY: No CONSULTANT: James Wilson
SUBJECT : Academic Performance Index (API)
SUMMARY
This bill requires an existing advisory committee to the
Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to make
recommendations, by July 1, 2011, for development of a
longitudinally valid assessment system in which annual
academic growth can be measured for a school and a pupil
over time.
BACKGROUND
Current law requires the Superintendent of Public
Instruction (SPI) to establish a broadly representative
committee to advise the SPI and the State Board of
Education (SBE) on the creation of the Academic Performance
Index (API) and make recommendations on the feasibility of
measuring academic performance utilizing unique pupil
identifiers.
The Academic Performance Index (API) was established
pursuant SB 1 X (Alpert, Ch. 3 of 1999). The index was
proposed as a means of combining multiple indicators of
school performance into one easy-to-compare index. A
school's API score is based on the test scores of pupils on
several statewide tests, including scores from the
California Standards Tests of pupils in grades 2 through
11, and the California High School Exit Examination
(CAHSEE).
ANALYSIS
This bill:
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1) Requires the Superintendent's advisory committee on
API matters to make recommendations by July 1, 2011,
on developing a longitudinally valid assessment system
in which annual academic growth can provide an
accurate and valid measure of individual pupils and
school's academic achievement growth over time.
2) Requires that the advisory committee use a pilot study
of academic growth measures that was required by
provisional language in the 2007 Budget Act when
formulating its recommendations.
3) Requires, by October 1, 2011, that the SPI to forward
the committee's recommendations, along with cost
estimates and implementation timelines to the State
Board of Education, policy and fiscal committees of
the Legislature, and the Department of Finance.
4) Provides that recommendation made pursuant to this
bill may not be implemented unless funds are expressly
appropriated for the purpose.
STAFF COMMENTS
1) Measuring academic growth . The California Standards
Tests, that make up the heart of the state's
Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program,
measure pupil performance against the statewide
standards adopted by the State Board for each grade
level. Although the standards are considered among the
best in the nation, they were not designed to track
pupil performance in specific skills from one grade to
the next. Each grade has a unique set of standards
and the tests for that grade are designed to measure
pupil performance against those standards, but aligned
as they are to the standards at each grade level, the
tests are not "vertically aligned" so that a pupil's
performance on any particular set of skills may be
tracked over time. As a result, this system does not
allow an accurate comparison of a pupil's growth or
decline in performance between grade levels.
2) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) . Federal law requires
states to measure the student proficiency in grades 3
through 8 and in specific subjects in high school. The
NCLB accountability measure calls for increasing
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percentages of pupils to achieve set levels of
proficiency over time towards a goal of having all
pupils "proficient" by 2013. By contrast, the state's
accountability measures call for schools to improve
each year in relation to that school's performance in
the prior year. The two different systems result in
schools judged to be failing" under the federal
system, while they are succeeding on the state index.
California and other states have requested federal waivers
to allow the use of a system that rewards growth,
rather than requiring all pupils to meet set levels of
performance. Several states were provided flexibility;
but the federal government rejected California's
request for two reasons. California does not yet have
an operational longitudinal database yet since the
California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System,
known as CALPADS, is expected to be implemented in
2010. Second, the state assessment system
does not produce pupil scores that can be compared
from year to year.
3) Academic Performance Index (API) . Currently the API
is based primarily on achievement test results and the
API is configured to produce scores measuring a
school's performance at each grade level and content
area at one point in time. The Department of
Education also calculates a "Growth API" that compares
this static performance from one year to the next.
This growth API, however, does not measure growth for
a specific group of students and is not based on
information for individual pupils; in other words that
measure may only be reflecting the differences in two
cohorts of pupils, for example last year's third grade
class vs. this year's third grade class. The current
state testing system does not measure the actual
growth for the same students over time.
4) Possible ways of measuring student growth . There are
several methods that could be employed to either
eliminate or work around this problem. On one end of
that spectrum might be a full vertical scaling effort,
which would allow a student's growth to be tracked as
the student moves up the score scale that runs from
the lowest grade level up through the highest scores
at the highest grade level and which would reflect a
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progression through the content. Since the API is an
aggregation of STAR test scores, vertical scaling of
the test scores would eliminate most of the problems
associated with using the API to compare school and
district performance across time. At the other end of
the spectrum might be approaches that rely on
statistical procedures to estimate what score, on the
average, should be achieved in a given year based on
the previous year's score or other information. In
this way a student's or school's actual score can be
compared to the projected score, and a judgment could
be made about whether the student or school grew at a
greater or lesser rate than the average. There are
many other methodologies that could be employed to
allow comparisons over time. The trade-off among
these procedures is generally between the increased
validity and accuracy of the results, and
the cost and time involved in implementing that
approach. At the two ends of the spectrum, a vertical
scaling process would be the most involved of the
approaches, while direct statistical mediations would
be less costly and faster; on the other hand
statistical mediation does not solve the underlying
problems and would suffer from greater issues with
validity.
This bill does not presume that any of these approaches is
best in terms of either maximizing the validity and
accuracy of the comparisons of individual scores or
aggregate API measure that will eventually be compared
over time or in terms of minimizing the costs of
producing these comparable measures. Instead this
bill directs the advisory committee, with the
expertise to balance these goals, to make
recommendations on the best course for the state to
proceed; the bill does, however, constrain the
advisory committee by requiring it to solve this lack
of longitudinal comparability for both individual
assessment results and for the state's aggregate
accountability measure. In other words, this bill
leads the advisory committee to those many possible
approaches where individual test scores that can
validly be compared over time are developed and used
to build up to an API that is also longitudinally
valid. What this approach rules out is an approach
that mediates the aggregate API measure without
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allowing the underlying individual test scores to be
compared over time.
5) Budget Act Required Study. The Budget Act of 2007
required a study of academic growth measures to
evaluate multiple approaches for measuring individual
pupil annual growth on the state standards. The study
examined five approaches to measuring growth,
including vertical scaling and different statistical
mediations. The study recommended that the
state proceed with a regression based approach,
consider the development of vertical scales, and not
pursue certain specific statistical approaches; the
study also noted drawbacks to these approaches, the
possibility of misunderstanding or misinterpretation
of the resulting comparisons, and the
unintended consequences that could occur with the
release of growth information to students and parents.
6) Related legislation : AB 1130 (Solorio), which is also
on today's calendar would require that the
recommendations of the Superintendent's advisory
committee regarding measuring annual academic
achievement growth must not be proprietary, must be
replicable and its results, as well as its statistical
features, must be able to be fully and accurately
explained to the public.
SUPPORT
American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees
Association of California School Administrators
California County Boards of Education
California Federation of Teachers
California School Boards Association
California State PTA
California Teachers Association
Californians Together Coalition
EdVoice
Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities
Los Angeles County Office of Education
San Francisco Unified School District
Santa Clara County Office of Education
OPPOSITION
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None received.