BILL ANALYSIS
AB 2273
Page 1
Date of Hearing: April 21, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
AB 2273 (Torlakson) - As Introduced: February 18, 2010
SUBJECT : Education: performance accountability
SUMMARY : Establishes the California Education Opportunity
(CEO) Index to measure both academic performance and
opportunities that elementary and secondary schools provided
students to prepare them for graduation and for becoming
responsible and contributing community members after graduation.
Specifically, this bill :
1)Adds to Legislative findings and declarations regarding the
state of education in California, the need for a reliable and
transparent accountability and reporting mechanism, and the
need for an accountability system that encourages the
preparation of each pupil for life after graduation, as well
as for academic achievement.
2)States Legislative intent that the accountability and
reporting system focus on a broad range of factors related to
student success, be used to provide transparency rather than
sanctions, and be used to measure characteristics beyond
student achievement, including attendance and graduation,
opportunities for college and career, opportunities in civic
participation and study beyond mathematics and language arts,
and fitness and health.
3)States Legislative intent to encourage teacher preparation,
involvement of pupils, parents and community, and high quality
education that helps every pupil to graduate and be
successful; also states intent to utilize state data systems
in developing the CEO Index.
4)Adds the CEO Index to the Public School Performance
Accountability Program that now includes the Academic
Performance Index (API), the Immediate Intervention/
Underperforming Schools Program, and the Governor's High
Achieving/Improving Schools Program.
5)Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to
develop the CEO Index consisting of, but not limited to,
AB 2273
Page 2
measures or data showing the following:
a) Academic performance, including the API.
b) Attendance and graduation.
c) Preparation of students for college and career.
d) Preparation of students for civic responsibility.
e) Enhancement of student learning beyond the core academic
curriculum and into the subject areas of leadership, the
arts, physical education, advanced academics, world
language acquisition, and career technical education.
f) Student fitness and health.
6)Requires the SPI to establish a representative and diverse
committee to advise the SPI and State Board of Education (SBE)
on the creation and reporting of the CEO Index, and requires
the committee to:
a) Consist of a majority of public classroom teachers.
b) Make recommendations to the SPI and SBE by July 1, 2012,
on the collecting, updating, and reporting of CEO Index
data.
EXISTING LAW :
1)Requires the SPI, with the approval of the SBE, to develop and
implement the 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
AB 2273
Page 3
measure of a school's growth over time.
4)Requires that a measure of graduation in the fifth and sixth
year of high school be developed and included in the
calculation of the API, with partial credit included in a
school's or district's API for pupils graduating in 5 or 6
years and full credit for pupils with disabilities graduating
within 6 years.
5)Authorizes schools in the alternative accountability system to
receive an API score, but prohibits the inclusion of those
schools in API rankings.
6)Establishes the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR)
Program to test academic skills in grades 2-11, and to report
individual and aggregate results.
7)Requires that each school district produce an annual School
Accountability Report Card (SARC) for each school in the
district, including various specific data elements describing
the school and its condition.
8)Requires the CDE to develop a standardized template for the
SARC, post it on the Internet, and develop and recommend
standardized definitions for the SARC elements in order to
clarify, regularize, and streamline schools' compliance.
FISCAL EFFECT : Unknown
COMMENTS : Current law requires the SPI to develop and
administer the school accountability system which assigns each
school a score on the API 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, 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 to increases 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
AB 2273
Page 4
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.
In addition, California's public school accountability system
has no mechanism for measuring success in terms of outcomes or
opportunities beyond core academic performance, including civic
and community responsibility, career or college readiness and
acquisition of life skills; the current accountability system
also has no way of identifying or rewarding those schools that
educate the whole pupil in any way other than tested skills and
knowledge in mathematics, language arts, history and science.
The CEO Index proposed in this bill is intended to augment the
current API, and to include information on student opportunities
and student success so as to provide broader and more
comprehensive information on school performance than is
available from the API focus on achievement test scores only.
The CEO Index would aggregate information related to seven
different dimensions of student performance and opportunity,
including academic performance, attendance, graduation rates,
preparation for career or post-secondary education, civic and
community participation, enhanced student learning
opportunities, and student fitness and health. Academic
performance, in the form of STAR test results in a limited
number of subject areas, are included in the API; attendance and
graduation rates are authorized to be included in the API by the
SPI, but have never been so included. The remaining areas of
performance or opportunity are not authorized to be included in
AB 2273
Page 5
the API, although the state does produce physical fitness test
results at grades five, seven and nine.
According to the author, "In the past 10 years California has
made slow but steady progress improving student's academic
performance. Although academic progress is extremely
important, California has neglected the larger discussion: What
does a California High School diploma mean in a 21st Century
Economy & Society? The CEO index is a step toward defining what
a high school diploma means."
The author also states that "Parents, students and community
members want to know what opportunities exist in schools to
learn drama, art, physical education and a variety of other
subjects. Currently, there is no easy way to highlight these
opportunities that exist in our schools. This index gives the
public a tool to review the many opportunities in public
schools. Business leaders have explained the skills they want
and need for a 21st century workforce. Employers need students
to be creative and innovative, be problem solvers with critical
thinking skills and be able to communication in a collaborative
fashion. Our global society requires students learn
problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. Students can
develop these skills in a multitude of ways such as the arts,
music, language, 21st century learning skills, civic or
community participation. Currently, parents and the public may
not know how or if schools are providing students with the
classes or opportunities to develop problem solving and critical
thinking skills."
Unfortunately, these skills are not measured by the API. The
stated intent of the author is to create a transparent and
accountable tool, that can be used by students' parents and
communities to understand how their schools are performing in
the broader task of educating our students.
It should be noted that this bill only builds on the current
requirement to include graduation rates and attendance in the
API by incorporating these and other measures of the success of
schools into the CEO Index; this bill does not change the
current requirement that the SPI determine the extent to which
the data are currently reported to the state and the accuracy of
that data, before including high school graduation rates and
attendance rates in the API, nor does this bill change any
definitions or requirements related to the API. The CEO Index
AB 2273
Page 6
would make use of some data elements that are currently reported
at the school level in each school's School Accountability
Report Card (SARC), which is required to be produced annually
for each school by each district in the state.
This bill also requires the SPI to establish a representative
and diverse committee to advise the SPI and SBE on the creation
and reporting of the CEO Index, and requires that the committee
consist of a majority of public classroom teachers and make
recommendations on the collecting, updating and reporting of CEO
Index data to the SPI and SBE by July 1, 2012,
Committee amendments: Committee staff recommends for both
policy and fiscal reasons that the bill be amended to require
the SPI to establish a representative and diverse committee to
advise the SPI and SBE on the creation and reporting of the CEO
Index by making use of the existing API Advisory Committee, but
augmenting that existing committee, for the purposes of this
bill only, in order to ensure that the majority of the resulting
CEO Index Advisory Committee consist of public classroom
teachers and that the resulting committee is also representative
and diverse as the author intends.
Related legislation: AB 2013 (Arambula), pending in the
Assembly Education Committee, 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. AB 2307 (Carter), pending in the Assembly Education
Committee, requires the SPI and SBE to allow a dropout recovery
high school to use an individual pupil growth model, meeting
specified criteria, as part of the alternative accountability
model.
Previous legislation: AB 1130 (Solorio), Chapter 273, Statutes
of 2009, states legislative intent regarding the examination of
methods for making and reporting comparisons of school and
district academic achievement over time based on a cohort growth
measure. AB 429 (Brownley), vetoed in 2009, would have required
examination of methods for making and reporting valid
comparisons of individual academic performance over time and for
making potential improvements in the Academic Performance Index
AB 2273
Page 7
(API), so as to be able to measure and report both a student's
and a school's academic growth over time. AB 1061 (Mullin),
Chapter 530, Statutes of 2007, makes changes to simplify the
annual School Accountability Report Card (SARC). 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. SB 1448 (Alpert),
Chapter 233, Statutes of 2004, reauthorized the STAR Program.
SB 257 (Alpert), Chapter 782, Statutes of 2003, requires the
advisory committee established to advise the SPI on the API to
make recommendations to the SPI on a methodology for generating
a "gain" score measurement to provide more accurate measure of a
school's growth over time. 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 and development of the API. SB 376
(Alpert), Chapter 828, Statutes of 1997, authorized development
and implementation of the STAR Program.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
California Alliance for Arts Education
California Federation of Teachers
Californians Together
Public Advocates
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087
AB 2273
Page 8