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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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