BILL ANALYSIS �
AB 180
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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
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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.
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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
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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 �enrolled 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
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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
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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
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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