BILL ANALYSIS �
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
AB 2001 (Bonilla) - Pupil Assessment System.
Amended: July 5, 2012 Policy Vote: Education 8-0
Urgency: No Mandate: No
Hearing Date: August 6, 2012
Consultant: Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez
This bill meets the criteria for referral to the Suspense File.
Bill Summary: AB 2001 requires plans relative to early
assessments and making standardized assessments more meaningful
to pupils to be developed as part of the process for
reauthorization of the state's K-12 assessment system.
Fiscal Impact:
Develop plans: The California Department of Education (CDE)
estimates that it will incur $175,000 in General Fund costs
to develop the plans required in this bill. Title VI federal
funds are not available for this purpose.
Implementation: Unknown, likely substantial, ongoing costs.
The total costs of this bill will depend on the scope and
substance of the recommendations produced by the
Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) in consultation
with required parties and adopted by the State Board of
Education (SBE). The plans required in the bill change the
way students may be assessed, and expand early assessment
programs.
Background: Existing law establishes the Standardized Testing
and Reporting Program (STAR) as the state's primary K-12
assessment system. This program consists of: (a) California
Standards Tests (CST), including tests in Spanish for specified
grades; (b) the Spanish Assessment of Basic Education primary
language test, and (c) the California Alternative Performance
Assessment for special education pupils. The STAR program is
scheduled to sunset in 2014.
The United States Department of Education issued a competitive
grant for the development of a comprehensive assessment system
based on the Common Core Standards in English language arts
(ELA) and mathematics that would adhere to federal testing
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requirements. Two assessment consortia were funded through this
process: the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for
College and Careers and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment
Consortium. Both consortia are working toward developing an
assessment system to help participating states transition to
Common Core Standards, and are scheduled to operationalize
assessments 2014-15.
In June 2010, California joined the SMARTER Balanced consortium.
Participation in this consortium requires California to
administer and use the assessments developed by the consortium
in the 2014-15 school year.
Proposed Law: AB 2001 requires plans and extensive planning
processes relative to early assessments, the early assessment
program, and making assessments more meaningful to be developed
as part of the process for reauthorization of the state's K-12
assessment system. Specifically, this bill:
1) Declares legislative intent that the process of
reauthorizing the state's assessment system include both: a) A
plan to bring together elementary and secondary school policy
leaders, higher education institutions, and postsecondary career
technical and vocational programs to develop criteria and create
pathways in which assessments taken by middle and high school
pupils are aligned with college and career readiness, as
specified; and, b) a plan for transitioning to a system of
high-quality assessments that has tangible meaning to individual
middle and high school pupils.
2) Requires the SPI, for the purposes of developing a plan to
strengthen the relevance of assessments to pupils and strengthen
the alignment between middle and high school assessments and the
entry or placement requirements of universities and career and
technical training institutions, to develop and recommend to the
SBE, all of the following: a) Principles among elementary and
secondary schools, higher education institutions, and
postsecondary career and technical training institutions that
would strengthen the alignment of assessments of pupils in
grades 7-12 to the requirements of entry into college or career
opportunities; b) options for using the grade 11 assessments in
core subjects and options for this grade's assessment results in
English language arts (ELA) to be used for effective placement
for grade 12 English learners so they may strive for full
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English proficiency before they graduate from high school; and,
c) a plan and a timeline to expand and strengthen future early
assessment programs to provide information to postsecondary
institutions, secondary schools, and pupils about the
preparedness of all of the state's postsecondary institutions.
3) For the purposes of the developing the plans, requires the
SPI to consult with: the SBE, higher education segments, career
technical and training institutions, school administrators,
teachers, schools board members, pupil representatives, and
parents.
4) Requires the SPI, for the purposes of developing a plan to
make assessments more meaningful to pupils, to recommend
multiple methods to provide for pupil recognition, reward, and
incentives that a school district may adopt, including:
inclusion of scores on transcripts, inclusion in final course
grades, exemption from other assessments, etc. Further requires
that developing the plan shall include consulting with the SBE,
school administrators, teachers, school board members, pupil
representatives, and parents.
5) Requires the SPI to present recommendations to the SBE by
May 30, 2014, and requires the SBE to hold two regularly
scheduled public meetings after the SPI presents its
recommendations. The SBE is required to adopt, or modify and
adopt, the recommendation by September 30, 2014. The SBE and SPI
are required to present to the Governor and appropriate policy
and fiscal committees a schedule and implementation plan.
6) Requires the CDE to use federal Title VI funds or any other
available and appropriate state and federal funds to implement
this bill.
Related Legislation: AB 250 (Brownley) Ch. 608/2011, required
the SPI to develop recommendations for reauthorization of the
state's assessment system, including a plan for transitioning to
a system of high quality assessments and determining which
assessments are not valuable to pupils, administrators, and
teachers and therefore, should be eliminated. This plan is
required to be finished by November 1, 2012.
Staff Comments: This bill will result in both (direct and)
immediate costs to complete the plans and recommendations it
requires, and future costs to implement the new recommendations.
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According to the CDE, this bill would result in one-time costs
of $175,000 to create the SPI recommendations, as described in
the bill. This cost includes: a) convening expert panels and
focus groups, in order to comply with the bill's consultation
requirements; b) staff time; c) materials; d) participant travel
expenses; and, e) public hearings. The CDE believes these tasks
could be accomplished by existing staff, but would require
significant time to be involved with the various coordination
efforts of the bill. If the SBE did not simply adopt the SPI's
recommendations, but rather rejected or sought to modify them,
there would be additional costs to revise those recommendations.
Cost pressure to implement plans/recommendations: Implementing
plans for transitioning to a system of high-quality assessments
that has tangible meaning to individual middle and high school
pupils, as described in this bill, is likely to result in
substantial new coordination and programmatic costs. The SPI is
required to propose "options" for changing the use of
standardized test results, and it is not clear what those
options will be, or whether they will be options for school
districts or options for the state, which may place related
mandates on school districts. For example, one option the bill
expressly permits is a proposal for making standardized test
scores meaningful that involves inclusion on a pupil's
transcript, at the request of the pupil's parent. If such an
option were adopted at the state level, school districts could
be mandated to add information to transcripts at a parent's
request. Another option discussed in the bill is a pupil's right
to be exempted from required statewide assessments "if
equivalent or more rigorous exams are taken and equivalent or
sufficiently comparable subject matter proficiency is shown".
This broad language could result in a recommendation to
establish a system of determining equivalencies between state
exams and other subject exams, such as Advanced Placement exams.
Costs or savings would entirely depend on the recommendation and
how it is implemented.
Early assessment programs : This bill makes multiple references
to expanding "early assessment programs" without defining the
term. Currently, there is a program called the Early Assessment
Program (EAP) that is a collaborative effort among the SBE, the
CDE and the California State University (CSU). That program was
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established to provide opportunities for students to measure
their readiness for college-level English and mathematics in
their junior year of high school, and to facilitate
opportunities for them to improve their skills during their
senior year. The EAP provides a CST augmentation for 11th grade
students, which assesses their readiness for meeting college
performance standards. The EAP also has a teacher development
component focusing on helping teachers instruct students on more
effective writing. It is not clear whether the author intends to
expand this existing EAP program, or simply to expand programs
with similar goals.
This bill specifies that the SPI must develop a "plan and
timeline to expand and strengthen future early assessment
programs" which implies that it is a more general expansion of
potential future programs. It also lists among the options for
inclusion in the SPI's recommendations "Making future early
assessment programs available to all pupils at all schools";
this seems to suggest that the early assessments envisioned are
fundamentally different from the existing program of testing and
supporting high school students. The cost of the expansion and
strengthening of early assessment programs will depend on what
is proposed by the SPI; this bill leaves broad discretion.
Title VI funds: The CDE has indicated that Title VI funds are
not available to implement this bill. Other state or federal
funds would need to be used.