BILL ANALYSIS �
SB 1458
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Date of Hearing: June 27, 2012
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
SB 1458 (Steinberg) - As Amended: June 14, 2012
SENATE VOTE : 24-11
SUBJECT : School accountability: Academic Performance Index:
graduation rates
SUMMARY : Makes changes to the composition and use of the
Academic Performance Index (API). Specifically, this bill :
1)Provides that achievement test results shall constitute no
more than 40% of the value of the API for secondary schools
commencing with the 2014-15 school year.
2)Provides that achievement test results shall constitute at
least 40% of the value of the API for primary and middle
schools commencing with the 2014-15 school year.
3)Authorizes the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI),
with the approval of the State Board of Education (SBE), to:
a) Incorporate the rates at which pupils successfully
promote from one grade to the next in middle school and
high school and successfully matriculate from middle school
to high school into the API;
b) Incorporate valid, reliable, and stable measures of
pupil preparedness for postsecondary education and careers
into the secondary school API; and
c) Develop and implement a program of school quality review
that features locally convened panels to visit schools,
observe teachers, interview students, and examine student
work, if an appropriation for this purpose is made in the
annual Budget Act.
4)Requires that, when additional elements are selected for the
API they not be incorporated into the API until at least one
full year after the SBE made the decision.
5)Requires the SPI to annually provide to local education
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agencies and the public an understandable explanation of the
individual components of the API and their relative values
within the API.
6)Repeals the requirement to use the API to select schools for
participation in the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming
Schools Program (II/USP) and to rank schools pursuant to the
High Achieving/Improving Schools Program (HA/ISP).
7)Requires the SPI, on or before October 1, 2013, and in
consultation with the Public School Accountability Act
advisory committee, to:
a) Report to the Legislature and recommend to the SBE for
adoption a method or methods to increase the emphasis on
pupil performance in science and social science in the API;
b) Report to the Legislature a plan to streamline and
reduce state-mandated middle and secondary school testing;
and
c) Report to the Legislature an alternative method or
methods, in place of decile rank, for determining
eligibility, preferences, or priorities for any statutory
program that currently uses decile rank as a determining
factor.
8)Expresses the intent of the Legislature that the state's
system of public school accountability be more closely aligned
with the public's expectations for public education and the
workforce needs of the state's economy and that the state's
accountability system evolve beyond its narrow focus on pupil
test scores to encompass other valuable information about
school performance, as specified.
9)Finds and declares that the overreliance of the API has been
limited by an overreliance on the Standardized Testing and
Reporting Program (STAR) test scores, that the API does not
indicate the degree to which a school has prepared its pupils
for success in postsecondary education and career, and that
the transition to new common core academic content standards
and related assessments present an opportunity to reexamine
the state system of public school accountability.
EXISTING LAW establishes the Academic Performance Index (API),
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which summarizes a school's or a local educational agency's
(LEA's) academic performance and progress on statewide
assessments. The API is a single number ranging from 200 to
1,000 and is required to include a variety of indicators,
including results of the Standardized Testing and Reporting
Program (STAR) tests, attendance rates, and high school
graduation rates. Existing law requires that achievement test
scores constitute at least 60% of the API. However, the only
indicators used so far to calculate the API have been test
scores, so, in practice, test scores constitute 100% of the API.
Among other things, the API is used to rank schools into
deciles, based on their API scores. Each school receives two
ranks-one relative to all other schools in the state and one
relative to 100 other schools with similar pupil demographics.
Decile ranks are used for a variety of purposes, including:
1)Identifying schools for participation in the II/USP and HA/ISP
programs;
2)Compliance with the Williams settlement;
3)Charter school renewal;
4)Identifying schools for the Open Enrollment Act;
5)Identifying eligible schools for the Assumption Program of
Loans for Education;
6)Reporting on the School Accountability Report Card (SARC);
7)Determining allowable expenditures for the Professional
Development Block Grant; and
8)Identifying eligible schools for the Quality Education
Investment Act.
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Senate Appropriations
Committee analysis:
1)One-time costs of $200,000 to $250,000 to the California
Department of Education (CDE) to research and implement data
indicators for career and college readiness, incorporate
indicators into the API, and to incorporate the new data
collection into the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement
Data System (CALPADS) as well as for additional meetings of
the school accountability advisory committee.
2)Substantial cost pressure for the SPI to develop and implement
the school quality review program that is authorized by this
bill. Depending on the design of quality reviews, they would
likely involve substantial state and local staff time to visit
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and evaluate schools.
3)Unknown fiscal impact on individual schools. Certain funding
is tied to API scores, as is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP),
and charter schools are evaluated for renewal and revocation
based in part on API scores. Changing the constitution of the
API score will impact all schools, but costs or savings at the
local level will vary.
COMMENTS : According to the author, "It is time for the API to
evolve into a less punitive, more constructive representation of
school performance, and to encompass a more comprehensive set of
expectations and aspirations for school performance, such as
graduation and/or dropout rates, and, as appropriate, measures
of pupil preparedness for college and career." A recent report
from Education Sector, "Ready by Design: A College and Career
Agenda for California" (June 2012) finds that there is no
correlation between a school's API score and its graduation or
college enrollment rates and concludes that the API is a flawed
measure of college and career readiness. The report suggests
that other measures, which are based on data that are already
collected and that are better indicators of college and career
readiness, could be added to the API at the high school level.
These measures include:
1)High school graduation and/or dropout rates;
2)Data on pupils who pass the "a-g" requirements (coursework
required for admission to the University of California);
3)Passage rates and test-taking rates on Advanced Placement and
Early Assessment Program exams; and
4)Data on enrollment in postsecondary institutions.
Another report from the National Governors Association (NGA),
"Creating a College and Career Readiness Accountability Model
for High Schools" (January 2012), states that, "In a time when
there is a national consensus that schools should focus on
students' college and career readiness, it is critical for
states to design accountability systems that measure the numbers
of students who are college and career ready." The NGA Center
for Best Practices recommends that states consider the following
principles when designing a college and career readiness
accountability system for high schools:
1)Use multiple measures to determine school and district
performance.
2)Provide incentives for preparing the hardest-to-serve students
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for college and careers.
3)Set realistic targets for accountability measures.
Regarding the use of multiple measures, the NGA Center states
that measures need to take into account the full picture of
student performance, while guarding against having too many
measures. Measures, according to the NGA Center, should be
meaningful (i.e., directly linked to the overall performance
goal of college and career readiness), actionable (so that
teachers and administrators know how to help students improve on
that particular measure), and limited (so educators are not
stretched too thin or overwhelmed).
Another report from Education Sector, "On Her Majesty's School
Inspection Service" (2012), describes the system of school site
inspections used in England. That system is known as the
"Ofsted" system (Office for Standards in Education, Children's
Services and Skills), and was created by Parliament in 1992.
Under that system, schools receive a narrative report describing
its specific strengths and weaknesses in key areas along with
its accountability rating. The report argues that the narrative
report provides a guide to corrective action that leads to
faster improvement. The report estimates that the cost of
conducting such a system in California would range from $63.7
million to $130.9 million annually.
Clarification needed. This bill requires the SPI, "as
additional elements are incorporated into the API, �to] annually
provide to local educational agencies and the public a
transparent and understandable explanation of the individual
components of the API and their relative values within the API."
This is unclear whether the explanation is to be provided
annually or just when additional elements are added. It is the
author's intend that this information be included as part of an
annual reporting requirement. Therefore, staff recommends that
this be clarified by striking "as additional elements are
incorporated into the API."
Eliminate duplicative reporting requirement. This bill requires
the SPI, on or before October 1, 2013, to report to the
Legislature a plan to streamline and reduce state-mandated pupil
testing. However, AB 250 (Brownley), Chapter 608, Statutes of
2011, already requires to SPI to develop recommendations to
minimize testing time "while not jeopardizing the validity,
reliability, fairness, or instructional usefulness of the
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assessment results." The recommendations required by AB 250 are
due to the Legislature on or before November 1, 2012. Staff
recommends that this bill be amended to strike the additional
reporting requirement.
Related legislation. SB 547 (Steinberg) would have replaced the
API with a broader-based Education Quality Index. SB 547 was
vetoed by the Governor with the following message:
"I am returning Senate Bill 547 without my signature.
This bill is yet another siren song of school reform.
It renames the Academic Performance Index (API) and
reduces its significance by adding three other
quantitative measures.
While I applaud the author's desire to improve the
API, I don't believe that this bill would make our
state's accountability regime either more probing or
more fair.
This bill requires a new collection of indices called
the "Education Quality Index" (EQI), consisting of
"multiple indicators," many of which are ill-defined
and some impossible to design. These "multiple
indicators" are expected to change over time, causing
measurement instability and muddling the picture of
how schools perform.
SB 547 would also add significant costs and confusion
to the implementation of the newly-adopted Common Core
standards which must be in place by 2014. This bill
would require us to introduce a whole new system of
accountability at the same time we are required to
carry out extensive revisions to school curriculum,
teaching materials and tests. That doesn't make sense.
Finally, while SB 547 attempts to improve the API, it
relies on the same quantitative and standardized
paradigm at the heart of the current system. The
criticism of the API is that it has led schools to
focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other
subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded
education. SB 547 certainly would add more things to
measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually
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improve our schools. Adding more speedometers to a
broken car won't turn it into a high-performance
machine.
Over the last 50 years, academic "experts" have
subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change
and experimentation. The current fashion is to collect
endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing
indicators of performance to distinguish the
educational "good" from the educational "bad." Instead
of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing
nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for
ever more measurement "visions and revisions."
A sign hung in Albert Einstein's office read "Not
everything that counts can be counted, and not
everything that can be counted counts."
SB 547 nowhere mentions good character or love of
learning. It does allude to student excitement and
creativity, but does not take these qualities
seriously because they can't be placed in a data
stream. Lost in the bill's turgid mandates is any
recognition that quality is fundamentally different
from quantity.
There are other ways to improve our schools - to
indeed focus on quality. What about a system that
relies on locally convened panels to visit schools,
observe teachers, interview students, and examine
student work? Such a system wouldn't produce an API
number, but it could improve the quality of our
schools.
I look forward to working with the author to craft
more inspiring ways to encourage our students to do
their best."
AB 224 (Bonilla) would have required the SPI, in consultation
with the SBE, to add specified indicators to the API. AB 224
was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
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Support
American Association of University Women-California
California Association of Regional Occupational Centers and
Programs
California Association of School Counselors, Inc.
California Association of Work Experience Educators
California Business Education Association
California Correctional Peace Officers Association
California Council for the Social Studies
California Manufacturers and Technology Association
California State PTA
Children Now
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids-California
Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce
Metropolitan Education District
North State Building Industry Association
Policy Link
United Ways of California
University of California
Opposition
None of file
Analysis Prepared by : Rick Pratt / ED. / (916) 319-2087