Call to restore CALPADS money
Agency faces layoffs of 40 workers
Speaking no doubt for many of his peers, the data administrator overseeing compliance with CALPADS for Long Beach Unified is urging the Legislature to quickly restore money that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed for the besieged statewide student data system. The failure to do so will lead to the shutdown later this month of the state agency that supports and trains local districts in uploading critical data that the federal government demands, John Novak, the Long Beach administrator, wrote in a letter he circulated last week among legislators. Long Beach is the state’s third largest school district and recognized as a leader in using data.
A month ago, Schwarzenegger deleted from the state budget nearly $7 million in operating money, effective Dec. 6, for the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, which IBM is building under a contract with the state Department of Education. The governor expressed frustration with delays and errors, which have put the system a year behind schedule, and he called on the upcoming Legislature to consider a different manager of the system.
But Novak argues that “the undeserved target” of the veto is the California School Information Services, a small agency that runs the help desk for CALPADS and trains district personnel on using the system. Novak asserts – and others have confirmed – that CSIS will actually run out of money in mid-November, three weeks before the Dec. 6 date cited in the governor’s veto. Joel Montero, CEO of the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which run CSIS, confirmed that as many as 40 CSIS employees may have to be given layoff notices within the next month.
“The Governor’s veto has generated a tremendous amount of angst, anxiety, and anger among those of us at the LEA level … as we consider the not-at-all-attractive prospect of moving into an uncertain new realm without our most trusted and reliable support system,” Novak wrote, referring to CSIS.
Novak acknowledged that bad decisions by IBM and the Department of Education and a failure to communicate with districts the first year “conspired to bring the system to its knees.” But, backing up the claims of the Department of Education, Novak said that things have turned around. “Plainly speaking, the CALPADS system is working,” he wrote, adding that he expects the critical next phase of uploading CALPADS data, known as Fall 2, will go smoothly.
But Dec. 6, when the veto takes effect, also coincides with the start of the reporting period for Fall 2, leaving districts without anyone from the state to consult with about reporting problems.
One way or another, the state must report dropout, graduation, and other data to the federal government by next September. A months-long stoppage in feeding data to CALPADS could create a mess, forcing already-stretched-thin local district employees to work around the system.
Novak’s letter adds urgency to the Legislature to take a two-pronged approach: to quickly restore money for CSIS and core CALPADS operating dollars and then separately and deliberately to create new oversight for IBM and CALPADS, in the process settling unresolved governance questions regarding access and control of the system.
If the legislature is going to bring-up the topic of fixing CALPADS, it should simultaneously bring-up the other elephant in California’s student data system: The astonishingly low utility of California’s STAR assessment system, especially the California Standards Tests.
Even if the CALPADS data system is fixed, we still won’t have good data to put into it. Why bother with a complex, longitudinal data system if (as is the current case) we have no longitudinal assessment data worth tracking? Focusing so much time and money on CALPADS while our assessment systems are disfunctional is nuts. It’s a bit like buying fancy crystal stemware to drink Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.
This is not to take anything away from the hard work of CSIS, nor do I differ with John Novak’s point that CSIS staff are collateral damage in a larger fight.
If, however, California is going to simply continue to ignore the embarassingly low quality of its assessment system, it might as well have an equally non-functional data system and give the money to schools and districts to select their own assessments and data systems (as we did some years ago). Ihave little doubt that a brainiac like Novak and his data-oriented colleagues at Long Beach could do much better than the state.
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Eric: I absolutely agree CA could be doing a whole lot more to make their statewide assessment system data more amenable to accountability uses. But to paint the entire system with a description of “embarassingly low quality” is a bit much. Fact is that CA’s STAR system is now kinda a middle of the pack assessment system, just like our performance standards per the recent AIR study that John described several days ago. It does not have vertical scaling [only about half the statewide assessment systems in the US do have this property], and lack of ability to make grade-to-grade comparisons within content areas severely hampers ability to conduct longitudinal accountability analyses. STAR could have vertical scaling without interfering with its basic structure if it was a priority, but so far it hasn’t been a priority for the CDE or SPI or SBE or OSE or anyone else with influence in Sacramento. There are a number of assessment system infrastructure elements that need attention that would enhance our statewide assessment system as an accountability tool — better year-to-year equating data [also needed to reduce turnaround time drastically] and adherence to statutory requirements for development of performance standards [i.e., standards-based performance level descriptors] are two such elements that come to mind in addition to vertical scaling. These infrastructure elements are the “mortar” part of high quality “bricks and mortar” needed to build a top drawer statewide assessment system that provides good accountability data. What CA has right now is a bunch of pretty decent individual tests to serve as the bricks but poor quality mortar to help with the connectivity of the bricks. Doug McRae, Retired Test Publisher, Monterey, CA
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If funding is restored CSIS needs to be put in charge. Production should be stopped until the SSID and Fall 1 tasks are streamlined. They need to stop pushing forward to Fall 2 until they fix what needs to be fixed.
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