Steinberg’s API alternative
Bill would give Brown lots of leeway
Rebuffed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year, Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is back with another academic accountability bill, this time giving the governor lots of latitude to help redefine how to measure schools’ performance. SB 1458 needs to be vague, because, at this point, no one but Brown professes to know what he has in mind.
Recognizing that the Academic Performance Index, based predominantly on English and math standardized test results, was too narrow a gauge, Steinberg last year proposed replacing the API with an Education Quality Index that would have included other indexes, such as dropout rates, the need for remediation in college, success with career technical education programs, and graduation rates. Standardized tests would have counted no more than 40 percent of the EQI in high school. Steinberg and key supporter Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson built an impressive coalition of supporters – business and civil rights groups, career and technical education groups, charter schools, the state PTA, and early childhood education advocates.
But in his veto message of SB547, Brown criticized the continued reliance on quantitative measures. “SB 547 would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools. Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a high-performance machine.”
In the new bill, Steinberg would retain the 40 percent maximum use of the API, and would instruct Torlakson to expand the use of science and history tests within it. As for the remaining 60 percent, SB 1458 would allow Torlakson and the State Board of Education to incorporate another idea that Brown mentioned in his veto message and State of the State message: school inspections or visitations to measure the quality of learning and instruction not measured by standardized tests. Brown has not clarified if he is talking about a corps of outside inspectors, as is used in England by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) or a less formal system of intradistrict inspections.
The State Board, led by Brown advisor Michael Kirst, plans to make the adoption of new accountability measures a priority this year. At his instigation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization WestEd has surveyed other states’ accountability systems and analyzed all of the data that the state collects. Its report has not yet been released.
The timing is right for a new accountability system. Brown proposes to give near-total control over spending and budget decisions to local districts this year, as part of his school finance reforms. It will become imperative to create better ways to measure whether schools are providing a rich environment for learning, spending dollars effectively on students who have been targeted for extra money, and preparing students well for post high school jobs and colleges.
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Bravo to the Senate leader! We have to make our accountability system more meaningful to students, parents, the media, employers and the general public, while directly confronting the harmful, curricular narrowing pressures of the current index.
Let’s hope the Administration steps up this year with more than just stones to throw at Steinberg’s good-faith and admirable legislative endeavor.
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Round two: Senator Darrell Steinberg is again the point person for gutting a decade-old system of serious objective academic accountability in this state — the Academic Performance Index — that allows communities and families to learn annually how their public schools and their children are performing in the essential skills of reading and math and on the required CA High School Exit Exam. As before, Governor Brown should not fall for this regressive measure. He should maintain the API at its present weight in measuring school effectiveness because it’s in the public interest to do so.
Steinberg’s proposed changes reduce the influence of actual test results from an existing 60% to a less-than-half 40% in determining a school’s standing in relation to others. He proposes to make up the difference with amorphous, subjective, pseudo-measures to form a toothless “Education Quality Index.”
The existing Academic Performance Index is derived from results of annual standardized tests that are themselves based on California Standards for what students should be taught and need to learn in grades 2 – 11. The API is neither “too narrow a gauge” nor need it result in “harmful curricular narrowing.” In fact, the tests should be improved to include actual student writing samples beyond the multiple-choice fill-in-the-bubble format and should be expanded to cover other subjects that are included in the Standards. If the curriculum is narrow, it’s because the school day/year is too short.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Senator Steinberg, a good Democrat and Speaker of the State Senate, is representing an ally, the politically powerful California Teachers Association, by offering these watered-down changes to the API. CTA hopes to take advantage of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown by pushing this strategic weakening of the API because it’s based on results from standardized testing.
This latest bill is CTA’s muscular if defensive response to highly controversial “value-added” measures based on test scores that may be used to evaluate classroom teachers and affect their continuing employment.”Value-added” was tried out in Los Angeles last year and became law in all of New York State in February. As noted in the story above, Senator Steinberg continues this quest along with “key supporter Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson” who is himself a former teacher and termed-out Democratic State Senator.
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Thank you Mrs. O’Neill Zimmerman for continuing to support accountability. I too, would like to see writing rather than bubbles, not least because that was my own educational experience and one that served me well. I would expand the accountability to a measure of how well schools are preparing students in Music, as well as the Visual and Performing Arts. Portfolio type assessments using a carefully moderated system to ensure validity of scores would be effective. This has been in place for decades in the UK, and strengthens learning while reducing the impact of the final examination in subjects that are better served by longer projects.
I am weary of administrators and teachers ignoring these aforementioned essential elements of learning and expression, so perhaps assessment would force them to pay attention to the Standards already in place. In the current climate, unless parents pay for these “extras” they are cut immediately. A “fee for service” is not part of the public education system in California, and classroom teachers in K-5 should be either teaching the content and skills explicitly, as well as integrating them into daily activities. As a kid I learned a great deal from integrated math – art projects, as well as developing simple drama skits to improve spoken and written dialogue. If anyone has any ideas as to how to “encourage” a school district to include these subjects, I’d appreciate it. The senior music staffer at the CDE was not much help – just said there was “local control..” while expressing her personal concerns that there wasn’t more that she could do to ensure schools taught those curriculum areas. Equity in opportunity was clearly troubling her – as it is me – because parent ability/willingness to pay for those areas of learning should not be the primary criteria for children’s access to them.
Years ago in SDUSD there was attempt to introduce portfolio assessments in high schools to demonstrate writing across the disciplines. Because there was no “hammer” it was killed by an active refusal of many teachers to “do something extra” – so a few of us ended up doing most of the work. It was a valuable process, and one in which my students took great pride. Since I enjoy math and science, although a Humanities teacher, it was a “doable” process for me to assist students as they articulated their content knowledge through writing. But, because it wasn’t part of the “contract” a learning tool that provides deep analysis, research, and complex writing skills was gone before it had the opportunity to flourish. Regrettably, without the “hammer” of the API, there’d be a lot less going on in some classrooms. If you don’t believe that – spend a year as a substitute teacher, with about a week at a time in each school, all across the spectrum. You’d be amazed you were in the same system – I know I was in my first year teaching in the US! Even a day in some schools was enough to make me wonder how/why the students endured it.
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