SBE challenges school accountability measurement, looks for options
By Kimberly Beltran
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Thursday, May 09, 2013
California’s State Board of Education raised some major red flags Wednesday over changes being considered to the state’s K-12 school accountability system, leaving in question the next steps for updating the system.
Mike Kirst, board president, even questioned whether a revised API could continue to serve as a viable measuring tool.
“In baseball, you have a batting average, you have a runs-batted-in average, you have an on-base percentage and other measures and you don’t put them all together and say this is the performance index of the hitter – they’re separate things,” Kirst said. “I think we get in trouble when we start mixing apples and oranges and bananas, throw them into a blender and get a single number.”
Kirst’s comments came during an update from California Department of Education staff on its progress to add student growth indicators, other than test scores, to the Academic Performance Index – as required under legislation passed last year. CDE staff is guiding the work in conjunction with a panel of education experts convened to recommend to
New student testing would use machines for most of the scoring
The Legislature remains undecided about if and when to move to a new testing system based on the common core standards but the new assessments mostly likely to be used are expected to have about 75 percent of the test items machine scored – including a fair number of reading and writing elements.