Say farewell to the API as you know it. Welcome to new era of accountability, with at least a couple years of confusion in between.
The release Thursday of the results on the state’s Academic Performance Index marks the end of a decade of judging student performance based on test scores alone. Within three years, California will have moved to a very different system in which scores on the newly introduced Common Core assessments and other state standardized tests will be but one spectrum in the prism for evaluating schools and districts.
There will be new, multiple measures that could include high school and middle school graduation rates, rates of absenteeism, reclassification of English learners, passage on Advanced Placement exams or a mix of other indicators.
How these measures will fit together – whether they can even be combined coherently in one index – will be the State Board of Education’s challenge.
In the law laying out the Local Control Funding Formula, legislators laid out eight priority areas for evaluating the effectiveness of a school, with says to measure them. Source: charter from the Legislative Analyst’s Office report “An Overview of the Local Control Funding Formula,” July 2013. Click for clarity.
The Legislature gave the board until October 2015 to solve it in the law