Toward a holistic education in a post-API California
Q: To which California demographic group has the Academic Performance Index score, known as the API, ranking all of the state’s schools, been of the most benefit since its introduction in 1999?
A: Realtors.
You know the pitch: “Folks, are you kidding me, a house on this block, we’re talking Stanford early admission virtually guaranteed! Richard Henry Dana Middle School? Check it out: a 956 on the API, it’s like you’re getting little Einsteins just for walking in the door!”
More than 15 years after its implementation, it can be a little hard to remember that one of the promises of the California API, which came along around the same time as the similar promises of the national No Child Left Behind program, was that socioeconomic factors would be taken into consideration, weighted through a complex algorithm that would make sure parental income and education levels were not the primary indicators of their children’s scores on yet another series of standardized tests, this time scored on a 200-1,000 scale.
Rather, the high teaching skills or lack of them at your children’s schools would be allowed to shine through on the API, so that parents could truly make their choices about where to live based on the quality of the schools themselves, as opposed to living around a bunch of rich and multiple-degreed neighbors, or of simply being, of course, rich and multiply degreed themselves.
But guess what? A quick look at the highest API scores in the state shows that — a few urban charters and magnet schools for highly gifted students aside — the best way of predicting high test scores is still parental education and income, up to a point. (Because of what experts call the ski-vacation factor, the numbers on average tend to drop off a bit for the children of the very wealthiest Americans, because too much striving can be unseemly.)
Now, the API era has come to an end, and educators are in the midst of what they say will be a lengthy process of figuring out how to replace it. John Fensterwald of the key California educational analysis website EdSource says the State Board of Education “is seizing the chance to redefine student achievement and reframe how schools are held accountable for performance.”
No one knows exactly what that will be. But there is fairly universal acknowledgement that the famous three-digit figure, if easy for Realtors to toss around, was what Fensterwald calls “a narrow gauge” for evaluating our schools. Too narrow a gauge, so that state education board chair Michael Kirst looks Toward a holistic education in a post-API California:
