LCAP not API to serve as school performance monitor
(Calif.) In a subtle but significant policy shift, state education officials acknowledged publicly Wednesday that the focal point for measuring school performance going forward will be the Local Control Accountability Plan and not the Annual Performance Index.
The API, based solely on test scores, has stood since 1999 as the primary matrix for communicating school success. That system was suspended last year as schools transitioned to the Common Core State Standards, new curriculum and a new assessment program.
But staff from the California Department of Education noted Wednesday that the Brown administration’s long-standing interest in making the API a subset of the broader and more robust measures being contemplated for the LCAP seem to have formally taken hold.
At the regular July meeting of the California State Board of Education, officials said a nearly three-year effort to find new, non-test-based measures of student accountability to add to the API has been put on hold so that the board can concentrate on defining the major accountability components of the LCAP.
“We had a number of these similar conversations moving forward,” CDE’s Kerrick Ashley told state board members Wednesday, referring to meetings of the Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee – a group of education experts charged in 2012 with making recommendations for changes to the API.
“We’ve actually slowed down the number of meetings of PSAA in order to allow kind of a single conversation to happen in this body before gathering together PSAA for the superintendent’s recommendations,” Ashley said.
The pronouncement comes as the board continues the daunting task of choosing indicators aligned to the LCAP’s eight state education priorities, designed to reveal how well schools are preparing students for success in the college and career world.
LCAPs are required under the Local Control Funding Formula, ushered into law by Brown in 2013. The LCFF provides additional school funding and gives local governing boards greater control over LCAP not API to serve as school performance monitor :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:
