Dan Walters: Rating California schools is a big battle
Students Matter, an organization created and financed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch (pictured), successfully sued the state over teacher seniority and tenure laws, contending that they shortchange “high-needs” students. Now it’s suing 13 school districts for not obeying the Stull Act, the 1971 law that requires teachers to be evaluated based on student achievement. Damian Dovarganes AP
California’s largest-in-the-nation public school system educates – or purports to do so – 6 million-plus kids from dozens of socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.
National academic testing has found that California’s students rank near the bottom in achievement.
The situation spawns two perpetual political debates – whether we’re spending enough money to raise that achievement, and whether there’s sufficient accountability for results.
The money question is in abeyance, at least temporarily. An improving economy, a temporary tax increase and an overhaul of state school aid have raised per-pupil spending from all sources by roughly 50 percent in recent years to $13,000 a year, and from one of the nation’s lowest levels to at least the middle ranks.
Indeed, school spending has increased so dramatically during Jerry Brown’s second governorship that advocates of other programs, particularly health and welfare services to the poor, complain they are being shorted.
A multifront war over who should be held accountable for students’ progress, however, is still raging, and if anything metastasizing like a California wildfire.
Without writing its formal obituary, Brown and other politicians, plus the state’s education establishment, have strangled the test-based accountability system that California adopted in the late 1990s.
Educators, particularly the politically powerful California Teachers Association, despised a system that not only graded schools on how well they were improving academic achievement, but provided the basis for “parent trigger” actions to seize control of ill-performing schools. Nor did the CTA like the potential for using the data to judge teachers’ competence.
The system was overly simplistic and punitive, critics said, didn’t make allowances for differences among students, and encouraged “teaching to the test.”
Legislators, state schools superintendent Tom Torlakson and the Brown-appointed State Board of Education are developing a replacement system, what one planning document calls “an improved accountability system that uses multiple measures to more completely assess the progress schools are making.”
However, it’s extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, to know what will emerge, or when, because pieces are scattered throughout the various policy venues and are being couched in the densely opaque jargon of professional educators.
ACRONYMS ARE FLYING.
Trish Williams, member of the State Board of Education
“Acronyms are flying,” Trish Williams, a member of the state school board, complained during one jargon-packed presentation on a new accountability system in July. “It sounds like a foreign language.”
“I’m trying to put the puzzle together,” another member, Feliza Ortiz-Licon, added.
This is a sample of what consultant Nancy Brownell was telling them:
“The conversation around what we’re learning and the development of the evaluation rubric obviously applies in the context of accounting at the larger context. So while the specifics of really being able to build a system that emphasizes the cohesive framework that leads to a sense of how we are going to operationalize the demands and expectations in Ed Code around the rubric around how the components then of an accountability system that focuses on multiple measures and tries to, as several of you have said, weave the pieces together to help think about the context of the state priorities and how the guiding principles are a lens we want to continue to develop the details.
“I have taken to using a picture of an iceberg in some of the presentations on accountability. There is a lot of agreement in some ways on the surface level. None of us would questionDan Walters: Rating California schools is a big battle | The Sacramento Bee:
