SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown’s candid veto of legislation to transform California’s maligned school assessment practices is a radical departure from the mostly perfunctory messages of governors gone by, this one calling on Albert Einstein, lecturing the education community and issuing his own challenging alternative.
The bill would have added different gauges to the traditional yardstick known as the Academic Performance Index, or API, that now tracks school success based on test scores exclusively.
“Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a high-performance machine,” Brown wrote in his veto message.
(To view the full message, click here.)
Excerpts from Brown’s veto message
• While I applaud the author’s desire to improve the API, I don’t believe that this bill would make our state’s accountability regime either more probing or more fair.
• The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB 547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools.
• Over the last 50 years, academic “experts” have subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change and experimentation. The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational “good” from the educational “bad.” Instead of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for ever more measurement “visions and revisions.”
• There are other ways to improve our schools to indeed focus on quality. What about a system that relies on locally convened panels to visit schools, observe teachers, interview students, and examine student work? Such a system wouldn’t produce an API number, but it could improve the quality of our schools.
Background
What is the API?
The Academic Performance Index measures how students in grades 2 through 11 fare on a series of standardized tests. Among those: reading, history, math and English. The high school exit exam also counts.
The results show the federal government, the state, the school and community the overall progress the school is making toward meeting proficiency targets. Schools are given a score, ranking and growth targets.
What SB 547 would have done?
Standardized test results would have been part of the assessment, but only up to 40 percent of the overall yardstick.
Other proposed measurements included career- and college-readiness and graduation rates. The bill also suggested school districts could adopt some of their own assessment policies.
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How to fairly and accurately judge school performance has been an
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