One in 4 California school districts required to get county help based on new state performance data

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource (2017)

Student at Skyline High School in Oakland

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource (2017)

Student at Skyline High School in Oakland

John Fensterwald

December 7, 2017

9 Comments

Republish

One in 4 California school districts received notice that they must work with county offices of education or with a new state agency to improve the education of at least one of their student groups that were ranked among the worst performers on the California School Dashboard, a new school and district grading system released on Thursday.

In two-thirds of the 228 districts designated for assistance, students receiving special education services were among student groups identified as performing very poorly. In half of the designated districts, students with disabilities were the only student group flagged.

The districts must now take a hard look, with help from the county or the new California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, at the factors behind the low achievement of students whose disabilities range from mild learning deficits to severe physical and emotional handicaps.

“With the Dashboard, California is shining a light on inequities by identifying the students that need the most help within a district and pinpointing their areas of challenge,” said State Board of Education President Michael Kirst in a press release. “These are students whose struggles would have been masked under a less comprehensive accountability system.”

The dashboard, which debuted last spring, gave schools and districts, as well as the public, a chance to familiarize themselves with the data and use it to guide priorities and spending for this year. The new data release provides more current information, including 2016-17 suspension and graduation rates, along with the results from last spring’s Smarter Balanced tests in math and English language arts.

The updated dashboard also initiates county office- and state-guided support, the next step in the state’s school accountability system. Only districts, not individual schools, will receive assistance this year. Next month, the State Board of Education will designate for assistance in 2018-19 the lowest performing 300 low-income schools. The board will use slightly different criteria set by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

In creating the dashboard, the Legislature sought to evaluate schools by more than standardized test scores. It included indicators of school climate and student engagement, which are among eight priorities that districts must address. To confront achievement gaps hidden behind averages for all students, the Legislature focused on results of individual student subgroups.

A focus on special education students is long overdue, said Arun Ramanathan, CEO of Pivot Learning, a nonprofit providing technical assistance to school districts in California. “The academic performance data on students with disabilities reflects nearly a decade of neglect at the state and local level to their needs, specifically in the area of reading instruction. California is woefully behind other states in adopting best practices in special education,” said Ramanathan who formerly oversaw special education services as Chief Student Services Officer for the San Diego Unified School District.

Students with disabilities were not alone in being ranked at the bottom on the dashboard:

• In 27 districts, African-American students were designated for assistance.
• In 19 districts, English learners were designated for assistance.
• In five districts, Hispanic students were designated for assistance.

Eight districts, including Sacramento City Unified and Twin Rivers in Sacramento County, Oakland Unified and Salinas Union High School District, have four student groups designated for assistance. In Konocti Unified, a 3,000-student rural district in Lake County, five student groups were designated: American Indian, African-American, white, homeless and low-income students.

Of California’s 58 county offices of education, 48 have districts requiring assistance, including Los Angeles (19 districts), Tulare (11) and San Diego (10). Ten county offices, either with few districts (Alpine and Sierra) or mostly wealthy districts (Napa and Marin) have no districts qualifying.

Any subgroup performing in the red, the lowest of the five color bands on the dashboard, on at least two of the priorities qualified for help. The indicators were student suspension rates (school climate), test scores on the Smarter Balanced tests in math and English and a measure of English learners’ progress in learning English (academic achievement) and high school graduation rates (student engagement).

With the exception of about 10 percent of students with severe disabilities who take an alternative test, special education students take the Smarter Balanced tests; it’s not surprising that they don’t do, as a group, as well as other students. Their graduation rate also lags. But parents and rights advocates argue achievement could be higher, with better services, higher expectations and earlier diagnosis of learning issues.

The dashboard will shine a light on other factors contributing to underperformance: chronic absenteeism for special education students is nearly twice the statewide average, and suspension rates are higher than average as well.

“Taking a look at the big picture, including how you are providing adequate and early interventions, makes a lot of sense,” said Maureen Burness, co-executive director of the Statewide Special Education Task Force, which issued a report recommending significant changes in how students with disabilities are identified, taught and funded in 2015. “To tweak the edges will not fix the big problem.”

‘Doing with, not doing to’

The support that districts will receive, called “technical” or “differentiated” assistance, will be starkly different from the prescriptive programs imposed under the No Child Left Behind Act — and state-appointed teams of experts, under the state versions preceding the Act. Teachers and administrators resented programs they viewed as punitive, and researchers found top-down reforms for the most part didn’t work.

In the accountability provisions of the 2013 Local Control Funding Formula, the Legislature stressed partnerships. County offices would provide guidance, but districts and teachers would choose actions and directions for change.

“Rather than ‘doing to,’ as in the past, the current approach is premised on ‘doing with’ because it is more likely to lead to sustained improvement,” Kirst, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson and Carl Cohn, executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, wrote in a letter that went to all districts receiving assistance. The Legislature created the California Collaborative as a semi-autonomous state agency to coordinate the overall assistance effort.

“This approach will be a collaboration,” said Josh Daniels, the agency’s director of outreach and training, who is also a Berkeley Unified school board member. “It sounds fluffy, but it is harder when a school district must implement change, instead of change coming from the outside. It will be a challenge — but we believe in the philosophy underlying local control.”

The California Collaborative initially will concentrate much of its attention on students with disabilities. In February, it will create what it’s calling a Professional Learning Network Collective to identify innovations and model practices in special education and share them with districts, as outlined in this recent presentation to the State Board of Education.

Daniels and county leaders caution there will be no quick fix. During the next few months, county and district teams will do a high-level analysis of the dashboard data to identify strengths and weaknesses. They will bring others into the conversation — teachers and parents perhaps, and, for districts focusing on students with disabilities, the regional agencies that oversee special education services, called Special Education Local Plan Areas, or SELPAs.

After the initial analysis, districts can continue with their county teams or look elsewhere, to other counties, the California Collaborative or nonprofit providers with more expertise. They may join one of 56 interdistrict networks that the California Collaborative has set up with state funding.

Working through the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association, county offices have been working together for more a year on creating a uniform process. Dozens of administrators have prepared a 127-page Facilitators Guide on how to lead an open-ended, constructive dialogue, said Jean Madden-Cazares, director of district school Improvement for the San Diego County Office of Education, who oversaw the effort. Three hundred county officials have taken multi-day trainings by the Palo Alto-based Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the national leader in what’s called improvement science, the exacting, data-focused process demanding persistence and patience through cycles of actions and revisions.

What is ‘continuous improvement’?

The approach commonly is called “continuous improvement” and California is betting big that it will result in sustained improvements — over time.

But the sheer number of districts to be served and the newness of the approach will create a daunting challenge for many of the state’s 58 county offices of education, some of which are tiny and serve one district, like the Alpine County office, while others, like the Los Angeles County office, serve dozens of districts.

Fresno Unified has demonstrated that continuous improvement can bring results. Working with Carnegie, it increased the number of student applications to California State University and University of California by 50 percent after settling, over two years, on strategies that involved training counselors and providing students more timely information. The charter school organization High Tech High took a similar approach, with strong results, as described here.

But in a report titled “Continuous Improvement in Practice” by the nonprofit Policy Analysis for California Education, researchers concluded that despite high aspirations, “there is also wide acknowledgement that continuous improvement is not happening at scale in the state. Even among districts that would describe themselves as farther along, very few reported that they had seen improvements in student outcomes.”

The authors cited several challenges:

• A lack of clarity concerning what “continuous improvement” means and how to achieve it, with few examples, like the one in Fresno, as models;
• A variation in the ability of county offices to support districts’ continuous improvement efforts;
• High staff turnover, from superintendents on down, which undercuts the ability to sustain long-term commitment;
• Conflicting priorities amid declining revenues and multiple demands for improvement;
• A history of policy fatigue — the weary feeling that “this reform, too, will pass.”

Daniels said there may be no visible impact in the first six to 12 months of work; changing a culture in a district takes time. “Trying to force things immediately will not lead to the type of long-term success that we really need,” he said.

This week, the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel filed a lawsuit on behalf of students in low-performing schools in Los Angeles and Stockton, charging that the state had failed to teach students to read and write. It called for the state to step in to provide and monitor a policy ensuring literacy is taught well. The lawsuit indirectly challenges local control and the improvement approach launched this week; it is a reminder the public and perhaps judges could become impatient with a strategy characterized by the adage “going slow to go fast.”

El Dorado County Superintendent Ed Manansala, president-elect of the county superintendents association, said that the new approach is “complex but promising. Every year we will be looking at individual subgroup performance that cannot be hidden. That will create a healthy sense of urgency.”

To get more reports like this one, click here to sign up for EdSource’s no-cost daily email on latest developments in education.