Credit: Ababsolutum / iStock
Credit: Ababsolutum / iStockAs part of the California School Dashboard, the state’s new school accountability system, 1 in 4 school districts will receive assistance from county offices of education and the state to help improve the performance of groups of students who have done particularly poorly on criteria set by the state.
But an EdSource analysis found that 561 additional districts are not targeted for formal state support, despite large and persistent achievement gaps between African-American, Latino and low-income students and white and Asian students in those districts.
Under the state’s rules for determining county help, those districts, serving several million students, will now face the challenge on their own of narrowing large academic disparities, as indicated by scores on standardized tests in math and English language arts.
In many places, those achievement gaps have persisted for decades and failed to narrow during 15 years of state- and federally dictated school reforms during the era of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, many districts will proceed without an alternative system of strategies and effective supports in place to guide them.
Districts’ ability to figure out how to improve academic measures and other indicators of student achievement will serve as a fundamental test of local control, the principle underlying the state’s 4-year-old school finance law, the Local Control Funding Formula. The longer it takes to show tangible results, the louder will be the calls in the Legislature to reassert state control, tamper with the formula and demand stricter accountability.
“Coming out of 20 years of high-stakes testing, where districts have not thought through school improvement, this is a real shift,” said Janelle Scott, associate professor at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and African-American Studies Department. “It’s not clear districts are ready and prepared to think differently.”
“The dashboard data will be quite valuable for districts to address highest-need kids,” said Julie Marsh, associate professor at the Rossier School of Education at USC, who, with other researchers, have tracked how districts used resources under the funding formula. “But the state has never fully invested in district capacity — the knowledge, expertise and good working relationships you need for different outcomes. So it is not fair to expect immediate improvement.”
Orange and red trigger action
The dashboard debuted last spring. The second edition, released in December with another year of data, introduced new accountability requirements.
The dashboard offers a broad picture of performance by rating not only standardized test scores but also suspension and high school graduation rates and progress of English learners toward language proficiency. Next year, with the addition of indicators of chronic absenteeism and students’ readiness for college and careers, districts will likely have to address more low-performing groups.
Student performance on each indicator is ranked by color. The best rating for students is blue followed by green. Yellow indicates mid-level performance, while orange and red indicate poor performance, with red being the worst. All districts and schools receive colors for overall student performance, and also for performance by a dozen student groups, including homeless, foster and low-income students, English learners and eight racial and ethnic groups.
Every district must designate as a priority every student group rated red or orange in any indicator. Districts must highlight the low performance in their Local Control and Accountability Plan, or LCAP, their annual planning document, and commit to making improvements.
For the first time, 228 districts will get diagnostic help from county offices of education, because at least one student group performed poorly in multiple areas. They will also be on the radar of a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Education Excellence. Districts whose student groups don’t improve in three out of four years will be subject to “intensive” assistance, an as-yet-to-be-defined heavier hand.
For the next few months, districts will do a data analysis to understand what caused low performance. District officials can choose to continue with their county offices or work with other districts or experts to determine next steps. They must include whatever actions they plan to take in their LCAPs. Other districts not chosen for help also theoretically can ask their county office for advice.
The 228 districts, or about 1 in 4 districts in the state, could tax counties’ capacity to provide help. But the list qualifying for assistance, though long, does not include hundreds of other districts with large academic achievement gaps among racial and ethnic groups, and between low-income and wealthier students.
That’s because performance on test scores alone or any single indicator — no matter how low the performance — is not a trigger for county help under the rules that state law established. To qualify for county assistance, at least one student group in a district must also get a red ranking on another indicator — such as suspension rates or graduation rates.
Half of the 228 districts will get county help only for students with disabilities. Only 42 districts qualified for county assistance with one factor the academic performance of a racial or ethnic group. Of those, five districts qualified, in part, because of low test scores of their Latino students, while 27 will get such assistance based on the performance of African-American students. A mere dozen qualify based on the performance of their low-income students.
These numbers are small compared with the 561 districts in which at least one racial ethnic or racial subgroup received an orange or red rating for performance on math or English language arts tests but did not qualify for county assistance. These include 480 districts with low-performing Latino students and 192 districts with low-performing African-American students. A total of 800 K-8 and unified school districts had the minimum number of students required to receive a color ranking for test scores.
The colors of disparity
A state analysis of dashboard colors for math and English language arts tests that students took last spring (see pages 2 and 4) presents a stark picture of the academic achievement gap for schools and districts. The analysis includes charter schools. Here are the results for math:
- Among districts with 30 or more African-American students, 70 percent of those students received a red or orange ranking on their academic performance. Only 5 percent scored in the blue or green range, the top two levels of achievement. The rest earned a yellow ranking.
- In 55 percent of districts with Latino enrollments, Latino students scored in the red or orange range in math. In 14 percent of districts, Latino students scored blue or green.
- There were similar patterns in math for low-income students (ranking red or orange in 60 percent of districts) and English learners (red or orange in 57 percent of districts where they were enrolled).
- On the other hand, Asian students received a red or orange ranking in math in only 7 percent of districts, compared with the 83.5 percent of districts where Asian students were rated blue or green.
- White students received red or orange rankings in 24.5 percent of districts, while in 49 percent of districts, they were rated blue or green .
Here are the results for English language arts:
- African-American students were rated red or orange in 67 percent of districts with African-American students enrolled; only 10 percent scored blue or green, the top two levels of achievement. The rest were yellow.
- Hispanic students scored red or orange in English language arts in 57 percent of districts and charter schools, and blue or green in 15 percent of districts with Hispanic students.
- There were similar patterns for low-income students (62 percent in red and orange) and English learners (64 percent in red and orange).
- Asian students scored red or orange in only 8 percent of districts, compared with 84 percent in blue or green in districts with Asian students.
- White students scored 22 percent in red and orange and 56.5 percent in blue or green in districts with white students.
The color indicators for math and English language arts scores apply only to grades 3 to 8. Performance by 11th-graders — the only high school students required to take the Smarter Balanced assessments — is a perplexing exception.
Data Source:California Department of Education; Chart by Yuxuan Xie
High school results are treated as one component of the college and career indicator that will be phased in by next year. As a result, district and school scores weren’t assigned colors for the 11th grade test results, so they won’t receive county help for that grade and they won’t fall under the LCAP requirement to address low test-score performance.
The state requirements for assisting poorly performing student groups apply only to districts, although the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires addressing the “persistently” lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, about 300 in California. They too will get help from county offices, although the state board has not yet selected them.
What’s next for districts
In coming months, districts will decide actions they will take on behalf of their lowest-performing students as they prepare their 2018-19 LCAPs. Some districts may form partnerships with other districts or turn to universities or consultants for help. Some districts will continue work they’ve been doing.
Clovis Unified responded to an orange ranking of its English learners by making their improvement a priority, said Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Debbie Parra. Among its actions, the district used state money it received from the funding formula intended for English learners to buy supplemental materials aligned to the state’s English Language Development standards. As a result of its efforts, student performance improved, and the rating for English learners jumped two colors, to green, in the latest dashboard.
But three other student groups — African-American students, students with disabilities and homeless students — received an orange rating in math in the latest dashboard. That will add urgency and increase visibility for parents when the district begins public engagement for the next LCAP, Parra said. Homeless students and students with disabilities also received an orange rating in English language arts.
A year ago, after analyzing performance data, the eight school districts in CORE, a district-led nonprofit that includes Los Angeles, Long Beach and Fresno, three of the state’s four largest unified districts, chose improving middle-school math performance for African-American and Latino students as a collective focus. CORE is receiving guidance from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Palo Alto.
Unlike CORE, though, many districts won’t know whom to turn to for help in figuring out how best to improve low performance, said David Plank, executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent research organization affiliated with Stanford University, USC and UC Davis. “It’s really hard for a district to say, ‘We have a problem in middle grades English language arts, and X did a great job with this in district Y’; districts have no idea what is out there.”
The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence is responsible for designing the system connecting the expertise, but that hasn’t happened yet, Plank said.
Stay tuned, said Joshua Daniels, the collaborative’s director of outreach and training. Within the next month, there will be more details about how a statewide system of support for districts might work — a topic at the Feb. 1 board meeting of the semi-autonomous state agency. The framework, he said, is still being worked out.
Brown proposes more funding
Meanwhile, more resources may be on the way via the state budget. Recognizing that both the collaborative and county offices of education require more money to meet districts’ needs, Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday proposed $76 million in new funding for 2018-19.
County offices would get $70 million more, including $10 million to help regional special education planning agencies align funding with academic needs of students with disabilities. The collaborative would receive $6.5 million more to help to bolster counties’ expertise.
“As the accountability indicators evolve, we expect the range of issues and districts will continue to expand,” said Peter Birdsall, executive director of the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association.
John Fensterwald covers education policy. You can tweet him @jfenster or email him jfensterwald@edsource.org; Daniel Willis is a data analyst for EdSource. You can tweet him @BayAreaData or email him at dwillis@edsource.org.
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Robert 4 years ago4 years ago
This article does a very good job of covering and explaining California’s plan to narrow the achievement gap. The quickest and the easiest way to significantly narrow the achievement gap is to redefine what is meant by the “achievement gap.” The next way is more difficult and will require some rethinking of our methods of education. It is to lower the scores of the high scoring groups. This would primarily be East Asians and whites. The … Read More
This article does a very good job of covering and explaining California’s plan to narrow the achievement gap.
The quickest and the easiest way to significantly narrow the achievement gap is to redefine what is meant by the “achievement gap.”
The next way is more difficult and will require some rethinking of our methods of education. It is to lower the scores of the high scoring groups. This would primarily be East Asians and whites.
The most difficult and most time-consuming method is to raise the scores of blacks and Latinos. The first step would be to stop the gap from widening. The next step is the very slow process of raising the scores of these groups. This will require a major rethinking of our social programs and will take many years. Although it would take many years, it has the advantage of being cheaper than our current programs.
John Affeldt 5 years ago5 years ago
For the "California Way" of continuous improvement to work, the big band of orange and yellow districts in the middle of the bell curve--i.e., those not designated for outside support and assistance--need to be effectively engaging in their own local reflection and improvement processes. Nearly all of the current focus of policymakers has been on the important task of figuring out how to identify and support the 228 districts for "differentiated assistance" under LCFF and … Read More
For the “California Way” of continuous improvement to work, the big band of orange and yellow districts in the middle of the bell curve–i.e., those not designated for outside support and assistance–need to be effectively engaging in their own local reflection and improvement processes. Nearly all of the current focus of policymakers has been on the important task of figuring out how to identify and support the 228 districts for “differentiated assistance” under LCFF and the bottom 5% of schools under ESSA. This article does a good job of reminding us that the bulk of the work of continuous improvement will have to be incentivizing districts to improve on their own.
For starters, the State should be publicizing to local communities which districts are “predominantly orange” or “predominantly yellow” in performing on the system’s multiple measures. This formal, neutral identification can help generate the local conversations and pressures sometimes needed to move boards and district personnel to act who otherwise may consider themselves as performing adequately, having escaped designation for differentiated assistance. As well, CDE, CCSESA and the CCEE need to get more and better information out to the field now about promising practices and helpful potential partners.
It’s absolutely necessary to focus on the poorest performing districts but so too is it critical to build the infrastructure now for driving self-imposed continuous improvement in the much larger number of districts with the bulk of underperforming students in the state.
el 5 years ago5 years ago
As always, when looking at all these numbers, they should be considered a source of questions rather than answers. Which students aren't doing as well as we want? Why might that be and what might we do about it? Districts rarely enjoy compulsory counseling from the state or the county offices, but many will seek out help even if not compelled, depending upon their own internal resources. Certainly a gap is of concern. But there are two … Read More
As always, when looking at all these numbers, they should be considered a source of questions rather than answers. Which students aren’t doing as well as we want? Why might that be and what might we do about it?
Districts rarely enjoy compulsory counseling from the state or the county offices, but many will seek out help even if not compelled, depending upon their own internal resources.
Certainly a gap is of concern. But there are two ways, mathematically, to avoid the gap. One is to have all your students performing at a high level, certainly. But the other is to have all your students performing at a low level. The second is of course both easy and not better than having a gap. Districts that happen to have more uniform demographics are less likely to have a gap than districts that include a broader mix of household types.
Fundamentally, I’m not sure anyone has a successful magic recipe for kids who are under stress and performing poorly.
Replies
John Fensterwald 5 years ago5 years ago
Thanks for the comment, el. Very true, the numbers are a source of questions – which is a point of the story. Districts that qualified for county help will do a data analysis to pursue the questions that the data raise. Districts not qualifying for help will have to do that analysis on their own or find a partner to help them. County offices say this will be a different process than in the past, … Read More
Thanks for the comment, el. Very true, the numbers are a source of questions – which is a point of the story. Districts that qualified for county help will do a data analysis to pursue the questions that the data raise. Districts not qualifying for help will have to do that analysis on their own or find a partner to help them. County offices say this will be a different process than in the past, when the state sent them in to play the heavy. The counties have been working on creating a uniform way to do the new “root-cause analysis” to create consistency across the state. We’ll se how it goes.
Wayne Bishop 5 years ago5 years ago
See Betteridge’s law of headlines.
John Thomas Flynn 5 years ago5 years ago
As a non-educator but extremely interested individual on this issue, the second paragraph is the shocker. "But an EdSource analysis found that 561 additional districts are not targeted for formal state support, despite large and persistent achievement gaps between African-American, Latino and low-income students and white and Asian students in those districts." So over half of state school districts with "large and persistent achievement gaps ...are not targeted for formal state support." Insanity. Bureaucratic insanity. C'Mon Man! At … Read More
As a non-educator but extremely interested individual on this issue, the second paragraph is the shocker.
“But an EdSource analysis found that 561 additional districts are not targeted for formal state support, despite large and persistent achievement gaps between African-American, Latino and low-income students and white and Asian students in those districts.”
So over half of state school districts with “large and persistent achievement gaps …are not targeted for formal state support.” Insanity. Bureaucratic insanity.
C’Mon Man! At the very least somebody needs to fix this …
Mike McMahon 5 years ago5 years ago
While the CA School Dashboard is latest shiny new tool for school board members to demonstrate the inequities in district performance, the solution will remain elusive. As one commenter pointed out, school districts have shown performance data for over 15 years due to NCLB. Yet try as they may only a handful of school districts were able to address equity issues. Moving forward, involving County of Education offices will only muddy the waters when it … Read More
While the CA School Dashboard is latest shiny new tool for school board members to demonstrate the inequities in district performance, the solution will remain elusive. As one commenter pointed out, school districts have shown performance data for over 15 years due to NCLB. Yet try as they may only a handful of school districts were able to address equity issues. Moving forward, involving County of Education offices will only muddy the waters when it comes to be able to apply our knowledge about improving learning outcomes.
Renee Hill 5 years ago5 years ago
Sadly, you have used the wrong noun here. This rates schools and districts as it should, not students. I know your presentation is well intended, but it just magnifies part of the issue, and doubles down on the inequities. We all have to know more about learning, about how students develop, about our students, our subject matter and our teaching profession. We have to apply it more skillfully. Our ability to reach xyz students … Read More
Sadly, you have used the wrong noun here. This rates schools and districts as it should, not students. I know your presentation is well intended, but it just magnifies part of the issue, and doubles down on the inequities.
We all have to know more about learning, about how students develop, about our students, our subject matter and our teaching profession. We have to apply it more skillfully. Our ability to reach xyz students is in the red or green or yellow zone. Sure, students have responsibilities, too, but we know that specific, articulated, well-implemented efforts can work. Blaming the students takes the focus off the need to do this work.
Doug McRae 5 years ago5 years ago
John/Dan: Excellent analysis demonstrating the complexity of California's new LCAP Dashboard accountability system, and how it addresses the achievement gap issue. The results are reminiscent of one of the complaints of the NCLB-era federal AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) accountability system, that it involved so many targets (30 or more, as I recall) that had to be met each year, making it extremely difficult for any school to "make" AYP. A hidden problem with CA's new … Read More
John/Dan: Excellent analysis demonstrating the complexity of California’s new LCAP Dashboard accountability system, and how it addresses the achievement gap issue. The results are reminiscent of one of the complaints of the NCLB-era federal AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) accountability system, that it involved so many targets (30 or more, as I recall) that had to be met each year, making it extremely difficult for any school to “make” AYP.
A hidden problem with CA’s new LCAP Dashboard is the current lack of quality data for many of the measures (indicators). For example, the Smarter Balanced 2017 change scores which contribute to the assigned color ratings are flawed, likely due of a lack of comparability between Smarter Balanced scores from 2016 to 2017. Fortunately, this lack of comparability is correctable if diagnosed and addressed by Smarter Balanced in a timely fashion. Several years ago, Smarter Balanced acknowledged their tests did not have a sufficient number of test questions to measure “the lower end of the achievement spectrum,” which would hamper good achievement gap analyses. Hopefully, this flaw has been addressed by now.
Another current data quality problem is the lack of data collection and reporting maturity for indicators such as suspensions, chronic absenteeism, and perhaps the College and Career indicator for high schools. It often takes several years for new data collection and reporting efforts at the local level to fully reflect complete and valid data.
These are only a few of the problems with the current LCAP Dashboard system. Some say it will be 3 years before the new system can provide solid mature data upon which good school support decisions can be made. Patience and a willingness to correct data errors will be a mandate for this new complex accountability system to survive the test of time.