With federal approval finally in hand to give a Common Core-aligned practice test this spring, the State Board of Education took the inevitable next step this week. It suspended the Academic Performance Index, the chief measure of schools’ academic growth or progress, for this year and next.How can you "grade" a high school when you test only its juniors? How can you pinpoint where the problems are? How are we to use the data to fix issues if we don't know about a problem until late in junior year or early in senior year? I'm not saying we do a lot with the data we get now, but we'll be able to do even less under the new regime.
A reconstituted API will resume in 2015-16, incorporating results from the Smarter Balanced assessments, the new Common Core tests for English language arts and math that will be given to students in grades 3 to 8 and grade 11.
And we'll be able to do nothing for the next two years, except to jigger the numbers around to make California's education system not look as bad as it is.
Dallas ISD is trying to have a vote to get "home rule" which essentially means the district makes all decisions for the benefit of the district. Given some of their more boneheaded actions in the past, I'm not sure these folks are capable of managing themselves. While I support the idea of getting government out of school management, I have to admit some districts are so inept they should not be allowed to manage anything.
ReplyDeleteSchools in CA haven't been evaluated, properly, in more than a decade. Every year or so, the test changes, or the scoring changes ... it's all just for show. You want evaluation? look at the percentage of a school's graduates who need to take remedial classes at UC / CSU
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