Published
3 years agoon
Educational accountability is attracting a lot of political attention — or perhaps lip service — these days in California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed two bills touted as bringing more accountability to education.
Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, persuaded the Legislature to base state support of community colleges, in part, on how well they prepare their students for employment or transfers into four-year colleges. However, Brown stoutly resisted any similarly strong accountability for K-12 schools, saying he trusted local school officials to do the right thing as he gave them extra money to improve outcomes for poor and English-learner students.
Education reform groups have been highly critical of school districts, particularly large ones such as Los Angeles Unified, for a lack of transparency on how the extra money, provided through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), is being spent and what results have been.
The battles over LCFF have led the Legislature to direct State Auditor Elaine Howle to delve into how it is working in “three large, geographically dispersed districts” with substantial numbers of at-risk students, determining how the districts are spending the extra money and how they are measuring their progress.
Brown also resisted calls for a “longitudinal data system” that would track how individual students are performing from kindergarten through higher education and into the workplace, thereby revealing what’s working and what’s not.
Brown’s position reflected the education establishment’s fear that more data would translate into stricter accountability. Newsom, however, included $10 million to create such a system in his first budget and work on it has begun.
Better tracking of how individual students are faring could, and perhaps should, morph into what’s called a “growth model” of accountability, replacing the state’s current “dashboard” system that uses a variety of measures, some nonacademic, and confines results to the school and district levels.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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