Californians are finally getting a guide to deciphering school data

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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After becoming governor for a second term in 2011, Jerry Brown proposed a major overhaul of the way California funds public education.

The 1978 transition Proposition 13a landmark tax-containment measure, largely shifted school funding from local property taxes to the state. A decade later, voters passed Proposition 98which dictated how government support would be calculated.

The money was given to the locals schools on the basis of attendance, so much for each student, but there were also “categorical aids” — funds to finance specific educational programs.

It’s been a confusing mish-mash, fueling annual battles over how much of the state budget will be devoted to schools and how it will be divided.

Brown 2.0 proposed eliminating most categorical aid and changing enrollment-based allocations, giving more money to school systems with high numbers of poor and English-learner students who are lagging academically.

About 60% of the state’s nearly 6 million public school students fall into the target category. In theory, increasing financial support for them would close or at least reduce what is called the achievement gap.

The Local control funding formulaits official name, has faced demands from education reform groups to be closely watched to make sure the extra money is being spent on the students it’s meant to help and to assess whether it’s actually closing the gap.

But Brown pushed back, saying he trusted local education officials to spend the money wisely, backed by plans written with input from parents and other local groups.

A decade ago, a squabble over oversight finally led to the State Board of Education’s decision creating a “dashboard” which contains not only data on academic achievement but also numerous measures of non-academic factors.

However, as CalMatters soon discovered while diving deep into the system, other factors often masked academic gapswhich makes some school systems appear successful despite poor academic test scores. In addition, the board itself is very difficult for parents and other non-specialists to understand.

Two years ago, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, based at Arizona State University, gave California’s scoreboard a “D” in study of educational transparency.

“I have a PhD in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,” Morgan Polikoff, USC professor who worked on the reportsaid CalMatters. “How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”

Despite the criticism, officials continued to tout the dashboard as an accountability tool. But we Californians may finally have a way to decipher the otherwise opaque scoreboard created by GO Public Schoolsa Sacramento-based nonprofit that promotes better educational outcomes.

That’s it California School Board Guide provides easy-to-understand explanations of the scoreboard scores, both overall for the state’s 30 largest school districts and in detail for three districts. The three— Fresno United, West Contra Costa Unified and Oakland United — have a large number of at-risk pupils targeted by the Local Control Funding Formula.

“Together, the guides show that growth is happening in areas of different sizes and contexts – but progress is uneven and gaps remain large,” the organization said in releasing the guide on Monday. “Across regions, the data comes at a time when many districts are making difficult financial and staffing decisions. The results raise pressing questions about how limited resources, strategic choices and system conditions shape student outcomes.”

Uneven progress is a polite way of saying that not only does California’s achievement gap persist, but so do the state’s academic results still lag behind those of other countries of national testing. The GO Public Schools manual at least gives us a better understanding of these shortcomings.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.