Oakland students will suffer if the charter school closes

By Jerry Brown, especially for CalMatters

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The promise of American public education is based on a simple premise: every child deserves a quality education. Holding schools accountable for delivering on this promise is essential, but accountability is only as good as the tools used to measure it.

When these tools are misapplied, it’s the students — not administrators or policymakers — who suffer the consequences.

This tension is at the heart of how California tried to address school accountability. For decades, the prevailing approach was crude: reducing school quality to a single standardized test score, ranking schools accordingly, and then acting on the results. The problems with this approach were well documented.

Put plainly, California’s old approach penalized schools serving the neediest communities without considering the complexity of the challenges they faced.

We chose another time when the state California School Board launched in 2017. The dashboard was created to give families and educators a more complete picture of how schools are serving students. It includes a set of measuresnot just academic performance. The explicit design principle was that no single data point could fully capture a school’s impact on students.

Data matters, but so does nuance, context, and judgment. The scoreboard was never intended to serve as a cudgel for local school districts to kill competition and punish parents and students. This is what makes the situation at Aspire Golden State Preparatory Academy so alarming.

Aspire Golden State Prep, founded in 2008, is a public charter school in East Oakland serving primarily low-income individuals community of colorslike two charter schools I founded in Oakland at the beginning of the years when I was mayor. Golden State Prep students enter sixth grade three years below their class, but by the time they graduate, they are outperforming their peers at other schools.

As a result, it has one of the highest high school graduation rates in Oakland. This is a school that, by most accounts, is doing meaningful work in a community where educational opportunities are scarce, and the consequences of making this mistake fall hardest on the children who can least afford it.

However, the Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Office of Education have moved to close Golden State Prep. Their decisions rely heavily on a narrow interpretation of performance dataincluding one high-stakes math assessment administered annually to a limited number of students and targeted at the school’s younger grades. These results are not insignificant, but they represent only one part of a much bigger picture.

This is not the way the system was meant to work.

When resulting decisions like closing schools are guided by a narrow reading of the data, the larger question is lost: What is in the best interest of students?

By law, Oakland Unified and Alameda County must determine that closing Golden State Prep is in the best interest of enrolled students. Achieving such a decision requires more than a test score. This requires an honest account of where displaced students will go and whether those alternatives are truly stronger.

In communities like East Oakland, the stakes for getting it wrong couldn’t be higher.

The implications extend beyond Golden State’s prep. If California’s accountability framework can be boiled down to a single, selected data point, the same logic can be applied elsewhere. This would be a disservice to students and families.

This week the State Board of Education will have the opportunity to deal directly with it. The question before the board is not whether accountability matters — it does — or whether Golden State Prep is out of control. The question is whether California’s accountability framework is being implemented as designed.

Done right, accountability is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure every child gets the education they deserve. But accountability must be based on evidence, context and a real commitment to student outcomes. When it isn’t, we’re not just failing a school; rather, we are failing the students the school was created to serve and weakening the broader promise that inspired California to build a better system in the first place.

The State Council must fulfill this promise.

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