Progress Report: California’s experience with academic standards and accountability marks a 10-year milestone 

Ten years ago, California embarked on a journey that forever changed the way its schools educate students. Now, what children are taught and when they learn it is not left to chance. Whether they attend classes in Calexico or Cupertino, all students are taught the same core concepts, and on test day each grade is literally on the same page.

Previously, school districts could develop their own curriculum, drawing from a long list of state-approved textbooks. They chose from dozens of assessments to test what students knew. Accountability meant compliance with state law and not much more.

In 1999, a comprehensive state school accountability system was implemented that, for the first time, meant California schools would be held responsible for how well their students learned.

But the story actually begins before that.

CSBA takes the lead

Long before passage of the Public Schools Accountability Act in 1999, the California School Boards Association was in the forefront of the public school accountability movement. In 1992, when Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin was the association’s elected president, CSBA sponsored a bill to establish an interventions and assistance program for low-performing schools. (The bill became law, but it was never funded and lapsed in 1998.)

That effort came even before the 1993 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act encouraged states to create accountability systems with “measurable results”—which meant tests.

In 1996, the state Legislature authorized a committee to develop a plan for improving student achievement. Plotkin, then chief consultant to the Senate Education Committee, and Davis Campbell, executive director of CSBA at the time, were members of the advisory committee, which the next year issued a report that would influence a number of bills that eventually led to the PSAA. That report, “Steering by Results,” made recommendations for a school accountability system that included a school performance index, a program of rewards and interventions for schools and students, and an advisory group that would handle policy and technical issues that arose—all concepts that eventually made their way into the PSAA.

The committee reported its belief that California public education has “lagged behind other institutions” in responding to the changes brought by the technological revolution. “What was good enough yesterday is no longer satisfactory,” read the report. “Today the public education system in California is not meeting the demand for those skilled and educated individuals who will manage the process of continual change in the future.”

It also recommended how to get there: “In simple terms, the bar must be moved higher: students must meet more rigorous content and performance standards. … Any plan to reach higher levels of student achievement must focus on what is happening in our schools and hold them accountable for performance.”

That was new. “In the past,” the report continued, “school accountability has meant simply complying with a set of rules and processes delineated and monitored by the state. While the mission of schools is the continual improvement of student learning, those schools which routinely failed to carry it out suffered few consequences. …

“This report, on the other hand, embraces a new vision for California’s schools, one which focuses school accountability squarely on results—that is, on whether or not students achieve at high levels. Under this approach, schools will be held responsible for student success.”

Meanwhile, CSBA remained in the vanguard of the drive for school accountability. In 1998 the association sponsored a bill, authored by state Sen. John Vasconcellos, to establish a public schools accountability system that included school accreditation by an independent regional body. But it was a different bill that ultimately made its way to Gov. Pete Wilson’s desk—only to be vetoed because he didn’t feel the interventions and sanctions specified in the bill were strong enough, Plotkin says.

Wilson was termed out after that year, but newly elected Gov. Gray Davis called a special legislative session on education as one of his first acts in the early months of 1999.

Davis’ version of a public school accountability act, however, disregarded much of what the legislative conference committee had learned the previous year. Plotkin, as chief consultant to Sen. Dede Alpert, worked with the new governor’s education secretary to make the bill something Alpert would agree to introduce.

“After all we had just been through, they had come up with their own ideas about what the system would look like, and what kind of interventions and sanctions there would be,” Plotkin recalls. “But the most important difference was that they were not committed to the concept of multiple measures. They wanted to invent a system that was going to rely almost exclusively on standardized tests.”

Without a statewide student data system in place, there was little else to include in the newly created Academic Performance Index, although the Davis administration did concede to an accompanying “similar schools” ranking intended to compare schools with comparable characteristics. The result—the Public Schools Accountability Act—passed and was signed into law on April 5, 1999.

The fledgling system faced big challenges.

“Everything was totally out of alignment,” Plotkin says. “Testing was being administered to kids on subject matter that they hadn’t been exposed to because the textbooks hadn’t been printed yet. And it took a couple of years for it all to come together.”

Truth be told, not everyone loved the idea of a school quality index, says Bill Padia, the California Department of Education’s director of policy and evaluation at the time.

“There was a lot of behind-the-scenes bickering about ranking schools,” he recalls. “There were those who objected to combining everything into a big hopper and coming out with one number for the school,” which Padia likened to a sort of Dow Jones stock market indicator—a barometer of the system’s condition.

That’s changed as the public has become accustomed to the index.

“You don’t hear a lot of complaints about API stuff now. It’s … part of the school culture now,” he says.

Holly Jacobson, CSBA assistant executive director for policy analysis and continuing education and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Public Schools Accountability Act, says the API is probably the law’s most important contribution.

“It was a common metric for evaluating all schools that helped focus on the lowest-performing students by the way it was designed. We’d never been able to evaluate schools before. We had hunches,” Jacobson explains.

The shift to standards

At first, the API was based on a nationally normed test that bore little relation to what students were being taught in the classroom. Over the years, as the California Standards Tests came online, the validity of the index improved.

“The system is working as designed, I think,” says Padia, who rose to become the CDE’s deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability and is now retired. “It’s not perfect, but no accountability system is.”

Judging a school’s effectiveness by how well its students are learning an agreed-upon set of concepts was a sea change in California, as in the nation—and one that was long overdue, judging from the goals of state and national education reformers.

“I think everybody agrees the standards themselves were something that needed to be created, because we needed them to be generally consistent,” says Jacobson. “What we expect students to know in Compton should be exactly what we expect students to know in Beverly Hills. There shouldn’t be a distinction.”

A system in flux

However, unintended consequences arose from emphasizing a discrete set of standards. Among those unforeseen outcomes, Jacobson lists an overly proscriptive pedagogy and—to quote a State Board of Education member—“teacher-proof” instructional materials that were developed to ensure the standards would be delivered exactly as intended. As the “Steering by Results” committee envisioned, the original PSAA included an awards component—with incentives ranging from recognition and spending flexibility to cash and interventions for low-performing schools.

The cash awards quickly became contentious, however. Some teachers received as much as $25,000 based on their students’ performance on the state’s Standardized Testing and Reporting assessments—which were not aligned with standards—and schools won cash for API scores that turned out to be subject to an error rate which created doubts about the awards’ legitimacy.

“What it did was put enormous pressure on the whole testing system and accountability system. There were a number of cases where schools were actually cheating,” says Padia, who recalls how the bonuses pitted teachers against one another. “It was a real problem [for] the profession, because they don’t see themselves as competitors like the business world, but more as collaborators.”

Ironically, the “Steering” report had recommended holding off on cash awards until the fifth year of the program, after the technical kinks in the system had been ironed out and reliable growth data was available. Within two years, the awards program fell out of favor and was no longer funded by the Legislature.

The interventions program, too, became a casualty of unforeseen events. After the federal No Child Left Behind Act directed its own stringent sanctions at low-performing schools, enthusiasm for PSAA’s Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program waned, says Plotkin: “In the end it wasn’t fully funded, and then the funding was pulled. Then when the recession hit, there just weren’t enough resources to make it all work.”

Teaching to the standards

Now, on the 10-year anniversary of the Public Schools Accountability Act, classrooms throughout the state have been transformed.

“The whole standards-based movement has profoundly changed the way teaching takes place,” says Padia. “If you teach to the test, you’re teaching the standards.”

Judy Westbrook, a teacher in the Ontario-Montclair School District, has taught students from a variety of backgrounds at several grade levels over the course of her 13-year career.

“When I first started, there really wasn’t a roadmap to follow. I think I was in my second year before somebody showed me the district curriculum,” she says.

She said she much prefers the clear expectations made explicit by the standards.

“Once you give teachers a roadmap,” she explains, “it’s far easier for them to follow and have the results that are expected.

Is it time to revise the standards?

As California’s accountability system matures, adjustments and revisions to enhance its effectiveness seem reasonable.

Because the percentage of schools reaching the API target of 800 has more than tripled since 1999—it’s now at 42 percent—the PSAA advisory committee has discussed phasing in higher targets over the next several years.

The content standards themselves may need some tweaking, says Jacobson.

“We’ve learned that the standards we have in math are not working to get kids ready for algebra by eighth grade,” she says. “There’s a huge disconnect between fourth- and sixth-grade math and what’s expected of kids afterward.”

Specifically, the standards do not build logically on each other from grade to grade, Jacobson explains. So the skills students learn in one grade are not necessarily precursors to the skills they need to learn in the next grade.

Furthermore, Californians may wish to stress new or different concepts. Much has changed since 1997, when the standards were developed.

For one thing, “we lost a planet,” Jacobson points out, referring to Pluto’s reclassification that shrank the solar system. Even more earth-shaking events, like the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, may impact history-social science standards that ask students to interpret such events in the context of their larger social, economic and political causes. “How we view history after 9/11 is probably different than how we thought about it 15 years ago,” Jacobson says.

Methods for assessing a student’s mastery of the standards may also need to change. Bubble tests simply can’t measure certain concepts, Jacobson says, and teacher Westbrook agrees.

“In the past, when the state wanted to test children, they were able to put together a test of the skills we wanted,” such as reading, writing and math for a technological society, Westbrook says. But she admits that assessing students’ competencies for a global information age isn’t so easy.

“Most of us want children to come out of high school able to … research and communicate information properly—because that’s what this century is about, getting information out there … in a truthful, accurate way,” she says. “I’m not sure we have quite figured out how to test those skills that we value, and I think there’s still a little bit of a disconnect there.”

Many educators complain that California’s standards—although rich and rigorous—are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Teachers find it difficult to cover all the standards, and students cannot absorb them all completely.

“Why not make it a mile deep for a few select ‘power standards’?” asks Padia.

For now, California’s fiscal crisis has effectively eliminated any plans to revisit the state’s standards, although at least one bill to do so has been introduced.

An inch wide and a mile deep?

The Obama administration, in its guidelines for the Race to the Top portion of the federal economic stimulus package, requires states to form consortia to establish common academic standards. The requirement coincides with the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a project of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

If a common set of standards in core subjects is established nationwide, many educators and policymakers feel it will inevitably be followed by some form of national test. The fear is, where there’s a test, teachers will teach to it.

“One of my biggest worries is that they’re only focusing on English-language arts and math,” says Jacobson. “If the nation develops common standards and assessments are aligned to them, we will see even further narrowing of the curriculum than we see right now. And right now it’s pretty bad.”

CSBA warned about that possibility in its comments to the U.S. Department of Education on the department’s proposed “Race to the Top” guidelines:

“NCLB has forced districts to focus their efforts almost exclusively on English-language arts and math in order to avoid NCLB sanctions. This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in programs for the arts, science, history-social science and physical education. CSBA is concerned that basing assessments only on the core common subjects will further exacerbate this issue.”

As it is, the state’s own accountability system has responded to pressure from Washington by emphasizing federal—not necessarily state—priorities, Padia observes.

“We were churning along really well [with PSAA], then NCLB came along and I think really perverted the whole system. Because even though it focused on math and English-language arts, it was to the exclusion of other subject matter,” he says.

“NCLB just narrowed things tremendously. The biggest problem I see is the discrepancy between the API on the one hand and adequate yearly progress on the other hand, that seeks to undermine the API. [Some] schools will do well on the API and yet not make AYP.”

Padia said he would like to see just one system for federal and state accountability, preferably patterned on California’s API. “That way everyone knows there’s one game out there—there’s one way to win, one way to lose. Now, there are multiple ways.”

Clearly, the final chapter on California’s accountability system has not yet been written, but it’s hard to imagine the state’s schools operating without it.

It’s been remarkable to see the PSAA mature the way it has, says Padia.

“I was part of the original legislation under the whole PSAA act, and the way it was all cobbled together, it was a pretty extraordinary time.

“A lot of people predicted it would never hold past five years, and here we are at 10 years—and we’re still cooking pretty good.”

Kristi Garrett (kgarrett@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.

Resources on public school accountability

Here’s where you can learn more about the systems and initiatives mentioned in this story:

Academic Performance Index
Learn more about California’s Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and how it measures academic performance and growth.

Common Core State Standards Initiative
CSBA and California officials have reservations about the limitations that common academic standards could place on the state’s own high standards, and so they hesitate to fully support this effort by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers unless the common core standards being developed through those bodies “meet or exceed our own” standards. Draft college and career standards in language arts and math were released in July 2009, and draft standards for each grade are expected to be released in December. Interested parties may follow the initiative’s development online.

Public Schools Accountability Act
This CDE Web site includes an overview of the state’s accountability system, links to the pertinent Education Code and notices of meetings of the PSAA advisory committee.

California Academic Content Standards
Standards adopted by the California State Board of Education for English-language arts, mathematics, history-social science, science, and visual and performing arts may be viewed online here, along with curriculum guidelines to help teachers as they deliver the standards, a list of instructional materials adopted by the California State Board of Education and other information.

‘Steering by Results: A High-stakes Rewards and Interventions Program for California Schools and Students’
This report of the California Rewards and Interventions Advisory Committee was published by CDE in 1997. The report offers seven recommendations for establishing an incentive-based plan to improve academic achievement among California’s students. It proposes a vision for California schools emphasizing clear academic standards, school accountability and a system to link standards and assessments with rewards and interventions. Copies may be ordered for $8 from CDE Press (Item 001407). Select libraries throughout the state have copies for circulation; search for a library near you.