California School Board not pandemic-focused, gets D grade in report

National surveys have found that parents are significantly underestimating how far behind their children are academically because of pandemic learning disruptions. The A’s and B’s their kids get on their report cards don’t tell the whole story, A survey of 2,000 parents has concluded .

“Parents say the pandemic’s impact on education has been temporary. Are they right to be so optimistic? Recent evidence suggests otherwise.” Education professors Sean Reardon of Stanford and Tom Kane of Harvard wrote:.

State websites that annually report scores on standardized tests and other valuable data, such as chronic absenteeism, can provide a reality check by clearly and easily displaying performance results over time. However, California School Boardthe public’s primary source of school and district performance data, has failed to do so. The Center for Reinventing Public Education concluded in its report State Secrets: How Transparent Are Public School Report Cards About COVID Impacts?California is one of eight states that received a D grade on the AF scale, according to the ? report released Thursday. That lags behind 29 states that received better grades, including 16 that received A and B grades.

The report focused on how states handled longitudinal data — showing changes in outcomes across multiple years from pre-COVID 2018-19 or earlier to today. In most states, that multiyear view would show a sharp decline in initial testing after the pandemic, followed by a slow recovery that didn’t make up for lost ground. For California, fall in 2021-22 after two years of suspended testingIt erased the gradual gains recorded since the first dashboard in 2014-15.

“The (California) dashboard makes it hard to determine longitudinal results,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education and lead author of the report. “Because the dashboard never puts yearly data side by side; if you want to look at longitudinal trends, you have to find multiple years and download the data and put the data into Excel or something like that.”

In contrast, Connecticut, one of seven states to receive an A, displays five-year results for 11 measures with bar charts and line graphs.

Source: Connecticut’s Next Generation Accountability Report

“If we had rated states on something else — for example, how clearly they presented data for a particular year — we would have arrived at different ratings,” the report said.

The researchers examined longitudinal data for seven measures: achievement levels in English language arts, math, science, and social studies, achievement growth in English language arts and math, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation rates, and proficiency and growth of English language learners. The teams of raters from the center, located at Arizona State University, used a point system for each measure according to how easy, somewhat difficult, very difficult, or impossible it was to find longitudinal data.

“It’s not about this topic to have data—relevant to this topic presentation “We intend to make the data available to the public in a usable way,” Polikoff said of California’s dashboard.

California collects data for five of the seven measures. It no longer administers a statewide social studies test. It also does not compile achievement improvements over time using specific student scores, despite the state having assessed the approach for more than six years. Instead, it compares this year’s students’ scores to those of different students in the same class from a year ago.

Polikoff said that some states do not have social studies exams, and California can still get an A grade without one.

The California Department of Education said the dashboard undergoes an annual review for improvements to ensure it is “truly accessible and useful to our families.”

“We always remain open to the feedback and needs of our families and look forward to learning more about the approach taken by the Center for Reinventing Public Education,” Liz Sanders, the department’s communications director, said in a statement.

He added: School Accountability Report Cards and DataResearch complements the dashboard and can easily answer questions posed by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. “The dashboard serves a specific purpose to help California families understand the yearly progress of their students in school, and the user interface was simplified based on feedback from diverse and representative focus groups of California families,” Sanders said.

Not a priority

At the direction of the state school board, the California Department of Education chose to focus on achievement disparities as a top priority for the dashboard. For each school and district, it became easy to see how 13 student groups, including low-income students, students with disabilities, English language learners and various racial and ethnic groups, were performing on multiple measures.

The state developed a rating system using five colors (blue represents the highest performance, red the lowest). Each color combines the current year’s result with growth or decline from the previous year. Colors signal progress or concern.

But without longitudinal results reported for context, color coding can be problematic. In 2022, the statewide chronic absenteeism rate reached a record high of 30%. A 5.7 percentage point drop to 24.3% in 2023 gave it a yellow middle color that was neither good nor bad. Still, the chronic absenteeism rate was still alarmingly high. Viewers would have to look closely at the numerical components behind the color to figure it out.

No way to compare schools and districts

Unlike some other states’ boards, the California School Board doesn’t allow comparisons of schools and districts. That’s by design. Echoing former Gov. Jerry Brown’s view, the state board focused on district self-improvement and discouraged easy comparisons that didn’t take into account the data behind the colors.

However, both EdSource annual alternative dashboard And Ed DataThe California Department of Education, EdSource, and the Financial Crisis and Management Assistance Team/California School Information Services, a data partnership, are encouraging multi-school and district comparisons.

EdData has a five-year comparison of test scores and other metrics, but this year it no longer starts from 2018-19, the pre-Covid base year for comparisons.

EdSource created graphics shown longitudinally across the state Results in math and English language arts, including studies for student groups from the first year of the Smarter Balanced test.

“If California reported all of its results in this format, it would get an A because that’s exactly the type of comparison we’re looking for,” Polikoff said.

The report analyzed the usability of individual state dashboards to determine whether they were easy to use and well-organized. California is one of 16 states rated “fair,” with 23 states rated “excellent” or “good” and 11 states, mostly smaller states like Vermont, but also Texas and New York, rated “poor.”

“We were surprised at how difficult it was to navigate some state report card websites,” the report said. “We found many common pitfalls, from the relatively mundane to the massive and structural.”

Kansas, for example, had no landing page with overall performance data, while Texas school report cards presented “a wealth of data broken down by every imaginable student group” in huge tables of data but no visualizations.

The five states with “great” usability are: Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, Idaho And New MexicoThe last two of these received an F grade for longitudinal data.

“California’s dashboard is far from the worst dashboard on the market,” Polikoff said. “The reality is that minor tweaks are not going to cut it. That’s probably going to mean a pretty extensive revamp to make it usable for longitudinal comparisons. Now, the state can say, ‘We don’t care about longitudinal trends,’ and that’s their prerogative, but what purpose is the dashboard trying to serve and who is it trying to serve?”

“Answer these questions and then design the dashboard accordingly,” he continued.