School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 28 | NOVEMBER 17, 2004

State Board Adds More to SARCs and a News Story Probes SARCs Missing in Action

If you thought School Accountability Report Cards were already too long, better sharpen your pencils and get ready for more. To comply with the Williams lawsuit settlement, the State Board of Education just voted to add three new items to the 50 already on your SARC data definitions list.

These new requirements will expand what schools must now disclose about teachers, textbooks, and facilities. They will require that your principals describe the facts in more detail, or that your district staff provide more data. These additions, which will be provided in a supplement to the California Department of Education's SARC template will not arrive with the data in place. You will be doing the work. The ball will be in your court.

To give you a heads-up, below is a summary of the new requirements.
(You can also view all the revisions the CDE proposed to the State Board.)

Facilities: The CDE will require schools to report all facilities needing maintenance to ensure good repair. The Office of Public School Construction promises to define good repair by the end of the year.

Teachers: Schools must now report two new facts: the number of vacant teacher positions (that is, the number of year-long positions that have not been filled for a year or more; or semester-long positions that have gone vacant for an entire semester); and the number of misassigned teachers (teachers working outside of their credentialed area). Given the attention to highly qualified teachers in this year's SARCs, this data is certain to be a hot button.

Textbooks: Williams requires all schools to provide textbooks or instructional materials of equal quality to every student, to use both in class and at home. Photocopied sheets from textbooks are not considered acceptable. The CDE revised its template to include narrative about the availability of textbooks, but actual data about the number of textbooks is not required.

This revision met with mixed reviews at the recent meeting of the State Board of Education, where the CDE presented its recommendations for Board approval. John Affeldt, the lead attorney on the Williams case, urged the board to seek textbook data for every core course, and criticized the CDE for reducing the textbook question to a narrative. Affeldt also pressed for a prompt revision to the SARC data definitions. These issues are likely to be settled in the next few weeks.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Here are some tips from School Wise Press to help you prepare for the Williams addendum:

1. Meet with your facilities people and take a look at their punch lists for deferred maintenance. Are they keeping priority lists by site in a form you can use in your SARCs? Do they have a work-in-progress status report for jobs underway?

2. Meet with your human resources department and let them know that you want to identify unfilled teaching positions and long-term substitutes. Classrooms that have been assigned a succession of substitutes should also be flagged.

3. Meet with the people in your district who manage textbook ordering and distribution. If they can provide site-specific answers to the upcoming tough questions, you'll spare your principals from taking inventory.

4. With SARC audits just around the next bend, pay attention. Accuracy in your reporting is critical. Errors, omissions, and delays could cost you reimbursement dollars.

REFERENCES

Read more about the Williams case from this Web page on the CDE site.

Additional references about Williams are on the School Wise Press Web site.

Read the agenda of the State Board of Education pertaining to SARCs.

SAN JOSE MERCURY SCRUTINIZES SARCs

Districts throughout the Bay Areas mid-Peninsula were featured in a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News about school accountability reports.

Mercury News reporter Larry Slonaker scrutinized the SARCs of schools in Alum Rock, San Jose, and Palo Alto for availability and adherence to SARC law Slonaker discovered that Alum Rock had not published SARCs since 2000-2001. When he called the district for comment, Leslie Bar-Ness, assistant to the Alum Rock superintendent, was surprised to hear the news. "Shame on us,'' she said.

The four-page reports produced by Palo Alto USD were missing about half of the required factors. When Slonaker called Bill Garrison, director of assessment, for comment, he responded, "It's kind of prohibitive, cost-wise, to put something like that together. And it's not very interesting or useful … from a parent's standpoint."

San Jose USD went on the record with a very different view of SARCs. Their reports have been an important part of the distric'ts public engagement strategy for years. Assistant Superintendent Bill Erlendson pointed to the board and superintendents commitment to invest in public knowledge of school performance. "The better informed they are, the more likely they'll be part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

The article is well worth reading in full.