Academic Performance Index

Opinion: Let's Measure
What Counts for a Change

BY STEVE REES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 1/26/00

We are a people, it seems, ready to count everything that matters. So if indeed learning matters, then counting progress could only be a good thing. The debates surrounding the debut of the Academic Performance Index (API) this week affirm at least this much: that school performance matters enough that we should, indeed, measure it.

For this reason, I'm pleased that the governor is giving us his version of the Dow index for schools. At least we're striving to pay the same attention to measuring school effectiveness as we pay to baseball statistics and the stock market tables.

But I believe the governor has misunderstood the public's demand for school information. Like baseball fans and investors, parents want to know many facts about schools, not just one. I've never known a baseball fan who only cared to know about batting averages. And I've never known an investor who could afford to keep an eye only on the Dow Jones index.

The problem with an index like the API is that it hides more than it reveals. It combines many factors into one. What's worse, it claims to be a substitute or proxy for all other things that matter. For the parent who cares most about teacher credentials, small classes, or the number of "gifted and talented" (GATE) students in a school, the API will be of little help.

For five years, I've been listening to parents' questions like these. Because my company publishes facts about schools on-line and in print, we hear an earful about what parents want to know about schools. Of the thousands of questions we've been asked, we've never been asked for an index like the API. In fact, one customer told us she was glad we didn't rate schools like the Michelin Guide rates hotels. "Just give me facts, and let me rate schools myself," she told me.

It's the governor's presumption that he knows best what parents ought to know, that could cause him trouble. Perhaps the governor could serve the public better by adding more and better facts to the realm of what can be known about schools. Here are some suggestions.

1. High school graduation rates. This isn't included in the API because real, verifiable graduation rates can't be calculated from the poor data that now exists. Educators need a student identification system, like the Social Security card, that would enable them to track students wherever they live in California.

2. Teacher experience. If we can learn from Kaiser where our doctor went to school, what she studied, and when she graduated, perhaps we could benefit from knowing more about the teachers we entrust with our kids 180 days a year.

3. Real measures of progress. We'd know far more about a school if we used test data to show how far each student advanced each year. By measuring each student's progress, and then summing that at the classroom and school level, we'd better understand how teachers and schools differ. This is how Tennessee measures the "value" that teachers add to student learning each year. This way, teachers and schools aren't credited (or blamed) for something they can't control: how much students know when they sit down in their classrooms on the fi rst day of school.

These improvements are possible if lawmakers, the Governor, the Department of Education, and school boards reach agreement on who's in charge of school data gathering. Their political bickering has kept important work from getting done. For example, if the governor stopped being angry at Eastin for supporting his rival in the governor's race, and gave sufficient funds to Supt. Delaine Eastin's staff, her Demographics Unit could improve the accuracy and recency of existing data.

If the legislature got smart, and required schools to have site-level budgets, we'd know what schools receive and spend each year. And if the legislature passed a law that finally authorized the long-awaited California Student Information System (CSIS), we could stop arguing over the accuracy of school data like graduation rates, and get on with discussing the critical policy questions, at last anchored by facts we all believed.

BACK TO API PAGE