The Sacramento Bee, Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7

There's a lot of research where, as somebody once said, what's true isn't new and what's new isn't true. Take two recent reports from two very different organizations that agreed on but one thing: In education, California isn't doing well.

The first, from Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week, put California 34th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in its ranks of children's chances for school success. The rankings were based on a stew of criteria, from parental education and income to preschool enrollment, high school graduation rates and college enrollment.

Since a large percentage of parents of California students, many of them immigrants, rank low in education and English proficiency -- nationally 84 percent of parents are fluent English speakers; in California it's 62 percent -- the only surprise is that California is doing as well in high school graduation (we're at the national average) as it is.

But recent California data also indicate that even within the same economic groups Asians do better than others, including whites, which again indicates that much of the challenge is outside the school. In any case, the numbers are as much an index of social and economic welfare as of school effectiveness and quality.

The other recent report is a joint product of CBEE, California Business for Education Excellence, and PRI, the conservative Pacific Research Institute of San Francisco. Its title, "Failing Our Future: The Holes in California's School Accountability System and How to Fix Them," gives you a pretty good idea where it's coming from.

It points out that the state's target (for each school) on API, the Academic Performance Index, derived largely from state test scores, is 800 (on a scale of 200 to 1000). But that goal "is significantly lower than grade-level proficiency (which all students are supposed to achieve by 2013-14), which is 875."

Both numbers are arbitrary. It makes just as much sense to say that the 875 proficiency goal for every student is admirable but unrealistically high, which it is, as to say the 800 school average target is too low. You can almost bet that one way or another, the proficiency standard will be lowered before the crunch comes.

"Failing Our Future," by James Lanich of CBEE and Lance Izumi and Xiaochin Yan of PRI, also fusses about what they say is the state's requirement that every school with an API below 800 must reduce the gap by 5 percent annually. At that rate, they say, even a school with an API of 735 will take 44 years to get there.

That's wrong. The state's requirement now is 5 percent or a five point gain annually, whichever is higher, which reduces the time to 13 years max. Most of California's schools have been making greater gains.

Lanich and his colleagues are also behind times in their assertion that the state's accountability system provides "no incentive to intervene with lower-performing students (meaning low-income and minority groups) as long as enough higher-performing students keep the school's average scores above the API benchmarks."

That's half true. Until recently, schools only had to post annual gains for major ethnic and economic subgroups equal to 80 percent of the gain required for the school as a whole. But in order to close achievement gaps, new state rules require schools to show greater gains by low-achieving students than for the school as a whole. Given the low education levels, income and language skills of a huge percentage of California parents, that will be a daunting challenge.

Probably the most serious complaint of the Lanich-Izumi-Yan report is that the state's intervention program for low-performing schools is a colossal waste of money -- that it's simply a failure in turning schools around.

That's mostly true but not new. The same thing was reported in September in a lengthy study that AIR, the American Institutes of Research, did for the state.

But the real story here may have less to do with the problems of the state's program than with the inherent difficulties of turning around already underfunded schools with inadequate resources and weak staffs. The extra money from the intervention program, AIR said, may be less a supplement than a short-term infusion of resources that other schools have on a permanent basis.

Lanich, the lead author of the CBEE report, may be right that the state Department of Education is reluctant to declare too many schools "in need of improvement" because it lacks the capacity to provide effective intervention. Identifying low achievers, he says, shouldn't be limited by the state's own capacity. Everyone "should be engaged" in shaping up those schools -- universities, business organizations, community groups.

But where's the cavalry? Even in high visibility situations -- as in the Republicans' vote earlier last month to reject Joe Nunez's reappointment to the State Board of Education, perhaps the board's strongest defender of high standards and school accountability -- CBEE was nowhere to be found.