SACRAMENTO, CA – In his 2007 State of the State address, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger touched on some key education principles. Foremost was his call for enhancing parental choice by improving the transparency of the public school system through online information about school performance, funding and demographics. While providing such information would be useful for parents, it is unfortunately the case that much so-called education 'information' gives an inaccurate picture of the real state of schools.

According to the governor's website,  The Governor has directed his administration to work with the Legislature, Superintendent of Public Instruction and others to make the School Accountability Report Card parent-friendly and include relevant district and site information so that schools can be easily compared to one another. At present, individual schools produce an accountability report card that contains data on each particular school, but no comparison data with other schools. The governor is correct when he says that without comparative information it s more difficult for parents to decide whether their children should stay in a school or transfer to another. However, true comparisons require truthful data, and here, sadly, California often fails.

For example, the governor said that parents should be able to compare the dropout rates at different schools. Even if this information were widely available, parents could still be fooled because the way the state calculates the dropout rate is hugely flawed. Many dropouts, for instance, are not counted because schools do not track students who supposedly transfer to other schools but actually drop out. Veteran Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters has called the state s dropout rate  dead wrong, and says,  California is a major and willing participant in a political fraud  the sort of phony accounting that has landed corporate executives behind bars.

Comparing the performances of different schools is also made more difficult because the state has adopted a system called the Academic Performance Index (API), which uses student test scores to measure the academic performance of schools and their year-to-year improvement or decline. The state has set a target score of 800, based on the API scale of 200 to 1000, that all schools must eventually hit. If the school scores below 800, and depending on a school s particular API score, the state then calculates an annual growth target for each school, which is the number of points by which the school must improve in the coming year as it continues its trek to eventually reach 800. The key word here, however, is  eventually.

The state s formula for calculating the annual growth target produces improvement requirements so incremental it could take 40 to 80 years for schools that simply meet these targets to ever reach the 800 mark. So even if parents were more easily able to compare whether schools were meeting their growth targets, the targets themselves do not inform parents as to whether schools are actually making significant strides in raising the learning of students.

The governor also wanted parents to have information about how much money goes into the classroom. However, even if parents knew the amount of tax dollars going into classrooms in their area, the state s byzantine education financing system would make those numbers largely irrelevant. Currently, there are more than 60 state education-spending programs that earmark dollars for specific purposes, ranging from special education to reducing class sizes to migrant education and a host of others. Because schools cannot use money from a particular program for any other purpose except those dictated by the program, just knowing the amount of money going into a classroom doesn t tell parents how restricted schools are from using those funds to best meet local needs. Worse, the Legislative Analyst s Office and others have noted that there is no conclusive evidence that these programs are successful or that state officials even know where the dollars go and how they are used. 

Governor Schwarzenegger is right to call for more transparency in California s public education system. However, simply gathering currently available information will not pierce the fog that shrouds the state s schools. Only accurate data, tougher accountability systems, and better funding formulas will do that.

Lance T. Izumi is Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He can be reached via email at lizumi@pacificresearch.org.