Dive Brief:

• The California State Board of Education approved a new performance measure last week that will report how schools, and individual grades, perform compared to state proficiency levels while still giving parents score reports on the individual progress of their children.
• The Los Angeles Times reports most schools will receive scores between -95 and 45 because so many of their students do not meet proficiency, and some education advocates worry that will create communications problems for schools and be hard for parents to understand.
• Karen Valdes, assistant superintendent of the Minefee Union School District, spoke out against the state’s plan to combine scores of students who are still learning English with those English learners who have been reclassified as fluent, saying it would conceal EL performance.

Dive Insight:

Every state is working on a new accountability system based on changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act approved by Congress. California has moved particularly quickly, proceeding with accountability changes that aligned with its new school funding law even before the U.S. Department of Education finalized the rule-making that would guide implementation of the ESEA reauthorization, referred to as the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Besides its new plans for reporting standardized test performance, California will offer a dashboard of results to parents and community members. This is expected to be particularly powerful as a move away from a single summative score that determines whether a school is considered a success or a failure. It may also help drive school improvement efforts.