For more than a decade, the Academic Performance Index has defined the public's perception of a school.

Parents relied on the three-digit number, tied exclusively to scores on standardized tests, to decide where to send their children. Realtors used it to set up the price of homes nigh "good schools." Superintendents judged principals by how close their schoolhouse'southward API came to the totemic "800."

But now the API's power – some would call it tyranny – is waning. In the nearly term, the API will be a husk of its old self and may disappear for a couple of years. Longer term, it will become but one of many gauges of school performance – demoted from sheriff of accountability to the rank of sergeant.

The passage of Assembly Pecker 484, sponsored past Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concur, on behalf of State Superintendent of Public Didactics Tom Torlakson, suspends most of the standardized tests that had been given annually from grades 3 to 11, with no timeline for replacing many of theone thousand (meet accompanying story).

In 2014, AB 484 requires that districts give a preliminary or "field" examination in the Mutual Core standards – new, nationally aligned learning goals the state is implementing – instead of tests on state standards in math and English language language arts. A field test provides valuable information to the test'south creator – the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, in this example – but not valid scores for comparing schools or students.

Equally a event, for the commencement time since API was created in 1999, the State Board is likely to vote to suspend it next year. And the Board could decide to suspend the API once more in 2015, on the grounds that there needs to exist at least a couple of years of results from the official Common Core tests for math and English language arts before starting to judge schools past them.

These are the test components that made up this year's AP for elementary and middle schools (top) and high schools. CST stands for the California Standards Tests in various subjects. CAPA and CMA are acronyms for alternative standards tests that studies with disabilities take. Math and English language arts count the most, leading to criticism that the API has contributed to a narrowing of the curriculum. Source: API Information Guide, page 11

These are the test components that made upward this yr'southward API for elementary and middle schools (pinnacle) and high schools. CST stands for the California Standards Tests in various subjects. CAPA and CMA are acronyms for culling standards tests that studies with disabilities take. Math and English language arts count the nigh, leading to criticism that the API has contributed to a narrowing of the curriculum. Source: API Data Guide, page eleven

Fifty-fifty earlier AB 484 scrambled the state standardized tests on which the API is calculated, the API was facing a makeover. It took Senate President pro Tem Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, two tries to convince Gov. Jerry Brown, only in 2022 the governor signed Senate Bill 1458, which requires building in other measures besides standardized tests into the API.

Starting in 2016-17, at to the lowest degree xl percent of a high school's API score must include indicators of college and career readiness, such as graduation rates, dropout rates or the proportion of students who graduate with courses required for admission to University of California and California State Academy. (The Land Lath will determine which factors to include.) SB 1458 allows non-examination measures to be introduced into elementary and middle school API scores as well.

In a statement after the bill was signed, Steinberg cited what many educators and policy advocates had long concluded well-nigh the API. "For years, 'teaching to the examination' has become more than a worn cliché because 100 percent of the API relied on bubble test scores in express field of study areas," he said. "But life is non a bubble test and that system has failed our kids."

With a bespeak arrangement of 200 to ane,000 points and a target score of 800, the API has been weighted heavily toward the results of state English linguistic communication arts and math tests. Those ii subjects comprised 90 percent of a G-8 school'southward API last year, with social studies and scientific discipline making up 10 percentage. For loftier school, math and English language language arts tests in grades 9-xi made upward 45 percent of the API, with end-of-class science tests next at 23 percent, history and social science at xiv percentage, and scores on the high schoolhouse exit examination the remaining 18 per centum. SB 1458 encourages giving more weight to social scientific discipline and science tests in response to the widely shared criticism that a math- and English-heavy point system had discouraged Thousand-8 teachers from making fourth dimension for other subjects.

Include non-exam measures

In the law laying out the Local Control Funding Formula, legislators laid out eight priority areas for evaluating the effectiveness of a school, with says to measure them. Source: charter from the Legislative Analyst's Office report "An Overview of the Local Control Funding Formula," July 2013.

The Local Control Funding Formula lays out 8 priority areas for evaluating the effectiveness of a school. Click to enlarge. Credit: Legislative Analyst's Office

SB 1458 takes the view that the API should be mended to incorporate broader indices of a schoolhouse's operation.

The Local Control Funding Formula, the new schoolhouse financing system that Brown pushed and the Legislature passed this year, takes this one step further, while doing an end-run around the API. The funding constabulary'southward new Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), which every district must adopt as of July 1, lists viii priorities that schools and districts should be judged on and school funding should be aligned to.

API scores are 1 of a six indices in just i priority – pupil achievement. Other achievement measures include the English language learner reclassification rate, the percentage of students in a school who pass Advanced Placement exams and the percentage of students who graduate higher set. The other priorities include school climate, pupil engagement and implementation of the Common Cadre standards.

Michael Kirst, president of the State Board of Education, which volition create the template for the LCAP that districts volition use, says that the API "will morph into a broader set up of measures" that local districts will employ to gear up goals under their Local Control and Accountability Plan. The API will remain in police, but its primacy volition terminate, he said.

Sue Burr, a former executive director of the State Board and now a fellow member, agreed. In passing the new finance system, Gov. Brown and the Legislature were thinking of "a more robust way of evaluating schools, non simply a unmarried number," she said.

Steinberg was one of the central negotiators with the Brown administrators on the Local Command Funding Formula. Just the two laws aren't fully in sync on the mechanics of the API. The funding law appears to favor presenting data as a dashboard. Only as your car'south gauges give divide readings – gas in the tank, speedometer, temperature, oil, RPMs, tire pressure level – that create a blended picture of a car'due south performance, the LCAP envisions a report with multiple indexes illustrating eight priorities.

SB 1458 calls for shoehorning non-examination measures into the API. Translating graduation and dropout rates or performance in Advanced Placement courses into a three-digit index is problematic, and information technology remains to be seen, with the LCAP every bit an alternative, how eager the Land Board will be to attempt.

Burr suggested that, once the LCAP is in place, the public's desire for a unmarried number defining performance "may diminish over time."

Merely Susanna Cooper, Steinberg's principal education consultant, said information technology was premature to predict the API's demise.

"The big question is how do the API and LCAP fit together? Not sure anyone knows that yet," she said. "The beauty of the API is too its weakness: its simplicity. People sympathise what they think it means."

"It's a jump of faith," she continued, "to say that the API will lose its primacy and that the LCAP volition capture the attention of the public in the aforementioned way that the API has. Information technology's human being nature that parents will wait at the LCAP and say, 'There is the API. '"

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