Schrag: Be Wary of Distorted Factoids in “California’s Year of Education That Probably Won’t Be”

Last spring, Mockler gave talks at conferences sponsored by EdSource, which compiles, analyzes and reports California school data. In them he summarized some basic numbers. The talk and much of his accompanying data can be found online.

Here are a few highlights:

• Students in the lowest 10th on the state's Academic Performance Index in 2006 would have been near the middle in 1999. In 2003, 35 percent of California students scored at the proficient or advanced level in reading; in 2007, 44 percent reached that level. Gains were considerably higher for Latino and black students. There were similar gains in math.

• Far more students are taking high school math and science courses. In 2007, 741,000 were taking algebra I compared with 491,000 in 2003. Similar increases were recorded in geometry, algebra II, chemistry and physics. There's no guarantee that those courses are as rigorous as their titles imply, or that they're all well taught. But the numbers are an indication.

All that was accomplished despite the fact that California spends $1,000 less per student than the national average, that it ranks last among the states in number of school employees per student, that it has just over half as many counselors as the average American school and that its student-teacher ratio is still among the highest in the nation.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the "nation's report card," California scores lower than comparable states. But its data (as Mockler says) "are just silly" because each state chooses its own sample of students to be tested. Texas, which consistently ranks higher than California on NAEP, tests English learners only after they've been in school three years. We test them after one.

Despite some fiddles, moreover, California has stuck with its exemplary academic standards. That means that more of its schools will suffer penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) than the many states that watered down their standards or lowered the cut scores on their exams to make more of their students appear "proficient."

That's going to bite especially hard beginning this coming year, when California schools must show sharply increased progress toward the goal of 100 percent student proficiency in 2013-14. If proficiency is to mean anything, it's unreachable.

NCLB is already causing major problems for nearly 100 low-scoring California districts that have fallen into the federal "program improvement" category, which requires state fixes. But since some of those districts have strong programs and got the black spot only because a few students failed to take the required tests, they hardly need the kind of intervention that genuinely troubled schools require.

Unfortunately, the state hasn't yet provided the money to triage the needs and thus allow the cavalry to be sent where it's most urgently required. Ditto for funding the last steps to completing CALPADS, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System that will enable California to track all students and thus get better information on school and classroom effectiveness and student progress.

For the better part of four years, nobody in the governor's office seemed to understand the complexities of the state's huge education system – which of course made it much harder to check the conventional "schools suck" wisdom.

The other day, the governor named Rae Belisle to a high post at the Department of Finance. Belisle, former executive director of the state Board of Education, knows the issues. The appointment is a hopeful sign.

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.