Education Week - January 7, 2016 - Quality Counts - 16

EDUCATION WEEK | January 7, 2016

MOVING BEYOND JUST ACADEMICS
AS A WAY TO ASSESS EFFECTIVENESS
Suspension rates, school-climate surveys, and students' social-emotional skills are key factors for California's CORE districts
BY EVIE BLAD

A

Los Angeles

s discussions about
school accountability
begin to focus more
intently on factors beyond standardized-test
scores, educators and
policymakers nationwide are closely watching a group of California school districts-collectively known as the CORE districts-as
they rethink how they evaluate school effectiveness.
In 2013, six districts received the only
local-level waiver from the U.S. Department
of Education when it bypassed California's
state education department to excuse those
school systems from some requirements of
the outdated No Child Left Behind Act.
In return for the federal flexibility, the districts-including Los Angeles Unified, San
Francisco, and Fresno, some of the state's
largest-agreed to create a first-of-its-kind
local accountability system that relies on a
broad range of indicators in addition to traditional test scores to monitor schools.
Those indicators include suspension rates;
school-climate survey responses from parents; and measures of traits related to students' social development and engagement,
like self-management and social awareness.
That work foreshadowed an inclusion of

nonacademic factors as a part of school accountability in the Every Student Succeeds
Act, a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act that was signed
into law by President Barack Obama in December. Under ESSA, state accountability
systems will be required to include at least
one nonacademic indicator. The legislation
lists educator engagement, student engagement, and school climate measures as examples, and it leaves the door open for others.
"We need to make sure that our schools'
quality is measured in a way that is much
more reflective of the hard work that's been
done," said Antwan Wilson, the superintendent of the Oakland district, which is
also under the CORE waiver, along with
Long Beach and Santa Ana. (Three other
districts-Garden Grove, Sacramento, and
Sanger Unified-are a part of CORE, but do
not operate under the waiver.)

BROADER ACCOUNTABILITY
The accountability system, known as the
school quality index, will be maintained
by an organization that is governed by the
districts' leaders known as the California
Office for Reforming Education, or CORE.
(The Sacramento and Sanger Unified districts were originally approved to be a part
of the waiver group, but later withdrew.)
Efforts to broaden accountability to in-

clude nonacademic factors come with some
big questions.
At a time when some influential researchers have cautioned against using measures
of noncognitive traits in school accountability, CORE officials are navigating uncharted
territory in their ongoing work to determine
what student traits should be used in their
accountability system, how to measure
those traits, and what to do with the results.
Their work could be informative to states
as they seek to select what "other indicator"
they will use to measure their schools as
the federal government steps back from its
previously prescriptive model for accountability and devolves more authority to the
states in designing their systems.
The process of creating the CORE accountability system has also created excitement among education leaders who see it
as a chance to move away from traditional
accountability measures, which they say
rely too heavily on standardized-test scores
and tend to foster a culture of blame among
educators rather than an atmosphere of
support.
CORE pairs schools that fall to the bottom of the quality index and also rank lowest in academic achievement, known as priority schools, with demographically similar
high-achieving schools. The aim is that
principals and teachers trade techniques
and strategies to improve.

The system also gives every school a
"dashboard" of indicators it can monitor
throughout the school year.
"The history of accountability systems
has been about, 'What is the thing I need
to do to avoid the punishment?' " said Noah
Bookman, CORE's chief accountability officer. "We are trying to move the conversation
to: 'What am I learning? What strengths do
I need to leverage? What are the challenges
I need to address?' and 'What do I need to
do that?' "

HOW IT WORKS
Key to the CORE districts' waiver was a
promise to reduce the number of students
required for a school to be held accountable
for a given subpopulation-students from
racial- and ethnic-minority groups, Englishlanguage learners, low-income students,
and special education students-from 100
to 20. That means schools with smaller
numbers of students from those populations will be held accountable for their performance for the first time under the new
index.
The school-quality-improvement index
bases 60 percent of a school's score on academic factors. Under that category, schools
will be judged by their proficiency rates and
growth in proficiency rates on the Smarter
Balanced test, aligned to the Common Core

Stephany Rivera holds up her thumbs
to show agreement while participating
in the Second Step program at Beachy
Avenue Elementary School in Arleta,
Calif. The social-emotional learning
program teaches lessons in subjects
such as empathy and anger
management.

Jamie Rector for Education Week

16
Education Week - January 7, 2016 - Quality Counts

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