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California Department of EducationExecutive Office
SBE-003 (REV. 09/2011)
dsib-amard-jul12item01 / ITEM #05
/ CALIFORNIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
JULY 2012 AGENDA
SUBJECT
A Conversation about the Future of Accountability in California: The School Accountability Report Card, Including Approval of the 2011–12 Template. / ActionInformation
Public Hearing
SUMMARY OF THE ISSUE(S) /
The State Board of Education (SBE) annually approves the School Accountability Report Card (SARC) template in accordance with the requirements of state law (California Education Code [EC] sections 33126, 33126.1, 35256, 35258, and 41020).
One of the key components of California’s accountability system is the SARC. With 35 data tables reporting on information such as student enrollment, facilities and textbooks, student academic achievement, and graduation rates, the SARC is arguably the most comprehensive accountability tool available to gauge the performance of schools. However, past research has shown that the SARC is not easily accessible by parents, not consistent from school to school, and not engaging or user-friendly.
In May 2012, the SBE engaged in an initial conversation about the future of accountability in California which included information about the SARC, the Academic Performance Index (API), and local school review processes. The California Department of Education (CDE) is providing this item as part of a continuing conversation about the future of accountability in California.
RECOMMENDATION /The CDE recommends that the SBE approve the proposed template for the 2011–12 SARC that will be published during the 2012–13 school year. The only changes to the 2011–12 SARC template from last year’s SBE-approved template was to update the dates from 2010–11 to 2011–12.
BRIEF HISTORY OF KEY ISSUES /Included in Proposition 98, passed in 1988, the SARC is an accountability tool that reports data on various indicators. The purpose of the SARC was to apprise parents and members of the public about school conditions and performance.
The CDE is responsible for annually preparing a SARC template for SBE approval that includes all legally required data elements (see Attachment 1 for the proposed 2011-12 SARC template).
Schools can download the SARC template from the Internet and use it to meet their SARC requirements or they may use a different format, as long as all legally required data elements are included. See Attachment 2 for information about the legal requirements for each SARC data element. Schools have a legal obligation to complete their SARC by February 1 of each year, notify their parents of the availability of the SARC, post the SARC on their school’s Web site, and provide the CDE with the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the SARC.
The information above describes the legal requirements placed upon schools, the CDE, and the SBE around the SARC. Any changes to the required data elements included in the SARC must be legislated. However, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI), the CDE, and the SBE have considerable flexibility in the formatting of the SARC template, including how the data elements are displayed (e.g., tables or graphics) and the order in which the data elements appear in the SBE-approved template.
The CDE has convened stakeholder groups at various times to discuss revisions to the SARC, and the current SARC is a reflection of these various stakeholder groups’ input. However, the CDE has not convened a stakeholder group to discuss the contents of the SARC since 2007.
A March 2008 Legislative Report, entitled “Improving the Usability and Readability of the School Accountability Report Card (SARC)” was included in the May 2012 SBE item on the Future of Accountability in California. The agenda item can be found on the CDE SBE Agenda—May 9-10, 2012 Web page at http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/ag/ag/yr12/documents/may12item06.doc. That report outlined several recommendations for future improvements to the SARC and highlighted work done by The Grow Network, supported by the Hewlett Foundation, about ways to improve the SARCs usability and readability. The recommendations provided by The Grow Network were not implemented for a variety of reasons including budgetary constraints and CDE accessibility concerns, but many of the recommendations are relevant to the continued conversation about the future of the SARC in California.
When considering SBE actions and improvements related to the SARC, there are three categories of recommended improvements: 1) immediate actions to be taken by the SBE, 2) short-term improvements that can be accomplished within two to six months, and 3) long-term improvements that would take longer than six months.
Immediate Action to be taken by the SBE Related to the SARC
Each year, the CDE prepares for the SBE a template containing all the SARC reporting elements that are required by state and federal laws. Local educational agencies (LEAs) may use the template as designed or may design their own report cards as long as all legally required information is included.
Prior to 2010, the CDE provided three options for LEAs to use to meet the SARC requirement: (1) a blank template, (2) a template pre-populated with data, and
(3) downloadable data files. The template pre-populated with data and the downloadable data files include data available to the CDE (e.g., test results).
In 2010, the budget used to support the production of the template was eliminated. Therefore, the template pre-populated with data was not provided for LEAs in 2010. The SSPI requested that the CDE look for alternative solutions to assist LEAs. An existing partnership between the CDE, EdSource, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team called the Ed-Data Partnership (Ed-Data) was identified as a potential option for producing the SARC template pre-populated with data. The Ed-Data supports a Web-based series of data reports and displays for schools, school districts, counties, and the state that are designed to offer educators, policy makers, the legislature, parents, and the public quick access to timely and comprehensive data about kindergarten through grade twelve education in California. The Ed-Data Web site already reported on the majority of legally required SARC data elements making it a natural fit for the SARC template pre-populated with data. The SARC template pre-populated with data was first provided on the Ed-Data Web site in November 2011 for LEAs to produce the 2010-11 SARCs published during the 2011-12 school year.
For the 2012-13 school year, the blank SARC template and the downloadable data files will be made available on the CDE Web page and the SARC template pre-populated with data will be available on the Ed-Data Web site. The pre-populated SARC template will also be available in at least the top five languages, other than English, spoken by students in California.
The only changes to the 2011–12 SARC template from last year’s SBE-approved template was to update the dates from 2010–11 to 2011–12.
Possible Short-Term Improvements to the SARC
1. Revise the Optional SARC Executive Summary
The content and format of the current SARC executive summary was developed out of the workgroup meetings convened in 2007. There was no SARC executive summary prior to 2007 and there is no requirement in law for an executive summary. Each data element that appears on the SARC executive summary also appears in the SARC but not all data elements appear in the executive summary.
One approach to improving the usefulness of the SARC would be to review and potentially revise the data elements that appear in the executive summary to ensure that the chosen data elements are the most important to reflect the goals identified by the SSPI and the SBE. Re-ordering the current data elements in the current executive summary is another option that the SSPI and SBE could consider. The current SARC executive summary appears as the first three pages of the SARC template and is available on the CDE 2010-11 SARC Web page at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/sa/sarc1011.asp.
If the SBE is interested in pursuing changes to the executive summary, the CDE will work with SBE staff and convene the Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) advisory committee to discuss revisions. The PSAA advisory committee would discuss which data elements to consider for the executive summary, as well as if the executive summary should only include data already collected by the CDE, thus ensuring more consistency of the data from school to school. The CDE will then bring these recommendations back to the SBE at its September 2012 meeting for review.
2. Explore the Promulgation of Regulations To Improve Accessibility of SARCs
Current state law does not provide any specific direction to schools regarding how to report to CDE a link to their SARC Web page or require a consistent location on each school or LEA’s Web page where the SARC should be posted. This lack of consistency from school to school and LEA to LEA may make SARCs difficult to locate by parents. One approach that the SBE could pursue is to explore the promulgation of regulations that would require each school to report to the CDE the specific URL where the school’s SARC is posted on the school’s Web site by February 1 of each school year and that each LEA create a link off the LEA’s main Web page where all SARCs can be accessed.
Possible Long-Term Improvements to the SARC
1. Explore the Development of a Web-Based Application That Schools Could Use to Provide the CDE with the Locally Collected SARC Data Elements
There are two issues that could be addressed by the development of a Web-based application that would allow LEAs to provide the CDE with data that are currently required on the SARC but collected and reported locally.
The first issue is around consistency of the SARCs. Because schools are not required to produce their SARCs using the SBE-adopted template, there are substantial differences in formatting, organization of data elements, and the way that schools elect to display data in either tabular and graphical ways. These differences may present significant challenges for parents and the public when trying to make comparisons between schools.
The second issue is that about 12 of the 25 data tables and narrative boxes included in the SARC template are collected and reported locally and added to the pre-populated SARC template by LEAs. That information is not collected by the CDE, which limits the CDE’s ability to prepare and post on the Internet SARCs for all schools in California. In addition, the CDE does not have an ongoing archive of locally-provided SARC data. Because these data are scattered across thousands of individual school Web sites, the CDE cannot easily analyze, compile, or manipulate information for these data elements.
One approach to address both these issues would be to develop a Web-based application where schools would submit data directly to the CDE. The CDE would then marry the data already available at the CDE with the data provided by the LEAs to prepare and post a completed SARC for every school in California. This approach, however, would require additional fiscal resources and might also incur state mandated costs.
2. Revise the SARC Template to Be More User-Friendly
One complaint levied against the current SARC is that the CDE-provided template format and data displays are not engaging or user-friendly. A typical completed SARC will be 18 or more pages in length and include data and narrative statements in more than 35 different areas. The CDE could convene a stakeholder group and/or conduct focus groups to identify improvements in the organization, formatting, and data displays that would be more appropriate for the target audience. However, this approach would require additional fiscal resources that would vary depending on the mechanism for convening the group as well as the scope of the revisions.
3. Develop a Data Dashboard with Rating Information About Schools
While the SARC includes many data elements that provide information about school conditions and performance, users of the SARC are left to draw their own conclusions about the effectiveness of a particular school, because the SARC lacks an evaluative component that could indicate relative performance of the school.
There are several ways that this type of report might be developed. One way would be to establish ranges of performance and provide a rating for each individual data element. Another way would be to provide ratings for each individual data element and then organize the individual data elements into broader categories and provide a rating for each category.
The ratings could take many forms; for example, letter grades or symbolic ratings, such as stars. Colors could also be used to indicate whether a school was meeting or exceeding a target (green) or was below the target (red).
If the data in this type of report were limited to what was available to the CDE, the CDE could publish a consistent report for every school in California.
The goal of this approach would be to provide context and meaning for the wealth of data contained in the SARC so that parents and the public could gauge whether a school is exceeding expectations, meeting expectations, or below expectations.
SUMMARY OF PREVIOUS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION DISCUSSION AND ACTION /In May 2012, the SBE engaged in a discussion about the future of accountability in California that included exploring ways to better utilize the SARC to communicate with parents and the public about the performance of schools across a number of important indicators.
In July 2011, the SBE approved the 2010–11 SARC template that was used for SARCs published during the 2011–12 school year.
FISCAL ANALYSIS (AS APPROPRIATE) /If approved by the SBE, the recommended action will result in ongoing costs to the Ed-Data Partnership to prepare the pre-populated SARC template. All costs associated with the preparation of the data files are included in the Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division budget.
However, additional development costs will be associated with changes to the SARC executive summary or development of additional reports, but until the format and contents of such reports are finalized, the fiscal impact is unknown.
ATTACHMENT(S) /Attachment 1: School Accountability Report Card Reported Using Data from the
2011–12 School Year, Published During 2012–13 (16 Pages)