ACSA has sponsored two bills this legislative session that are currently making their way through the Capitol. One concerns student assessment data and school accountability, while the other concerns the cost of instructional materials.
The first bill, Assembly Bill 2776, Mullin, D-S. San Francisco, would make changes to the Academic Performance Index. The bill would require the Public School Accountability Advisory Committee to make recommendations to improve the API in two areas.
AB 2776 requires by July 1, 2010 the PSAA will make recommendations regarding the establishment of a methodology for generating academic performance measures using unique student identifiers and to recommend a system that can provide a more accurate measure of an individual student’s academic progress. This could result in looking at academic data within a grade level and across grade levels for an individual student in a number of subjects in which they are tested, including mathematics, English/language arts and science.
AB 2776 also requires the PSAA by July 1, 2009 to make recommendations regarding the inclusion of the California English Language Development Test and the feasibility of including English learner proficiency in the API.
“ACSA believes in order for the Academic Performance Index to continue to be relevant and meaningful over the course of the next decade, the focus must be teaching and learning and the needs of individual students,” said ACSA Legislative Advocate Sherry Skelly Griffith. “This will only happen if we tie individual student performance data to the assessments in the core subjects and integrate this data into the API. The progress of English learners must also be integral to the accountability system. Really good work is going on out in the field with English learners. Students are making progress in language proficiency, but there is absolutely no recognition in the API.”
ACSA believes AB 2776 is necessary because the current API only allows for comparison of classrooms and grade levels rather than progress of individual students over the course of their education experience. In addition, the CELDT component is necessary because the test gauges student progress toward full English proficiency over time. The CELDT is a standardized, scaled test that has cut points identifying students in five levels: Beginning, Early Intermediate, Intermediate, Early Advanced and Advanced.
The PSAA will identify how to link individual students with their test progress from grade to grade and subject to subject. The PSAA would also explore how the STAR testing system can be linked from grade to grade as well, depending on the subject.
The second bill ACSA is sponsoring this legislative session is AB 2468, Brownley, D-Santa Monica. This bill urges that procedures be established to ensure the State Board of Education considers price as one factor after the state Curriculum Commission submits its recommendations.
The bill also calls for procedures to ensure districts can purchase unbundled instructional materials and program components, and not be required to purchase intervention programs or other ancillary components the district deems unnecessary.
This bill also aims to establish policies for the SBE to ensure price is not considered by the Curriculum Commission in determining recommendations for instructional materials and that recommendations be based solely on content standards alignment, approved evaluation criteria and quality.
“ACSA believes that while textbook quality is of paramount importance, that price should also be a factor in final decisions made by our State Board of Education. AB 2468 would help to establish a policy that would allow California to adopt the highest quality textbooks, but to utilize our size and volume in an effort to ensure that the price of textbooks are purchased at the most reasonable level,” wrote ACSA legislative consultant Jeff Frost in a letter to Assemblywoman Brownley. “As school districts work to balance local budgets, while at the same time using substantial amounts of local general fund dollars to subsidize the purchase of required instructional materials, it seems appropriate that California begin to consider the price of materials before final decisions are made by our State Board.”
AB 2468 helps move California toward a model similar to one used in North Carolina that allows the Board of Education to negotiate price with publishers once textbooks have been approved for quality and content. This negotiation is handled through a sealed bid by the publisher. The board may refuse to adopt any of the books offered at the prices bid and call for new bids. When bids are accepted and a contract entered into, the contract may require, in the board’s discretion, that the total sales of each book be reported annually.
AB 2776 was scheduled for a hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, while AB 2468 has been referred to the Senate Education Committee. For more information on either bill, visit www.leginfo.ca.gov.