As office of a push to measure how well a school is educating its students based on more simply examination scores, California for the starting time time is planning to factor graduation rates into the state'due south main mensurate of a school's bookish achievement.

The state Department of Teaching is recommending that every bit early on as next year the proportion of students who receive some class of a loftier schoolhouse diploma should business relationship for a 5th of a school's Bookish Performance Index. The API is a composite score, betwixt 200 and 1,000, that is based on students' scores on standardized tests. Schools at the depression end of the scale risk state sanctions, putting campuses under pressure level to perform.

Only how to incorporate graduation rates into the API raised challenging questions that a committee overseeing implementation of the state's school accountability system has been struggling with. At a coming together concluding calendar month, the Public School Accountability Act Advisory Committee turned aside four options for determining the graduation rate's slice of the API that a group of experts presented, and asked for the Education Department to explore a fifth option. In April, subsequently regional hearings and in one case the Education Department has crunched some numbers, the Advisory Committee may accept plenty data to recommend a program to Superintendent of Public Education Tom Torlakson and the Country Lath of Education.

Screen Shot 2013-03-18 at 11.11.14 PMThe Advisory Committee is interim on the framework prescribed in Senate Bill 1458, legislation signed into law last year. Championed by Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg, it mandates that exam scores contain no more than lx percent of a high schoolhouse's API. The State Board will determine what volition brand up the forty per centum, but the Country Department of Educational activity is suggesting that it be split between graduation rates and other every bit-yethoped-for-adamant measures of higher and career readiness.

At its meeting, the Informational Committee discussed how to incorporate a high school's graduation statistics into API's indicate calibration. Whether or not they graduated and got some form of a diploma, each senior would get a score, and the average of the individual scores would become the school's or commune's graduation rate component of the API.

Difficult considerations

To determine the scoring organization, the Advisory Committee had to make a value judgment: How of import, relative to other measures in the API, is the graduation rate?

All of the options before the Committee assumed that a student who didn't graduate would become the minimum score of 200 points. Simply should each graduate be given the maximum score of 1,000 points? Doing so would show that the country considers getting a diploma very of import, and information technology could serve as an incentive for a loftier schoolhouse to boost the graduation rates. Consider: If each student who received a diploma got 1,000 points, a school with an 80 percent graduation rate would go an API score of 840 for its graduation rate slice of the API. Last year, the average API for high schools – really grades ix-11 since seniors don't take country standardized tests – was only 752. The about recent 4-year one thousandraduation rate in California, for the course of 2011, was 76.7 percent.

Suppose instead a student who attains a high school diploma were credited with a score of 875, which corresponds with proficiency on a country exam, the California Standards Test, or CST. That same loftier school, with an 80 percent graduation rate, would become only a 740 score, brought down by twenty pct of students who didn't get a diploma.

There are other considerations:

  • How many points should a student receive who doesn't have the credits to graduate merely passes the GED, the General Educational Development test?
  • What about a student with disabilities who manages to accomplish a special education certificate of completion? These are given to students with disabilities who don't qualify for a standard diploma merely who have completed an alternative course of study or have met the goals of their Individualized Education Plan for high schoolhouse.
  • Given the lower graduation rates of low-income students and English learners, should there exist bonus points for high-needs students who graduate with a diploma, as a reward for schools' efforts to get them across the finish line?
  • Should there as well exist more points for students who consummate A-Yard, the course requirements for admission to the University of California and California State Academy systems?
  • And what should be done to encourage, not penalize, culling schools that work with students at risk of dropping out or bring dropouts, some with 4th and 5thursday grade math and reading levels, back to the classroom? The omnipresence and transfer rates at many of those schools are often very low.

"There ought to be bonus points for re-engaged dropouts with career readiness certificates, bringing them to the level they are employable," said Ernie Silva, an ambassador with SIATech, a network of dropout recovery high schools, during the public comment period at the meeting.

The Committee punted, for now, on the issue of scoring graduation rates for dropout recovery and other alternative or ASAM schools (Culling Schools Accountability Model), every bit they're called.

But members did otherwise settle on a preference for assigning API scores to graduation rates. As proposed by Stanford Graduate School of Education Professor Edward Haertel, who's an Advisory Committee member as well every bit a member of a grouping offering technical advice, each educatee in a four-yr cohort who graduated would get 1,000 points, and students who don't graduate – currently virtually 24 percent of students – would become the minimum score, 200 points. Information technology would essentially be a pass-neglect. Even so, at that place would exist exceptions:

  • Students who pass a GED but don't go a diploma would receive 800 points. But once the state adopts what's expected to be a much more than rigorous GED, they too would get 1,000 points;
  • Students with disabilities who earned a certificate of completion also would receive 1,000 points;
  • Low-income students, students with disabilities and English learners who earn a diploma would get fifty bonus points for a score of 1,050. A pupil who falls in 2 categories (low-income, English learner) would get an API score of ane,100. Conceivably, a student who falls in all 3 categories would score one,150 points;
  • There would be no extra credit for A-G completion; however, there probable will be credit given every bit part of the xx per centum of the API score based on college and career readiness. The Committee will take that upwardly in coming months.

The  Teaching Department will do a detailed analysis of Haertel's proposal to see how information technology would touch on individual high schools' API scores. Haertel estimated that, if graduation rates were to comprise twenty percent of the overall API score, as the Department of Education recommends, and were implemented next year, his model would raise the boilerplate high school'south base 2022 API score by well-nigh 10 points.

Steinberg'south SB 1458 is written to take effect in 2016. But the Department of Teaching wants the Land Lath to adopt at least the graduation rate component this summer so that it could take effect in 2014. The reason is that Superintendent of Public Pedagogy Tom Torlakson is recommending the intermission of well-nigh high school discipline standardized tests subsequently this year, to requite a breather for schools to ready for the Common Cadre tests to begin in the leap of 2015. In that case, the API score in 2022 would be of express value, based solely on the high school go out exam results for 10thursday grade and a life science examination given in tenthursday grade. The new grad charge per unit would provide a more meaningful mensurate. However, several members of the State Board of Pedagogy, at their meeting last week, questioned the wisdom of modifying the API side by side year, only to plough around in two years to substantially alter information technology again with the addition of career readiness measures and the switch from state standardized tests to the Common Core assessments. The Board was non asked to decide.

The Advisory Committee will take up the graduation charge per unit issue again in Apr for possible State Board activeness in May or July.

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