There is an ongoing dispute between those interested in education policy over the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) which is part of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program and the API which part of the California Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA). The API is purported to measure "growth" in student academic achievement while the AYP is based on grade level proficiency.

Today the California Department of Education released the Academic Performance Index (API) growth reports for the 2004/2005 school year. When State Superintendent Jack O'Connell released the results, he announced "that 68 percent of California’s public schools met all of their state-required academic growth targets for the 2004-05 school year — a 20-point gain over 2003-04 — indicating significant improvement by schools and by minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged students." In looking at the actual API reports, I noticed two really troubling things.

1. More schools had minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged students meet their API growth targets, but the targets for those subgroups are significantly lower than those for White or Asian students. So, of course more of them met those lower standards.
2. In looking at the incremental growth targets, the number of API points that each subgroup had to gain last year, I noticed that the incremental growth numbers for these minority groups are exactly the same as those for white students in almost all cases. Thus, a school could meet their API target for all subgroups but still have a huge gap in performance between subgroups.

Confused? Welcome to the world of API. The API is a number from 200 to 1000 that CDE assigns to every school. CDE's goal is for every school to reach 800. Let me try to give you a specific example which outlines my concerns.

Let's look at Skyline High in Oakland Unified as an example. Skyline's African American students had a base API of 554 and had an incremental growth target of 7 points. That means as long as they reached a 561 growth API, they'd meet their goal.

The White students at Skyline High had a base API of 767 and had an incremental growth target of 7 points. That means as long as they reached a 784 growth API, they'd meet their goal.

So, you can see that the incremental growth target for both groups is the same and that the actual API goal for the minority group is signficantly less than the goal for White students.

In looking at the same school's AYP performance, the percentage of African American students who reached grade level proficiency dropped from 36.5% to 29.1% in Language Arts and there is a 50 percentage point gap between them and their White peers. In Mathematics, the achievement gap is only 40 percentage points.

This is a huge gap. This school has significant issues that need to be addressed to help them close these huge achievement gaps. Yet, the school met their API goals for both subgroups and yet there was minimal gap closure in math and the gaps actually increased in Language Arts.

API is designed to allow the CDE to readjust the scale each year so they can show growth where real growth probably doesn't exist. Even if it does exist, the growth rate is so slow it will take up to 50 years for schools to reach an API of 800.

As Mark Twain said, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure." I think the API is a great example. Not many parents understand the API. Not many principals understand it either. What parents want to know is whether their students can pass a test at their grade level. That's what is measured by the AYP and that's what makes sense to most people. CDE needs to abandon the API and take all the money they'd save and use it help schools increase the grade-level proficiency measured by the AYP.