SBE Changes API

May 11, 2006 by dave

Yesterday, the State Board of Education approved a change to the Academic Performance Index (API) that were recommended by the California Department of Education. See this San Jose Mercury News/AP story for more of the details.

The API is very complex and confusing. The darn document which is supposed to describe how it works is over 90 page. I'll do my best to explain this portion in a few paragraph. Each year, the CDE assigns a Base API and sets a "growth target", which is how many API points the school needs to gain during that year's testing cycle. There is a "school-wide" figure for the entire school and "comparable improvement" figures for each significant subgroup. Subgroups are individual groups of students such as African American, Hispanic, White, English Learner, Socioeconomic Disadvantaged, etc.

Previously, the school-wide figure was calculated as 5% of the distance from the schools Base API to the state target of 800. So, if a school had a 600 API, the growth target is (800-600)*.05 or 10 points. For the subgroups, the goal was 80% of the school-wide target. In this case, 8 points. If the calculation nets an answer less than 1 point, a minimum of 1 point is used as the target.

This change will require each subgroup to meet the same 5% of the difference to 800. The minimum target will be raised to 5 points, instead of 1 point. So, if the school mentioned above, had a English Learner subgroup that had an API of 500, their growth target would be (800-500)*.05 or 15 points. Supposedly, this will result in the closing of achievement gaps by requiring these lower performing subgroups to have greater gains that the higher performing subgroups.

On the surface, this change makes sense. It seems to be raising the stakes for the schools. The problem as pointed out in the article above is that there are no consequences for schools which don't meet their subgroup targets. The federal accountability model under NCLB allows states to include their local accountability system as part of NCLB. In California's case, they chose to add only the school-wide API, so thus if a school makes their school-wide API target but misses one or more subgroup targets, there are no consequences. Last year 981 schools fell into this category.

Actually 6 schools did fall under state sanctions, but they were part of the voluntary II/USP system. In exchange for more money, they accepted more accountability. This year 6 schools that have been in II/USP and unable to meet the requirements to exit received sanctions from CDE. The really funny part of it is that 3 of the 6 actually met their API school-wide and subgroup targets in 2004/2005. Yet, they still received sanctions.

Anyway, if you ask me, the whole thing makes no sense. The Board can raise the requirements, but unless there are consequences, there is no incentive for school administrators to make any changes that will impact student achievement.

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