Peter H. Hanley

The axiom that "it's not what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know that just isn't so" is particularly apropos to the latest proclamations of a significant turnaround in California's public schools. "Fraud" is perhaps too strong a word, but then so is "accurate" when applied to the announcement the state's public schools are on the road to recovery because 67% earned cash bonuses. This declaration came only weeks before voters decide on Proposition 38, a measure would have injected competition into the anachronistic state education monopoly.

The foundation for this celebration, the Academic Performance Index, is fatally flawed as presently constituted. Legislatively enacted in 1999, it was to measure the full range of a school's performance. But as implemented, the California Department of Education (CDE) has made one test, the SAT-9, the entire basis of the index. Unquestionably, testing is essential, but even its most rabid proponents want more than one test to assess performance for a school and a 6 million-student system.

Without accurate data such as graduation percentages, attendance rates, and numbers of dropouts, this index is grossly inadequate and deceptive. When dropout rates are omitted, schools performing so miserably that students head for the streets instead of the classrooms are actually rewarded. Since the cash bonuses are based on the percentage improvement from one year to the next, when the weaker students exit, those "improvement" goals are more easily met. Incredibly, even after decades operating the public school system, the CDE hasn't managed to calculate them accurately. Since information technology improved exponentially during this time, suspicion grows that the bureaucracy does not really want to know in precise detail.

Statewide 12% fewer 11th graders took the test in Spring 2000 than 10th graders did in 1999, according to the Education Department’s Web site. Larger declines prevailed throughout urban California. As schools had to test 95% of those students enrolled to qualify for bonus money, these pupils were no longer in the system, not merely absent.

Percentage declines, participants 1999-2000

Reading test

Los Angeles -26

Oakland -24

San Francisco -17

San Diego -14

The story for minority students appears near catastrophic. In both San Francisco and Oakland, African American participation crashed 37% and in Los Angeles Hispanic participation fell 30%.

But the API is only half this deceptive tale. Despite the distribution of over a million copies, the SAT-9 has not changed any of its questions for three consecutive years. Even without overt cheating, the integrity of this test is compromised.

Most disturbing is that despite the upward bias of the API index, the dubious validity of the test itself, and the departure of the weakest 12%, the number of California juniors reaching the national average in reading and math rose precisely 3% over their sophomore year. Reading performance collapses in the transition to high school. In 1999, 47% of California 8th graders read at the national average, yet one year later in 9th grade only 35% met that standard.

In Los Angeles, where 26% of juniors vanished, only 6% more students reached the national average in reading. A shameful 74% of all juniors, 80% of African Americans and 82% of Hispanics, don't read at that level. Even after 37% of Oakland's African American juniors went missing, 86% and 83% scored below national average in reading and math, respectively. Reading and math scores of fourth graders in San Diego, the first class to have full benefit of the class size reduction program, remained static. Yet 68% of San Diego schools, 64% of Los Angeles schools, and 30% of Oakland schools will receive performance improvement bonuses.

Terming this performance a renaissance in education asks the citizenry to engage in a willing suspension of disbelief, allowing hope to triumph over experience. We need the innovation that will flow from forcing the education establishment to open its locked doors to fresh ideas and California's entrepreneurial spirit. The state must demand that its schools measure up to genuine standards of excellence.

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Peter Hanley is an Affiliate Director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park. These are his personal views, not the Institute's.