Dan Walters: Californians finally get a guide to deciphering state’s school data dashboard

After becoming governor the second time in 2011, Jerry Brown proposed a major overhaul of how California finances public education.

The 1978 passage of Proposition 13, an iconic tax limitation measure, had largely shifted school finance from local property taxes to the state. A decade later, voters passed Proposition 98, which dictated how state support would be calculated.

Money was allocated to local schools on the basis of attendance, so much for each pupil, but there were also “categorical aids” — funds to finance specific educational programs.

It was a confusing mish-mash, fueling annual battles over how much of the state budget would be devoted to schools and how it would be divvied up.

Brown 2.0 proposed to do away with most categorical aids and modify the enrollment-based distribution, giving more money to school systems with large numbers of poor and English-learner students who tended to lag behind in academic skills.

About 60% of the state’s nearly 6 million public-school students fell into the targeted category. In theory, increasing financial support for them would close, or at least narrow, what was dubbed an achievement gap.

The Local Control Funding Formula, its official name, faced demands from educational reform groups that it be closely monitored to ensure the extra money was spent on the students it was meant to help and to gauge whether it did, indeed, narrow the gap.

However, Brown resisted, saying he trusted local education officials to spend the money wisely, buttressed by plans written with input from parents and other local groups.

A decade ago, the oversight squabble finally resulted in the state Board of Education’s creation of a “dashboard” that contains not only academic achievement data but multiple measures of non-academic factors.

However, as CalMatters soon discovered as it dove deeply into the system, the other factors often masked academic failings, making some school systems appear to be succeeding despite poor results on academic tests. Moreover, the dashboard itself is very difficult for parents and other laypeople to understand.

Two years ago, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, based at Arizona State University, gave California’s dashboard a D grade in a study of educational transparency.

“I have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,” Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor who worked on the report, told CalMatters. “How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”

Despite the criticism, officialdom continued to tout the dashboard as an accountability tool. However, we Californians at long last may have a way to decipher the otherwise opaque dashboard, crafted by GO Public Schools, a Sacramento-based nonprofit organization that promotes better educational outcomes.

Its California School Dashboard Guide provides understandable explanations of the dashboard’s ratings, both overall for the state’s 30 largest school districts and in detail for three districts. The three — Fresno Unified, West Contra Costa Unified and Oakland Unified — have large numbers of the at-risk students targeted by the Local Control Funding Formula.

“Together, the guides show that growth is happening in districts of different sizes and contexts — but progress is uneven, and gaps remain wide,” the organization said as it released the guide on Monday. “Across regions, the data arrives at a moment when many districts are making difficult financial and staffing decisions. The results raise pressing questions about how constrained resources, strategic choices, and system conditions are shaping student outcomes.”

Uneven progress is a polite way of saying that not only does California’s achievement gap persist, but the state’s academic outcomes still fall behind those of other states in national testing. The GO Public Schools guide at least gives us a better understanding of those shortcomings.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. His commentary comes via CalMatters.org, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more, go to calmatters.org/commentary.