To the members of the California State Senate:
I am returning Senate Bill 547 without my
signature.
This bill is yet another siren song for school
reform. It renames the Academic Performance Index (API) and reduces its
significance by adding three other quantitative measures.
While I applaud the author’s desire to improve the
API, I don’t believe that this bill would make the state’s accountability
regime either more probing or more fair.
This bill requires a new collection of indices
called the “Education Quality Index” (EQI), consisting of “multiple
indicators,”many of which are ill-defined and some impossible to design. These
“multiple indicators” are to change over time, causing measurement instability
and muddling the picture of how schools perform.
SB547 would also add significant costs and
confusion to the implementation of the newly-adopted Common Core standards
which must be in place by 2014. This bill would require us to introduce a whole
new system of accountability at the same time we are required to carry out
extensive revisions to school curriculum, teaching materials and tests. That
doesn’t make sense.
Finally, while SB547 attempts to improve the API,
it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of
the current system. The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to
focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters
that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB547 certainly would add more
things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our
schools. Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a
high-performance machine.
Over the last 50 years, academic “experts” have
subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change and experimentation. The
current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing
indicators of performance to distinguish the educational “good” from the
education “bad.” Instead of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing
nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for ever more measurement
“visions and revisions.”
A sign hung in Albert Einstein’s office read “Not
everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted
counts.”
SB547 nowhere mentions good character or love of
learning. It does allude to student excitement and creativity, but does not
take these qualities seriously because they can’t be placed in a data stream.
Lost in the bill’s turgid mandates is any recognition that quality is
fundamentally different from quantity.
There are other ways to improve our schools — to
indeed focus on quality. What about a system that relies on locally convened
panels to visit schools, observe teachers, interview students, and examine
student work? Such a system wouldn’t produce an API number, but it could
improve the quality of our schools.
I look forward to working with the author to craft
more inspiring ways to encourage our students to do their best.
Sincerely,
Edmund G. Brown Jr.
Here is the letter. http://gov.ca.gov/docs/SB_547_Veto_Message.pdf
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