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 and reduces its significance by adding three other quantitative measures...
This bill requires a new collection of indices called the “Education Quality Index”, 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...
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.