State Education Officials Decry Funding Veto (CA)

October 19, 2010

Officials with the state Department of Education said Monday that a veto of $6.8 million in state funding for a student data tracking system could hurt California’s compliance with federal regulations and make it difficult to track dropouts.

Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed nearly $1 billion in spending, including some funding earmarked for the development and support of the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, commonly known as CALPADS.

The state rolled out the long-planned tracking s ystem nearly a year ago, and state education officials said it would help track student achievement on standardized tests, graduation rates and other data.

Schwarzenegger said in a statement earlier this month that CALPADS does not work well and contributed to the state not being awarded competitive federal funding. He also said the state Department of Education had been slow to develop an effective student tracking system.

Department of Education officials denied those charges in a conference call Monday and said the veto could hurt California’s efforts to comply with federal guidelines in data reporting.

"It puts us in real jeopardy," said Keric Ashley, director of the Data Management Division for the department.

State officials also said the funding could make it difficult for the state to conduct a future "value-added" analysis, which estimates teachers’ and schools’ effectiveness in increasing student achievement on standardized tests.

Some experts and policy-makers have embraced the method as a way to bring some level of objectivity to teacher evaluations, which currently rest almost entirely on subjective metrics like observations. Others say it should not be used as the sole measure of a teacher’s performance.

After the Times published a series of stories in August using a value-added analysis of seven years’ worth of student test data, some state education leaders, including Schwarzenegger’s education secretary, said they would urge local districts and the state to conduct more value-added analyses.

An up-to-date CALPADS system would be needed to conduct a state analysis.