Fixing the Academic Performance Index

Andrew McEachin is an IES Postdoctoral Fellow at the Curry School of Education and a Research Associate at UVa’s Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness. His research interests include the design and impact of educational accountability policies, teacher labor markets, and math education policy. Thirteen years ago, the California State Senate passed the Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) which created the Academic Performance Index (API) as the primary measure for accountability. The PSAA was intended to hold schools accountable for students’ achievement and progress, in order to ensure that all students were prepared to become lifelong learners able to succeed in the 21st century. Shortly after the implementation of PSAA, the federal government reauthorized ESEA, also known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Since then, schools have operated under a dual-accountability system with both state and federal achievement benchmarks. Although only the federal NCLB system includes real monetary and other sanctions, schools are still very responsive to their performance under PSAA, and specifically to their API scores and growth. The local media, realtors, and other stakeholders look to the API as a measure of school progress. Schools’ API scores have been used in the allocation of high profile interventions and sanctions, such as the Quality Education Improvement Act (QEIA), District Assistance Intervention Teams (DAIT), and School Improvement Grants (SIG). They are sources of pride for local schools and districts, and even a few points worth Executive Summary

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