A nearly year-long fight between the Trump administration and the California state government over school accountability ended with an unexpected twist last week when U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (pictured) explicitly endorsed a state student progress metric that reformers had denounced as intentionally vague and misleading. This clears the way for the Golden State to receive about $2.4 billion in federal education aid in 2018-19.

The dispute was over California’s formal proposal to meet the rules established in December 2015 when Congress created a new federal education framework to replace 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act, which had fallen into disfavor among Republicans and Democrats alike for linking some federal aid to states to progress in standardized testing. GOP governors denounced the law as an infringement on states’ rights. Democratic governors ripped NCLB for an emphasis on test scores that they said was excessive and and undermined learning.

Approved by a landslide bipartisan vote, the NCLB replacement law – the Every Student Succeeds Act – wiped out virtually all federal mandates. But the ESSA law did require states to identify schools which consistently finish in the bottom 5 percent on standardized tests; which have minority subgroups with consistently weak test results; and which graduate fewer than two-thirds of students.

Weakened federal mandates still criticized by state

Even those much-weakened requirements rankled state Board of Education President Michael Kirst. The Stanford emeritus professor – Gov. Jerry Brown’s longtime go-to man on education issues – depicted the rules as inferior to California’s approach to identifying and helping struggling schools. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kirst said requiring an evidence-based system of ranking schools “makes it sound as though, ultimately, states must boil down every factor they’re looking at and give each school a rating. If we’re forced to come up with a number, our [evaluation system] debate is over.”

Kirst said it was not realistic for California to turn down federal aid, so the state would seek to accommodate the federal law. But he said the California School Dashboard education evaluation program was much preferable to assigning schools a single score.

The Dashboard evaluates 10 indicators of educational progress. Some focus specifically on student achievement, including graduation rates, test scores and English learner progress. Several other indicators focus on school district performance with regard to absenteeism, suspensions and “school climate surveys” of students and parents.

Reformers have long blasted the Dashboard as being intended to muddle, not clarify, whether districts and schools are broadly helping students’ academic performance.

“On the one hand, the idea of having a lot of data to give a more holistic view of how schools are doing can be seen as a positive. But if it’s presented in a way that even if you have a Ph.D. you can’t understand, and you can’t compare school performance and things that one cares about,” that’s unhelpful, EdVoice President Bill Lucia told the Monterey Herald last year.

Feds initially unhappy with CA accountability plan

As CalWatchdog reported in December, similar concerns led the U.S. Department of Education to reject the Brown administration’s initial ESSA compliance plan. In a Dec. 21 letter, Jason Botel, principal deputy assistant secretary of education, said California should use more precise measures of student performance. Botel also offered a list of other questions about the state plan.

Since then, Botel’s negotiations with the state yielded progress on some of his concerns. The EdSource website reported that on June 29, Botel sent state officials a letter indicating he would recommend that DeVos approve California’s third version of its plan. Botel was pleased with tougher standards offered by the state in evaluating the progress of English-learner students from poor families and in assessing teacher training.

In a July 12 press release, DeVos announced that ESSA plans for California and Utah had been approved, leaving only Florida without a federally endorsed proposal to receive education aid.

DeVos’ statement lauded the Dashboard approach: “California’s new accountability and continuous improvement system provides information about how local educational agencies and schools are meeting the needs of California’s diverse student population, based on a concise set of measures that are displayed in the California School Dashboard.”

Beyond the state’s promises to better monitor some categories of student progress, it is unclear why the U.S. Department of Education’s view of the Dashboard’s “holistic,” multistandard approach went from specific criticism in December to specific praise eight months later. EdSource, the education website with many insider sources in Sacramento, depicted the evolution of the state’s ESSA compliance proposals over the past 10 months as reflecting relatively minor concessions.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Education’s “Getting to Know the California School Dashboard” explainer website appears unchanged from earlier versions.

The Trump administration turns out to share the Obama administration’s disappointment with California’s efforts to hold schools and school districts accountable for improving students’ academic performance.

After President Barack Obama took office in 2009 and installed Arne Duncan as secretary of education, California initially participated in their “Race to the Top” program in which states which adopted reforms that used metrics to measure student, teacher and school performance received additional federal education dollars. California’s proposal didn’t qualify for federal grant consideration, however.

But by 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown replaced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and made changes in the state Board of Education, the state government had lost interest in working with Duncan, with a sticking point being his push to measure teachers based on standardized test results.

In December 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to replace 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act as the framework of how the federal government dealt with states on education. While ESSA contains far fewer of the federal mandates that made No Child Left Behind unpopular with teachers unions and small-government conservatives alike, it did have one accountability provision. It requires every state to identify schools which are in the bottom 5 percent of statewide assessments; graduate less than two-thirds of students; and have minority subgroups with poor and unimproving results. Every state is supposed to help these schools with “improvement strategies.”

Education official faults reliance on ‘Dashboard’ over test scores

But the Trump administration doesn’t believe California has met this requirement with what even state officials acknowledged was a “minimalist” proposal to the U.S. Education Department. The main sticking point is the state’s view that its recently adopted California School Dashboard program – in which schools are rated on a variety of categories, including suspension rates, not just test scores – should be used to determine which schools fall in the bottom 5 percent.

In a Dec. 21 letter, Jason Botel, principal deputy assistant secretary under U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, criticized the idea of using the Dashboard instead of more precise measures of student performance; rejected the state’s plan to give districts discretion in determining how to improve underperforming schools; and noted that the plan failed to disclose how the state would meet its requirement to track the number of teachers who were in the classroom despite inadequate, inappropriate or incomplete credentials. The 12-page letter also cited many other issues with California’s plan.

As the EdSource website reported, the U.S. government’s reaction paralleled the position of education reform groups in California, which have criticized the California School Dashboard as a bad idea that will make it more difficult – not easier – to tell if a school is improving.

But Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and state school board president Michael Kirst strongly defend the state’s proposal and say it should be given a chance to work. This is why the state board voted at its Jan. 18 meeting to only make minor changes in its proposal to the Trump administration, with the exception of considering revising how the dashboard would be used to determine underperforming schools.

$2.6 billion in federal funds at risk if administration plays hardball

The question now is what will the Trump administration do. If it rejects the California plan, in theory it could withhold $2.6 billion of the $8 billion in annual federal education aid that California receives. That’s a little more than 3 percent of Golden State school funding from all sources. Such action would feed the narrative that the Trump White House is picking on liberal California.

But such action could also trigger bipartisan blowback from the Senate, which passed ESSA on an 85-12 vote, and the House, which approved it 359-64. While lawmakers went along with the limited accountability requirement, they also stressed the need for states to be able to figure out their own education needs.

Last February and March, both chambers voted – with White House backing – to block Obama administration rules meant to strengthen accountability provisions under ESSA.

The website of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce depicted the votes as one more message that the federal government needed to stop playing the role of “national school board.”

There is no timetable for when the U.S. Department of Education will respond to California’s actions. So far it has approved more than 30 plans submitted by states while raising questions about plans submitted by other states.