Two separate policy changes fueled the about-face. At the federal level, Congress turned its back on No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era legislation that drew consistent fire from some Republicans and Democrats concerned that assessing student performance was becoming more formulaic and outcome-based than appropriate.

The new law — known as the Every Student Succeeds Act — “aims to take a more holistic approach to evaluating schools, using qualities beyond test scores,” the Los Angeles Times noted. But questions have arisen as to how much wiggle room ESSA can, or should, give state educators when it comes to assessment. “Under ESSA, states have to devise a ‘system of meaningfully differentiating’ schools by looking at academics in addition to at least one other factor, as long as the academics are given ‘much greater weight,'” reported the Times. “ESSA calls for states to intervene in the bottom 5 percent of their schools, in addition to schools where specific groups of students consistently underperform and high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. States can determine what they do to those schools, as long as the interventions are ‘evidence-based.'”

Off the hook

In California, the changes drew initial enthusiasm. The state Board of Education has busied itself replacing its own Academic Performance Index with a new set of guidelines also designed to bring a more holistic and nuanced approach to capturing what schools do well or don’t. But the lapse in federal rigor between the weakening of No Child Left Behind and the passage of ESSA gave California officials an opportunity to loosen standards markedly — one they seized upon, to the dismay of critics. “Since 2002, No Child Left Behind tied schools’ federal grades to students’ proficiency in math and English. But now, under a waiver granted in June, California bases those grades solely on attendance, test participation and graduation rate — which itself has been inflated with the demise of the state high school exit exam,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. “Those are much easier bars to hurdle — and achieved by most California schools.”

“Without the fed’s waiver, more schools would be facing more mandates if the yardstick were still based on proficiency. On standardized tests last spring, only 44 percent of California students tested proficient in English, and 33 percent proficient in math — far short of No Child Left Behind’s unrealistic expectation of 100 percent proficiency. Even though nearly half of California public schools are still designated as Program Improvement, educators no longer see it as threatening.”

In fact, state education officials have helped along the rush toward weak and waived standards. California, wrote Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, “is so happy to be free from the tyranny of testing that it has suspended the California High School Exit Examination and ordered schools to retroactively reward diplomas to students who failed the test during the last decade.”

Brewing conflict

What’s more, the Board’s suspension of the API has triggered a crisis of regulatory interpretation around the standard’s requirement that the Board publish an annual list of the 1,000 worst-performing schools in the state. Citing the API’s suspension, state superintendent Tom Torlakson “is refusing to publish a list of the 1,000 low-achieving schools, thus blocking parents from sending their children to ones with better ratings,” as Dan Walters observed at the Sacramento Bee. Outgoing Republican state Senate leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, has challenged Torlakson’s interpretation. “He has an opinion from the Legislature’s legal counsel that Torlakson, a close ally of unions, is still obligated to calculate an API, based on available indices of achievement, such as the state’s newest academic tests, and therefore issue a list,” wrote Walters.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, as the tests are formally known, ranked fourth graders in only five states, plus Washington, D.C., at as low a level of math proficiency as California’s.

The latest round of nationwide fourth and eighth grade math and reading tests yielded disappointing results. Stacked up against other states, California hovered at the lower end of the scale. “Across California, scores stagnated since 2013 at all levels — there were some small dips, which were not statistically significant,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Laying blame

Although national and state officials alike cautioned that the trouble was hard to pinpoint, project, or trace back to root causes, some pointed the finger at the changes in testing brought on by this year’s shift toward compliance with the new Common Core Standards. “The NAEP tests aren’t completely aligned with the Common Core State Standards,” however, as state Department of Education spokesman Bill Ainsworth informed the Mercury News via email. “Consequently, we do not believe they are a good measure of California students’ progress.”

But the test results did also reveal significant racial and ethnic divergences. This year, added the Times, “between a quarter and a third of the state’s students performed at or above proficiency on the various tests; in fourth-grade reading, 4 out of 10 students were deemed to be below basic. And, fewer than 1 in 5 students of color or low-income students met or exceeded proficiency on any test.” What’s more, the paper noted, over the past three years, “California’s Latino students’ scores decreased slightly, but were flat in fourth-grade reading.”

For analysts focused on comparative racial test performance, the results turned back the clock. According to Education Week, “performance gaps between black, Hispanic and white students, in reading remained as wide in 2015 as they were in 1998. In math,” however, “the gap between black and white fourth-grade students has narrowed by about 10 points since 2000.”

Some analysts shied away from drawing too strong an inference even along lines of race. Brookings Institution senior fellow Tom Loveless told Education Week that “California’s demographics — including nearly 1.4 million students classified as English language learners — make it difficult to pinpoint the impact of the state’s school system versus other social and economic factors on results. In three of the state’s largest school districts — Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego — achievement gaps between black, Hispanic, and white students have remained largely unchanged or even widened.”

Racial controversy

The intersection of race and education has recently occupied central, contested ground in California. In the wake of the Vergara case, which alleged civil rights violations against minority students as a consequence of protective teachers’ union policies, the political stakes have been raised in the debate over which disparities matter most and how they are to be corrected.

The controversy has magnified the significance of studies plowing similar ground. As Inside Higher Ed reported, a long-term analysis of SAT scores, released by the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, showed that “race and ethnicity have become stronger predictors of SAT scores than family income and parental education levels,” at least “among applicants to the University of California’s campuses.” The study’s author, Saul Geiser, concluded that admissions committees should offset the impact of the SAT by taking affirmative action criteria into account.

That’s what California public school students face as the school year comes to an end. The Academic Performance Index, used to measure and monitor students’ progress statewide, was implemented by the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999. But the state Board of Education just exempted schools from taking the API this year. It was going to be gone for good next year anyway.

The Smarter Balanced test is part of the new Common Core standards the state is implementing along with most other states. Smarter Balanced was given to students last year on a trial basis, with another trial scheduled for this year.

As AP reported, Board President Michael “Kirst said that even if the new test results aren’t used on the state index, they will still be reported at the school, district and state level. ‘They’ll be held accountable to the public,’ he said.”

Officials believed it didn’t make sense to burden students with the time and effort to take two tests, one of which no longer will be given.

As the Monterey Herald noted, “The API is at odds with the federal system to measure growth, and over the years school administrators grew upset with having two different systems that often yielded conflicting results. In many instances, particular schools were making progress according to the API, but were falling behind according to the federal Adequate Yearly Progress report.”

Breathing room

School districts had warned officials they weren’t ready to administer the new Smarter Balanced tests, much less to perform well. In a case seen as indicative of the size of the problem, Los Angeles Unified School District struggled with the newly computerized format of the test. “At LAUSD,” the Associated Press reported, “there were numerous problems when a practice test was administered, including the website crashing and slow connectivity.”

Although district officials told the AP those issues had been resolved and tests now underway in 94 schools, LAUSD was able to proceed with confidence because of the breathing room it secured along with several other school districts. It was their request which state officials accepted to suspend state accountability rankings. Concerned that students would face struggles of their own transitioning away from pencil-and-paper testing, the school districts convinced officials to treat the results as a diagnostic only.

In a further effort to blunt the force of change, administrators have ensured the testing window now stretches out over weeks, not the handful of days used under the previous regime.

Looking for the exits

Across the country, some legislators have made moves toward targeting Common Core for opt-out provisions. One New York Assemblyman introduced what he called the Common Core Parental Refusal Act.

In that state, opinions on Common Core have become sharply divided. In a forum printing letters from opponents and supporters in school administration, the Washington Post featured one principal who warned of daunting failure rates on the horizon:

“If we were to retain all third graders who scored a ‘1’ on our Common Core tests (1 signifies below basic and 3 is proficient), New York would retain about 45 percent of black or Latino students, 75 percent of students with disabilities, and 75 percent of English language learners. Is your state prepared to do that?”

In California, however, parents have been able to withdraw their children from standardized tests at their discretion since 1996. According to California Education Code section 60615:

“[N]otwithstanding any other provision of law, a parent’s or guardian’s written request to school officials to excuse his or her child from any or all parts of the assessments administered pursuant to this chapter shall be granted.”

Common Core

The Common Core website explained the controversial origin of the standards, an unprecedented recent effort to overhaul the way America educates:

“State education chiefs and governors in 48 states came together to develop the Common Core, a set of clear college- and career-ready standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts/literacy and mathematics.”

Although other states have seen vehement disagreement over the Common Core, in California the standards have received relatively strong support among parents, teachers and administrators.

Republicans generally have led the opposition to Common Core nationally and in California. But last week the program was endorsed by Assembly Republican Leader Kristin Olsen of Modesto.

AP reported that last Thursday, “Olsen broke from Republican activists and GOP presidential contenders who have blasted a set of rigorous academic standards in schools known as Common Core. Olsen said she is a strong supporter of the education overhaul’s goals of expanding critical thinking and problem solving and blasted myths about Common Core, such as a rumor that it would mandate the collection of children’s DNA.”

Olsen herself said of Common Core, “I think it certainly can be successful. We have to try something different because the status quo that was making us 46th out of 50 in the nation is unacceptable.” She was referring to California students’ low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.