ABSTRACT
For the past several years, California has embraced the public reporting of academic achievement outcomes. This annual ritual (Stein, 2004) is framed as school accountability and is carried out by public officials and the media as an act of openness and service. The public reporting practices, in fact, are meant to signal transparency, and the standardized test scores are likewise presented as racially and socioeconomically neutral forms of assessment to the public (Valencia, Villarreal, & Salinas, 2002). Such accountability practices nevertheless provide, at best, an abbreviated assessment of the educational conditions that exist in California’s public schools (Koski & Weiss, 2004). In addition, the annual announcement of the Academic Performance Index (API) scores serves to repeatedly highlight the persistently low rankings of school communities with the highest concentrations of low-income students and students of color. In turn, as policy makers enter their annual deliberations regarding the distribution of funding to the public school system, the evidence they must rely upon is also limited and confusing with regard to how dollars can be transformed into better outcomes for diverse students. The burning question that emerges for those of us concerned with the role of policy analysis in education finance is thus, “In whose interest do we continue a cycle of limited evaluative information, disappointing academic results, and partial explanations that belie the full challenges and potential of the California educational context?”
