That tension sits at the heart of how California has tried to address school accountability. For decades, the prevailing approach was blunt: reduce school quality to a single standardized test score, rank schools accordingly, then act on the results. The problems with this approach were well-documented.
To put it plainly, California’s old approach punished schools serving the highest-need communities without accounting for the complexity of the challenges they faced.
We chose a different path when the state launched the California School Dashboard in 2017. The dashboard was designed to give families and educators a more complete picture of how schools are serving students. It incorporates a range of measures, not just academic performance. The explicit design principle was that no single data point can fully capture a school’s impact on students.
Data matters, but nuance, context and judgment matter, too. The dashboard was never intended to serve as a cudgel for local school districts to kill competition and punish parents and students. That is what makes the situation at Aspire Golden State Preparatory Academy so troubling.
Aspire Golden State Prep, founded in 2008, is a public charter school in East Oakland serving a predominantly low-income community of color, like the two charter schools I founded in Oakland in the early aughts when I was mayor. Golden State Prep’s students enroll in sixth grade performing three years below grade level, but by graduation they are outperforming their peers at other schools.
As a result, it has one of Oakland’s highest high school graduation rates. It is a school that, by most accounts, is doing meaningful work in a community where educational options are scarce and the consequences of getting this wrong fall hardest on the kids who can least afford it.