Sharing Rewards and Defining Performance

So the state of California is upset because Irvine schools are sharing the cash dispensed to them by the state as part of the Academic Performance Index reward program (May 15). Apparently some of the Irvine schools didn’t get the funds because they had already performed too well the year before.

If you’re a high-performing school, such as the one where I teach fourth grade, and the students test very well (for all the reasons, mostly nonacademic, that cause this), it’s hard to keep pushing kids up and up each year on a test like the Stanford 9, which simply quizzes them, over an unduly extended period of time, about trivial information in a banal multiple-choice format. If the students score very high already, as some at Irvine schools did, the state now says that such schools don’t “perform” if their scores simply stay the same.

The API and other incentive programs trivialize education, demean student learning and bash teachers and many parents. They just give office seekers, bureaucrats and ideologues a new political football to play with.

Phil Brimble

Los Angeles

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Here is my question for Bill Padia of the state Department of Education’s office of policy and evaluation: Does he really know the difference between schools that performed and schools that didn’t perform? The Irvine schools shared their rewards with schools that had high API (above 800) but failed to reach growth targets by one point. These schools performed, in my parents book. They deserved the reward.

I think Padia should look into this reward program deeper to make sure that high-performing schools are rewarded, no matter what. The system focuses too much on schools that are failing, and the schools that perform well seem forgotten.

Vicky Fong

Los Angeles