برچسب: Focus

California retires RICA; new teacher test to focus on phonics
During small group reading instruction, AmeriCorps member Valerie Caballero reminds third graders in Porterville Unified to use their fingers to follow along as they read a passage.

Credit: Lasherica Thornton/ EdSource
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On July 1, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment will be replaced by a literacy performance assessment.

The licensure test puts a sharpened focus on foundational reading skills.

The new test is one of many new changes California leaders have made to improve literacy instruction.
Next week, the unpopular teacher licensure test, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, will be officially retired and replaced with a literacy performance assessment to ensure educators are prepared to teach students to read.

The Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) has been a major hurdle for teacher candidates for years. About a third of all the teacher candidates who took the test failed the first time, according to state data collected between 2012 and 2017. Critics have also said that the test is outdated and has added to the state’s teacher shortage.

The literacy performance assessment that replaces the RICA reflects an increased focus on foundational reading skills, including phonics. California, and many other states, are moving from teaching children to recognize words by sight to teaching them to decode words by sounding them out in an effort to boost literacy.

Mandated by Senate Bill 488, the literacy assessment reflects new standards that include support for struggling readers, English learners and pupils with exceptional needs, incorporating the California Dyslexia Guidelines for the first time.

“We believe the literacy TPA will help ensure that new teachers demonstrate a strong grasp of evidence-based literacy instruction — an essential step toward improving reading outcomes for California’s students,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of EdVoice, a nonprofit education advocacy organization.

Literacy test on schedule

Erin Sullivan, director of the Professional Services Division of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the literacy performance assessment is ready for its July 1 launch.

“We’ve been field-testing literacy performance assessments with, obviously, the multiple- and the single-subject candidates, but also the various specialist candidates, including visual impairment and deaf and hard of hearing,” Sullivan said.

California teacher candidates must pass one of three performance assessments approved by the commission before earning a preliminary credential: the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), or the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers (FAST).

A performance assessment allows teachers to demonstrate their competence by submitting evidence of their instructional practice through video clips and written reflections on their practice.

“It’s very different,” said Kathy Futterman, an adjunct professor in teacher education at California State University, East Bay. “The RICA is an online test that has multiple-choice questions, versus the LPA — the performance assessment — which has candidates design and create three to five lesson plans. Then, they have to videotape portions of those lesson plans, and then they have to analyze and reflect on how those lessons went.”

Field tests went well

This week, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing board is expected to hear a report on the field test results, approve the passing score standards for the literacy cycle of the performance assessment and formally adopt the new test.

All but one of the 280 teacher candidates who took the new CalTPA literacy assessment during field testing passed, according to the report. Passing rates were lower on the FAST, with 51 of 59 passing on the first attempt, and on the edTPA with 192 of 242 passing.

Cal State East Bay was one of the universities that piloted the test over the last two years.

“It’s more hands-on and obviously with real students, so in that regard I think it was very helpful,” Futterman said.

State could offer flexibility

Upcoming budget trailer bills are expected to offer some flexibility to teacher candidates who haven’t yet passed the RICA, Sullivan said.

The commission is asking state leaders to allow candidates who have passed the CalTPA and other required assessments, except the RICA, to be allowed to continue taking the test through October, when the state contract for the RICA expires, she said.

“We are looking forward to putting RICA to bed and moving on to the literacy performance assessment, but … we don’t want to leave anybody stranded on RICA island,” Sullivan said.

The commission has approved the Foundations of Reading examination as an alternative for a small group of teachers with special circumstances, including those who would have completed all credential requirements except the RICA by June 30, but the test may not be the best option for them, Sullivan said.

“It’s just a very different exam,” Sullivan said. “It’s a national exam. And while the commission looked at it and said, ‘We think this will work for our California candidates,’ it’s not the best-case scenario. So, trying to get these folks to pass the RICA and giving them every opportunity to do that until really it just goes away, that’s kind of what we’re looking at.”

The Foundations of Reading exam, by Pearson, is used by 13 other states. It assesses whether a teacher is proficient in literacy instruction, including developing phonics and decoding skills, as well as offering a strong literature, language and comprehension component with a balance of oral and written language, according to the commission’s website.

Teacher candidates who were allowed to earn a preliminary credential without passing the RICA during the Covid-19 pandemic; teachers with single-subject credentials, who want to earn a multiple-subject credential; and educators who completed teacher preparation in another country and/or as a part of the Peace Corps are also eligible to take the Foundations of Reading examination.

The Foundations of Reading test has been rated as strong by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

State focus on phonics

SB 488 was followed by a revision of the Literacy Standard and Teaching Performance Expectations for teachers, which outlined effective literacy instruction for students.

California state leaders have recently taken additional steps to ensure foundational reading skills are being taught in classrooms. On June 5, Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed that the state budget will include hundreds of millions of dollars to fund legislation needed to achieve a comprehensive statewide approach to early literacy.

Assembly Bill 1454, which passed the Assembly with a unanimous 75-0 vote that same day, would move the state’s schools toward adopting evidence-based literacy instruction, also known as the science of reading or structured literacy.
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02/07/2025
New California teaching standards increase focus on family engagement, social-emotional learning

Students at Edison High School in Fresno.

Credit: Fresno Unified / Flickr

California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing approved long-awaited revised Standards for the Teaching Profession on Thursday that emphasize culturally responsive teaching, social-emotional learning and family engagement.

The standards, which guide teachers’ professional development and evaluation statewide, broadly describe the knowledge, skills and abilities expected of effective experienced teachers. State law requires that they are updated regularly.

During the meeting Thursday, the overwhelming sentiment — from commissioners members, speakers from the public, and the letters received — supported the new standards; however, some asked the commission to push back the 2025-26 rollout of the new standards to allow university teacher preparation programs, school districts and commission staff more time to implement changes.

“The revised CSTP aims to rehumanize our system by focusing on the whole student, their identities and what’s meaningful in this world to them, not us,” said Leigh Dela Victoria, an instructional coach in the Fontana Unified School District in San Bernardino County.

“They have the potential to transform all of our classrooms into culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining communities,” she said. “As a coach, I can tell you firsthand the impact this type of teaching has on students when their identities, assets and agency are valued.”

She told commission members that the current standards, approved in 2009, are out of touch with what needs to be taught in classrooms.

The six overarching domains of teaching in the new document are similar to the previous standards, and are parallel to other state standards, according to the commission. The elements within the domains include definitions and examples. The six domains are also used in the Teaching Performance Expectations, which outline what beginning teachers should know.

Going Deeper

Domain 1: Engaging and supporting all students in learning – Teachers apply knowledge about each student to activate an approach to learning that strengthens and reinforces each student’s participation, engagement, connection and sense of belonging.

Domain 2: Creating and maintaining effective environments for student learning – Teachers create and uphold a safe, caring and intellectually stimulating learning environment that affirms student agency, voice, identity and development, and promotes equity and inclusivity.

Domain 3: Understanding and organizing subject matter for student learning – Teachers integrate content, processes, materials and resources into a coherent, culturally relevant and equitable curriculum that engages and challenges learners to develop the academic and social–emotional knowledge and skills required to become competent and resourceful learners.

Domain 4: Planning instruction and designing learning experiences for all students – Teachers set a purposeful direction for instruction and learning activities, intentionally planning and enacting challenging and relevant learning experiences that foster each student’s academic and social–emotional development.

Domain 5: Assessing students for learning – Teachers employ equitable assessment practices to help identify students’ interests and abilities, to reveal what students know and can do and to determine what they need to learn. Teachers use that information to advance and monitor student progress as well as to guide teachers’ and students’ actions to improve learning experiences and outcomes.

Domain 6: Developing as a professional educator – Teachers develop as effective and caring professional educators by engaging in relevant and high-quality professional learning experiences that increase their teaching capacity, leadership development and personal well-being. Doing so enables teachers to support each student to learn and thrive.

“The revised CSTP features several key shifts from the 2009 version, chief among them a more holistic approach to teaching and learning,” said Sarah Lillis, executive director for Teach Plus California, in a letter. “For example, the move from goal setting to designing learning experiences shifts the focus from results to students’ learning. Another notable shift is recognizing that all teachers, regardless of subject-specific credential areas, are teachers of literacy skills.”

Family engagement is a key element of new standards

The new standards also focus on family and community engagement, requiring teachers to find effective strategies for communicating and creating relationships with families.

“These standards provide an invaluable road map that will undoubtedly strengthen how teachers, schools and communities partner with families,” said Bryan Becker, of the Parent Organization Network.

Also new to the standards are two sections, one asking teachers to examine their personal attitudes and biases, and how these impact student learning, and the other asking them to reflect on their personal code of ethics.

After speakers expressed concern about the few references to English learners and students with disabilities in the document, Chair Marquita Grenot-Scheyer made a motion to approve the standards with amendments that would “shine a brighter spotlight” on those students.

She also asked that the amendment include direction to ensure teachers attend individualized education plan meetings. School staff and parents attend these meetings to review the education plan of students with special needs.

Revision put on hold for two years

According to the commission, the revision was a long time in coming. Originally adopted in the 1990s, the standards were most recently updated in 2009. An expert group of educators, administrators, researchers and state education staff came together in 2020 to update the standards. The group met online five times between June 2020 and May 2021, but work was paused a few months later “as Covid and other critical world events demanded pause and reflection.”

Over the past two years, the commission has been focused on other state initiatives that would impact the new standards, including the new PK-3 Early Childhood Specialist Instruction Credential and the implementation of revised literacy standards and literacy-related teaching performance expectations mandated by legislation. Members of the expert group returned in 2023 to review and finalize the document.

Board denies pleas for delay

The commission voted for the newly revised standards to go into effect in the 2025-26 school year, despite numerous requests by speakers to extend the rollout to give teacher preparation and induction programs and the commission staff more time to prepare for them.

Grenot-Scheyer also directed commission staff to develop an implementation plan that will support school districts and teacher preparation programs during the transition.

Audry Wiens, induction coordinator for Fontana Unified, was among those who asked the commission to delay the implementation of the standards for a year. She said programs would need to come to a common understanding of the shifts that need to take place, revise relevant documents, train mentors in induction programs and update accreditation websites.

Some wanted the standards implemented as soon as possible.

“I am not an induction program provider, but it really causes me pause to extend any sort of timelines, because we have got things to do here,” said Commissioner Megan Gross. “… I want us to capitalize on this sense of urgency that we have to do better for our kids.”

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13/06/2025
CSU campuses focus on new strategies to help students of color

CSU’s Young Males of Color conference in October 2023.

Credit: CSU Dominguez Hills

Last year, Cal State campuses received some sobering details about the growing gaps in graduation rates between students of color and their white counterparts. Instead of decreasing, the graduation equity gaps between Black, Latino and Native or Indigenous students have been increasing.

But some campuses are targeting new dollars and deploying new strategies to specifically target students of color that will help increase graduation, persistence and retention.

CSU’s Young Males of Color Consortium, which is housed at Cal State Dominguez Hills, received $3.2 million from a group of organizations including Ballmer Group, College Futures Foundation, ECMC Foundation and Ichigo Foundation to create new programs that support men of color on Cal State campuses. Sixteen CSU campuses and their neighboring community colleges will deploy those programs with the goal of improving rates of transfer, retention and graduation for up to 800 students. The partnered universities and colleges will start working with up to 40 young men each to pilot the new strategies.

The consortium, which started in 2017, has the goal of working across campuses to share information and data, and find solutions to help CSU’s Black and brown men.

The main challenge the consortium realized it needed to tackle was “institutional complacency” because many campuses failed to have the right data on students of color, or limited their investment in improving their academic performance, said William Franklin, vice president of student affairs for the Dominguez Hills campus.

Last year, during CSU’s Graduation Initiative 2025 event, new data revealed the graduation gap between Black, Latino and Native American students and their peers increased by 1 point to a 13% difference. The 2023 six-year graduation rate for Black students, for example, is at 47% but 62% for all students.

The rates on the Dominguez Hills campus, for example, are lower for Black and Latino men. The six-year rate for Black men is 36.4% and 38.9% for Latino men on the campus. Data for Native American and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students was not available.

“We need to hire full-time folks and we need to really give them training,” Franklin said. “We need to begin to connect with our institutional research office and understand our data better. It doesn’t necessarily mean we need more money, but we do need to spend the money that we have differently in order to ensure that those male of color programs get the kind of support they need.”

With the new funding, the campuses will work together to assess and evaluate instructors and staff, while also providing professional development opportunities. The campuses would also work with their community college partners to better assist them in transferring more Black and brown students to the universities.

Members of the consortium have already visited other universities outside of California that have seen success in improving graduation rates for Black and Latino students such as Georgia State University, Urban Prep Academies in Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, Franklin said.

And while they’re unsure which strategies will work best for Cal State students, figuring it out is part of the funding.

“Our funders have also given us an opportunity to take the funding they’ve given us to provide it as seed money for campuses to put some innovative programs and strategies in place,” Franklin said. “Fail fast or succeed fast, and learn what they need to do in order to scale those things that work.”

Black Honors College

Sacramento State is also trying something new to help not only the Black students on its campuses but across the system.

This fall, the university will debut the country’s first Black Honors College. Sac State has one of the CSU’s largest populations of Black students, and low graduation rates. The six-year rate for all Black students is about 45%.

“We’re the No. 1 institution serving Black students and we’re in the bottom third when it comes to graduation rates,” Sac State President Luke Wood said. “Our 75-year history has shown that what we’re doing is not working. I don’t just speak about that from the perspective of being president here, but I was a student here at Sac State. I got my bachelor’s degree here. I got my master’s degree here, and many of the people who are my contemporaries never graduated because the institution is not designed to support Black students.”

Sac State officials also looked outside of California for solutions, particularly at historically Black colleges and universities where graduation rates are much higher.

“We’re creating an institution within the institution so students have a standalone experience with their own curriculum, their own faculty, their staff, their space,” Wood said.

The college would be open to students of all majors, but the first two years of curriculum would have an African-American focus. For example, political science or statistics classes would have a unique focus on Black politics, issues and community.

Wood said the idea is built on research that shows creating a “family-like environment” and offering a curriculum relevant to students’ lives and experiences improves their academic success.

The new college will have 6,000-square feet of dedicated space with its own faculty, dean, counselors, academic advisers, support staff and outreach. But the ultimate goal is to see more Black Honors Colleges appear statewide and nationally, despite the conservative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion happening in other states.

But Wood anticipates more Black Honors Colleges appearing on community college campuses, some of which have already contacted Sac State for guidance or information, with the potential to establish a transfer relationship with the university.

“We’re going to grow this Honors College pretty extensively,” he said. “Our goal right now is 500 or 600, but when we can get more resources, our goal is to get to a thousand students.”

NOTE: EdSource receives funding from several foundations, including the College Futures Foundation and ECMC Foundation. EdSource maintains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage.

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09/06/2025
To teach math effectively, California must focus on deep, conceptual learning

Third graders discuss possible ways to solve a new math problem.

Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

Fierce wars continue to rage around math instruction, but there are many practical changes we should make for mathematics students upon which most of us can probably agree, that could transform their ability to achieve.

A promising new initiative for California that we have both been involved with tackles two of the most pressing flaws of traditional math instruction with elegant solutions that should be appealing to many, no matter which camp they occupy in the debates. Ask any teacher of math what they wish they did not have to deal with, and they will tell you the excessive amount of content they need to teach, which leads to the second problem — the shallow coverage of hundreds of methods that students do not learn in meaningful ways.

U.S. math textbooks are massive and heavy tomes. By contrast, math textbooks in Japan and China are small and slim. The reason for this is that U.S. curriculum repeats content every year. In China and Japan, content is taught less frequently but more deeply and conceptually. As teachers in the U.S. are forced to “cover” an extensive amount of content in every year of school, students only gain a shallow experience of mathematical methods and rules.

The second problem, linked to the first, is that students are taught hundreds of methods as though they are all equally important, without experiencing the more foundational concepts deeply and conceptually. Some concepts are much more central than others because they link to other areas of content, and they deserve to be learned deeply, over multiple lessons, through applied tasks that relate to students’ lives. An example of a central concept in grade four is “factors and groups.” Instead of learning about these through short questions and answers, students can learn them through rich tasks in which they are more deeply engaged, as can be seen here.

Students can learn all foundational concepts, such as fractions or functions, by drawing, building and learning about them through real-world examples. Every important idea in mathematics can be learned visually, physically and conceptually, including algebra and calculus. Instead, most students work through pages of numerical calculations, absent of any connection to the world, and spend hours of algebra class manipulating X’s on a page.

A solution to both of these problems is to teach the “big ideas in mathematics” for every grade, as set out in the California Mathematics Framework, such as “being flexible within 10” (kindergarten) or “unit rates in the world” (grade seven), making sure that for each of the eight or so big ideas in every grade, students have a deep and rich experience of their underlying concepts: by drawing them, building them and talking about them. Even if it is only these eight or so ideas that are experienced in this way each year, they will serve as a foundation for everything else students learn as they progress.

Many California school districts are now waiting for funding to be devoted to the training of teachers to move to the approaches set out in the framework. But in Kern County, leaders have been sharing these ideas for the past three years. Semitropic Elementary school, which serves mainly Latinx, English learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, is one example of a school that has moved to the approach of the framework. In the 2018-19 school year, before Covid-19 and the implementation of the new framework, only 5.6% of Semitropic students met or exceeded standards on math Smarter Balanced tests in grades 3-8, with less than 5% in grades four and five, and no students in grades 6 or 8. After the leaders in Kern County supported teachers in learning and implementing the ideas of the framework, through a series of professional development sessions to build capacity, with classroom demonstration lessons to model the new strategies, in action with their students, and coaching to meet teachers where they were, proficiency levels shot up, increasing to 16.3% overall, with the fourth grade showing the most significant increase, to 36.8%. There is more work to be done in this and other districts, but the demonstrable positive changes already unfolding are impressive.

What changed in the classrooms of the schools in Kern County? The teachers focused on big ideas, such as “being flexible within 10” which starts in kindergarten and extends through the elementary grades. Instead of students learning 10 as a fixed number that they use to calculate, they now spend time learning how 10 is made up, and all the ways they can make 10. A powerful strategy teachers started to use was “number talks,” in which teachers pose a number problem and collect the different ways students approach the problem, representing them visually. They also started using richer, deeper tasks, encouraging students to discuss ideas and learn with visuals and manipulatives. The superintendent and county math coaches were thrilled with the high levels of engagement they saw in the classrooms, as well as the significant changes in state test scores.

There are several problems with the systems of mathematics education in many states, and proposed solutions often spark disagreement. But perhaps we should all agree on one thing: Students need to learn important mathematical concepts deeply and well. They should not be working through sets of procedural questions that mean nothing to them, but rather should experience rich applied mathematics that inspires them, helps them learn effectively, and shows them that mathematics is important to their lives.

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Jo Boaler is a Stanford professor and author of “Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity & Meaning in Mathematics.” She was one of the writers of California’s new mathematics framework.

Cole Sampson is the administrator of professional learning for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools Office.

The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.

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29/05/2025
Why focus is a superpower in the classroom: A Q&A with author Doug Lemov

A first-grade boy and his kindergarten friend read together on a bench outside. Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

Attention must be paid. Amid the worsening literacy and numeracy crises in our schools, Doug Lemov, former teacher, education expert and author of the bestseller “Teach Like a Champion,” believes that there should be far greater awareness of what the research says about how the brain works, that parents and teachers should know how kids learn best.

Funny, warm and unassuming, Lemov recently took a few minutes away from his latest book to hold forth on how we can better connect what we know about cognition with what we do in the classroom. These insights into the science of learning shape the way he thinks about everything from focus to engagement, from the use of cellphones at school to why kids should read entire books, and not just passages, to fuel reading comprehension.

Is it possible that diminished student focus is part of why test scores have cratered? Could it be one cause of the literacy and numeracy crises?

Yes. On two levels. Attention is always the currency of learning. To learn something you first have to pay attention to it and sustain that attention. When attention is fractured, both learning and performance are lowered. And, of course, a habit of paying lesser attention reduces long-term learning. So, students both learn less and can produce poorer versions of what they do know when their focus is diminished.

Why might cellphones and other devices in the classroom diminish focus?

They are designed by the sharpest minds in society to do just that. They are designed to disrupt and reroute attention to the things on your phone. That is the business model: to get eyeballs. To do that you have to create a malleable consumer.

And humans are inclined to respond to new and unexpected stimuli. We evolved to do this because the new and unexpected is often — or was often — important in terms of survival. Hear a new noise in the woods you’ve never heard before? If you want your progeny to pass down into modernity, you’d better pay particular attention.

We are also especially responsive to “variable, unpredictable rewards” —we want affirmation —we are wired to be social because we are weak as individuals and could never compete with other species and only survived evolution because we banded together.

Group formation is an evolutionary imperative. We are hypersensitive to whether we are still liked and loved by the group because if not, we know we are at risk. Unpredictable and variable rewards hack that system. We’re always wondering if we’ve gotten those “likes” … and when we do, we get a little dopamine hit in our brains. And, in the end, the brain is neuroplastic. It wires how it fires. If you are constantly distracted, constantly seeking affirmation, you come to need the distraction and the affirmation, to be wired to expect it.

First you need your cellphone close to you all the time, but after a while your cellphone is within you. Its influence is wired into you even when it’s not there.

And would removing cellphones also help build student engagement?

It would help students to pay far better attention and to rebuild attentional skills. And it would reduce the anxiety of the shadow world of social media. My daughter’s school banned cellphones this year. She was not happy because she loves to listen to music. And she suspected I might have had something to do with it. So she was upset the first week. But on Friday she came to me and said: “Dad, don’t let this go to your head, but I can’t believe how much happier and less stressed I am without my phone. It’s just like this thing that was always on my mind is gone.”

What is important to understand about cognition, how working memory functions, for example, when teaching kids how to read or do math?

Working memory is the brain’s ability to think actively and consciously about something. It’s definitely a superpower, and its effectiveness is directly tied to attentional skills and focus. But learning is, a cognitive scientist would say, a change in long-term memory. In fact, we don’t learn most of the things we think about. We forget instead. And again, attention is one of the key drivers of the process of encoding — which is getting what we think about into our long-term memory.

Why does background knowledge matter?

Reading comprehension is not a set of formalistic skills. Practicing making inferences about “Tuck Everlasting” won’t help me make inferences about “Little House on the Prairie” because resolving the ambiguity in any text demands background knowledge. You make the inference that something special is happening in town when you are reading “Little House” because the girls are taking baths on a Wednesday evening. And if you know that people on the prairie in the 19th century only bathed for church on Sunday and on special occasions — because taking a bath required you to bring water up from the well and chop wood to heat it pan by pan, and so it was incredibly labor intensive — if you know that, you make the inference, and if you don’t, you don’t. So once students are fluent readers, background knowledge is the single biggest influence on comprehension.

Why is it important for kids to read whole books, instead of just reading passages, to foster reading comprehension?

Life is complex. A book is a long-form reflection on a topic. A narrator almost never sees the world at the end the way he or she does at the beginning. Understanding the world takes 200 pages, and that is actually a better reflection of the humility and depth it takes to navigate the world than the belief that we can tell the story of our lives fully in radically truncated forms.

You can only read fully if you understand “voice” … who is this person speaking to me, and how do they communicate? What are the gaps between what they say and what they are? A long-form relationship with a sustained narrative voice is necessary for the deepest forms of comprehension.

Why do we read less deeply online? If there is less brain activation from reading on screen, as some research suggests, why don’t we encourage kids to read printed books?

I’m not sure why we don’t, but maybe we need a short pithy phrase to remind ourselves that learning and reading are better without screens. So my phrase is: high text; low tech.

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27/05/2025
California School Dashboard lacks pandemic focus, earns a D grade in report

Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

National surveys have determined that parents significantly understate how far behind children are academically because of pandemic learning setbacks. The A’s and B’s that their kids have been getting on their report cards don’t tell the full story, concluded a survey of 2,000 parents .

“To hear parents tell it, the pandemic’s effects on education were transitory. Are they right to be so sanguine? The latest evidence suggests otherwise,” wrote education professors Sean Reardon of Stanford and Tom Kane of Harvard.

States’ websites that annually report the scores on standardized tests and other valuable data, like chronic absenteeism, could provide a reality check by clearly and easily displaying performance results over time. However, the California School Dashboard, the public’s primary source for school and district performance data, has failed to do that. The Center on Reinventing Public Education concluded this in the report State Secrets: How Transparent Are State School Report Cards About the Effects of COVID? issued Thursday. California was one of eight states to receive a D grade on an A-F scale, behind the 29 states that did better, including 16 states with an A or B.

The report focused on how states handled longitudinal data — showing changes in results over multiple years — from pre-Covid 2018-19 or earlier to now. In most states, that multiyear look would show a sharp drop on the first testing after the pandemic, followed by a slow recovery that has not made up for lost ground. For California, the decline in 2021-22, following two years of suspended testing, wiped out gradual gains since the first dashboard in 2014-15.

“The (California) dashboard makes it hard to identify longitudinal results,” said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education and the lead author of the report. “Because the dashboard never puts yearly data next to each other; you have to pull up multiple years, download the data, and put the data in Excel or something like that if you want to look at longitudinal trends.”

By contrast, one of seven states to receive an A, Connecticut shows five years of results in bar charts and line graphs for 11 measures.

Connecticut’s dashboard, praised in the report, shows changes over time for multiple performance measures.
Source: Connecticut’s Next Generation Accountability Report

“If we had rated states on something else (e.g., how clearly they presented data for the given year), we would have arrived at different ratings,” the report said.

Researchers examined longitudinal data for seven metrics: achievement levels in English language arts, math, science and social studies, achievement growth in English language arts and math, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation rates and English learner proficiency and growth. Teams of evaluators from the center, which is based at Arizona State University, used a point system for each metric based on whether it was easy, somewhat difficult, much too difficult or impossible to find longitudinal data.

“It’s not about having the data — it’s about presenting the data to the public in a way that’s usable,” Polikoff said of California’s dashboard.

California collects the data for five of the seven metrics. It no longer administers a statewide social studies test. It also doesn’t compile achievement growth using students’ specific scores over time, although the state has been considering this approach for more than six years. Instead, it compares scores of this year’s students with different students’ scores in the same grade a year earlier.

Some other states also don’t give a social studies test; California could still have gotten an A grade without it, Polikoff said.

The California Department of Education said that the dashboard undergoes an annual review for refinements to make sure it is “genuinely accessible and useful to our families.”

“We always remain open to the feedback and needs of our families, and we look forward to understanding more about the approach taken by the Center for Reinventing Public Education,” Liz Sanders, director of communications for the department, said in a statement.

She added that School Accountability Report Cards and DataQuest supplement the dashboard and can readily answer questions raised by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. “The dashboard serves a specific purpose to help California’s families understand year-over-year progress at their students’ schools, and the user interface is simplified based on feedback from diverse and representative focus groups of California families,” Sanders said.

Not a priority

At the direction of the State School Board, the California Department of Education chose to focus on disparities in achievement as its top priority for the dashboard. For every school and district, it has made it easy to see how 13 student groups, including low-income students, students with disabilities, English learners, and various racial and ethnic groups performed on multiple measures.

The state developed a rating system using five colors (blue marking the highest performance and red the lowest). Each color reflects the result for the current year combined with the growth or decline from the previous year. The colors send a signal of progress or concern.

However, without reporting longitudinal results for context, the color coding can prove problematic. The statewide chronic absence rate in 2022 was a record high of 30%. Declining 5.7 percentage points in 2023 to 24.3% earned a middle color, yellow signifying neither good nor bad. Yet the chronic absence rate was still at an alarmingly high level. Viewers would have to look closely at the numerical components behind the color to understand that.

No ability to compare schools and districts

Unlike some other states’ dashboards, the California School Dashboard also does not permit comparisons of schools and districts. That was by design. Reflecting the view of former Gov. Jerry Brown, the state board focused on districts’ self-improvement and discouraged facile comparisons that didn’t consider the data behind the colors.

However, both EdSource’s annual alternative dashboard and Ed-Data, a data partnership of the California Department of Education, EdSource, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team/California School Information Services, encourage multi-school and district comparisons.

Ed-Data has a five-year comparison of test scores and other metrics. Although this year it no longer starts with 2018-19, the pre-Covid base year for comparisons, viewers can use the year slider above the charts to view data for earlier years.

EdSource has created graphics showing longitudinal statewide results in math and English language arts, including breakouts for student groups, dating to the first year of the Smarter Balanced testing.

“If California had reported all of the outcomes in a format like that, it would’ve gotten an A because that’s exactly the kind of comparison we are looking for,” Polikoff said.

The report separately analyzed the usability of states’ dashboards to determine whether they are easy to use and well-organized. California is one of 16 states rated “fair,” with 23 states rated “great” or “good,” and 11 states, mainly small states like Vermont, but also Texas and New York, rated “poor.”

“We were struck by how difficult it was to navigate some state report card websites,” the report said. “We found many common pitfalls, ranging from the relatively mundane to the massive and structural.”

Kansas, for example, lacked a landing page with overall performance data, while Texas school report cards “offer a wealth of data broken down by every student group imaginable” in massive data tables but no visualizations.

The five states with “great” usability are Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, Idaho and New Mexico, the last two of which got an F for longitudinal data.

“California’s dashboard is far from the worst out there,” said Polikoff. “The reality is little tweaks are not going to cut it. That probably means a pretty substantial overhaul to be usable for longitudinal comparisons. Now, the state might say, ‘We don’t care about longitudinal trends’ and that’s their prerogative, but what purpose is the dashboard trying to serve, and who’s it trying to serve?”

Answer those questions, he continued, “and then design the dashboard accordingly.”

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13/05/2025
PBL Project Design Focus on Content Knowledge and Skills
PBL Project Design Focus

When designing a PBL Project, your focus is to teach students academic content area knowledge and skills drawn from district or state standards. Your project also focuses on building students’ ability to think critically, solve problems, collaborate, and communicate (3Cs), which are the 21st Century skills students need to prepare for life and work in today’s world, according to PBL in the Elementary Grades book.

The book provides a project overview planning form. See below

On the form, it indicates which standards and skills you are targeting for your project.

Selecting Content Standards for Your Project

You are good to go if you have come up with your project ideas by starting from your standards. It is important to remember to align your project with standards.

Standards that are most important are called “priority standards” that are identify by your school or district you want to use as the focus for your project. Priority standards are often based on what items appear more frequently on state tests.

If priority standards have not been identified, you can decide for yourself or with colleagues in your grade level what the priority standards are for the content areas included in the project.

To Start the Alignment Process:

First decide on the few standards that are most essential for meeting the goals of the project. It is not a good idea to try to include as many standards as possible in the project since students will ne spending so much time on it. Typically, a project should focus only 1 – 3 standards from each academic content area to be included, depending on how specific standards are written.

If you try to include too many standards, you cannot teach them in any depth and assess them adequately.

PBL in Elementary Grades book provides an 4th grade Curriculum Map with Projects as an example:

Another suggestion the book made is to use curriculum guides or scope and sequence documents that contain standards that are “unpacked” into discrete skills and pieces of knowledge. You can use this specific guidance to design project products, assessments, and lesson that align closely with the standards.

Selecting 21st Century Skills

Communication, collaboration, and critical thinking/problem solving are the three most important 21st century skills called the “3Cs”. According to PBL in Elementary Grades book these skills and several others are a natural fit with PBL. The book recommends not to assume students are gaining these skills because you designed a challenging project. These skills should be taught and assessed in a project.

PBL in Elementary Grades book notes you only teach and assess two of the skills if this is your first project. One is oral communication (making presentation) because all projects include presenting to a public audience as an essential element. Presentation skills are called for in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, and they are straightforward to teach and assess.

Collaboration or working in teams is the other skill that is easy to teach and assess. You probably are familiar with group work and cooperative learning, so you already have some basics tools in your toolbox.

PBL in Elementary Grades book emphasizes the 3Cs are important for success in the 21st century, and that these skills can be taught and assessed in projects. See examples below:

Collaboration
- Take responsibility for the quality and timeliness of his or her own work; uses feedback; stays on task during group work.
- Accepts shared responsibility for the work of the group; helps improve the quality of the work an understanding of other members.
- Applies or encourages the use of strategies for facilitating discussion and decision making.
- Manages project by identifying and prioritizing goals and tasks, creating timelines, organizing resources, and monitoring progress.
- Respects the ideas, opinion, abilities, values, and feeling of other group members; Works well with diverse group members; Encourages group cohesion by using conflict management strategies.
Communication (When making a presentation)
- Organizes ideas and develops content appropriate to audiences and situations.
- Uses effective oral presentation skills.
- Create media/visual aids that enhance content delivery.
- Gauges audience reaction and/or understanding and adjusts presentation appropriately.
- Responds to questions appropriately.
Critical Thinking/Problem Solving
- Recognizes and defines problems accurately; raises relevant questions and issues, formulating them clearly and precisely.
- Gathers pertinent information from a variety of sources; evaluates the quality of information (source, validity, bias).
- Organizes, analyzes, and synthesizes information to develop well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, judging them against relevant criteria.
- Considers alternatives; recognizes and assesses assumptions, implications, and practical consequences.
College and Career Readiness Standards for English Language Arts: Speaking and Listening: Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas Continuum from Kindergarten to Fifth Grade. See Below:

Hallermann, Sara; Larmer, John; Mergendoller PhD, John. PBL in the Elementary Grades: Step-by-Step Guidance, Tools and Tips for Standards-Focused K-5 Projects (p. 32). Buck Institute for Education. Kindle Edition.

Teaching students how to think critically and solve problems is more challenging. These are complex skills that cut across several content areas, and most teachers only have experience with instruction that emphasizes factual and procedural knowledge. Assessing critical thinking/problem solving is also challenging, because it is not readily observable.

Hallermann and Mergendoller suggest other skills might be encouraged in your project, but not explicitly taught and assessed — such as creativity or global awareness. If you’re ambitious, and it’s not your first project, you may wish to add more skills to your list of goals, such as project management, the use of various technological tools, and cross-cultural competence. These are all teachable and assessable. Note that if you want to teach multiple 21st century skills, your project will need to be longer, to build enough time during the project to practice and assess the skills.

Hallermann, Sara; Larmer, John; Mergendoller PhD, John. PBL in the Elementary Grades: Step-by-Step Guidance, Tools and Tips for Standards-Focused K-5 Projects (p. 33). Buck Institute for Education. Kindle Edition.

If this is your first PBL project, you might want to review First PBL Project Modest in Scope Achieve Best Results
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12/04/2025