Every year I rant about the Academic Performance Index (API) and how terrible it is as a measure of academic performance. I've tried to avoid repeating myself this year. But after several stories came out in the last couple days praising schools for their API performance, I couldn't help myself. This San Jose Mercury News story was probably the worst of the group.

The story holds out San Jose High Academy as a school that "models success." They cite the school-wide 63 point "leap" on the API and that their Latino students jumped 72 points. While I'm sure good things are happening at San Jose High Academy, they're not the model of success that the article seems to suggest.

These charts from edresults.org showing the school's proficiency (think at grade-level) rates tells a different story:

Language Arts:

Mathematics:

While there has been some improvement, particularly in math for last year, they've only risen about 20 percentage points since 2002 in Language Arts. They're not even to 50% this year which is the state average. At their current level of performance more students are below grade-level than at grade-level. Their school-wide rate is just barely above 40%. So, nearly 60% of their students are testing below their grade-level. They didn't even meet their Adequate Yearly Progress targets in 2009.

This is a great example of the disconnect between the API and whether students are at grade-level. This school has leapt and jumped on the API, but their gains in the actual numbers of children at grade-level are modest at best. I don't believe parents really care about the API. As a parent, what I'm more interested in is whether my students are at grade-level. If they're below grade-level, then I want to know what the remediation opportunities are so they can get caught up.

The API is simply too complex to use as a measure of student academic performance. It has a number of flaws, which include:

1. The API is re-calibrated every year by the California Department of Education (CDE) to adjust for changes in tests and test weights. That means you can't accurately compare a school's API base or growth score from one test cycle to another. That's why the need to come out with new "base" scores every year that are then compared to the "growth" scores from that year's testing results.
2. Although there are API scores for each subgroup of students, the numbers most widely reported are the school-wide figures, which hide achievement gaps between poor and minority students and their white and Asian peers.
3. CDE has set the target API score as 800. If a school reaches 800, they don't have to improve the tiniest bit as long as they stay above 800. At an API of 800, only about 55% of the students of that school are at grade-level. That's only slightly above the current statewide average.
4. The similar schools ranking in the API is based on a set of criteria called the "School Characteristics Index" and allows schools with completely different issues to be considered similar. For example, a school with a high population of Hispanic students could be considered similar to a school with a high population of African American or poor students. The various combinations of characteristics get combined into a single score (just like the API) which is then used to determine whether schools are similar.
5. Schools receive the maximum increase in their API score for moving students from the very bottom proficiency level, far below basic to the next one up, below basic, so they can show large increases without ever getting a single additional student to grade-level.
6. The API annual growth targets are set very low, so a school could make their growth target every year and still be decades away from getting every student to grade-level.
7. While school districts have API scores, they have no targets to meet and there are no consequences for them failing to improve.

As a comparison, let's look at Aspire Lincoln Wilson College Preparatory Academy in Oakland Unified. Wilson has greater percentages of poor students and is nearly entirely made up of Hispanic students since it lacks the Asian and White populations found at San Jose High Academy. Both schools have similar populations of English Learners. I believe that Wilson's scores truly have leapt and jumped.

Language Arts

Mathematics

Wilson still has a long way to go as well, but they're above the state average and they're gotten there in much shorter time. Schools like Wilson are the ones that should be highlighted as models of success. If education reporters stopped using the API and started looking at the actual percentages of students who are at or above grade-level, these stories would have a lot more meaning.

Each year the State Superintendent of Public Instruction complains about the confusion between the API and grade-level proficiency rates, yet he does nothing to resolve the issue. What the state needs to do is abandon the API as a measure of school achievement and do what parent's do. Look at whether the schools are getting students to grade-level. They could still reward schools for progress, only it would be real progress in getting students to grade-level rather than the pseudo-progress of moving kids from one definition of failure to a slightly better one.

As I've said before and I'm sure I'll say again, the API is a joke. Actually, it is too sad to be a joke. We're talking about more than 3 millions California students who are below grade-level every year without any apparent sense of urgency from our State Superintendent, education leaders or policymakers. I believe there would be more anger from parents, except that the education bureaucracy does its best to make certain parents don't realize how bad things have become. Most parents simply don't realize the severity of the problem, otherwise they wouldn't let our elected officials get away with it.