I thought this Sacramento Bee opinion piece by Dan Walters was great! He was one of the few people in the media who saw through the hyperbole from State Superintendent O'Connell about how well the Academic Performance Index (API) "forces" schools to close achievement gaps. As you've heard me rant many times before, there are no consequences for schools not meeting their API targets for subgroups.

The chief purpose of education, it might be argued, is to equip one's mind with the ability to absorb information and analyze it critically to reach a conclusion.

Ironically, however, the more information we are given about the academic performance of California's 6 million-student system of public education -- mostly in the form of test results -- the less we truly know about how our children are being equipped with those vital cognitive and analytical skills.

Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of schools, released the latest round of Academic Performance Index scores Tuesday and declared, "We're on the right track." O'Connell announced that 34.1 percent of the state's schools had reached the officially proclaimed target of an 800 API score (on a scale of 200 to 1,000, calculated from academic testing), up three percentage points from the previous year.

But when the details are examined, the term "right track" appears to be somewhat rosy. For one thing, the 800 number is not a very high standard, since the state itself says that it would take a score of 875 to equate to grade-level proficiency in reading, math and other skills. In other words, if every school just reached the 800 score that O'Connell terms the "benchmark of achievement," it would mean that every school's students would be subpar.

But even if we accept 800 as a target, barely a third of California's schools are reaching it, not exactly a cause for celebration. And when we look at the districts with large numbers of poor, non-English-speaking, Latino or African American students, the scores are downright abysmal. Huge, 700,000-student Los Angeles Unified, for instance, managed only a pathetic 655 API, with African American and Latino students barely topping 600. And while there are other districts even lower, such as Oakland Unified at 651, one can find affluent, mostly white and Asian American districts with scores topping 900, such as Palo Alto Unified at 921.

O'Connell says the state will now create separate targets for student subgroups to make sure that teachers and principals concentrate on low-performing students, but there's an expanding body of opinion that the API itself is flawed, with the numbers being manipulated through teaching to the test and other classroom techniques.

It is probably unnecessary to reiterate all the problems with the API in this post since I've done it many times this week. Where Dan misses the mark is on how the API is flawed. His concerns of "teaching to the test and other classroom techniques" are not the biggest problems facing the API. The flaws with the API are much more fundamental and many stem from the lack of consequences for schools not making their API subgroup targets.

Dan does a great job in bringing some reality to Jack's comments.

A massive 22-study examination of California's public schools, financed by a consortium of foundations and released last week, was highly critical of throwing money at a variety of supposed educational improvement programs without knowing what truly can work, especially for low-performing poor and non-white students. The project's researchers noted that California's students of all races and economic backgrounds lag behind their counterparts in other states -- 15th from the bottom in national testing for white students, fourth from the bottom for Latino students and 11th from the bottom for African American students.

"Seventy percent of Hispanic students in Texas score higher than the average Hispanic student in California," one of the studies pointed out. "Even children of college graduates in California scored 15th from the bottom relative to their peers in other states."

The fractional gains that O'Connell trumpets, even if they are real, still mean California schools have a long, long way to go to even reach fundamental proficiency.

Did I say there are no consequences for schools not making their API subgroup targets? In all of my criticism of California public education, I don't mean to downplay the fact that most schools are improving. The problem is that the growth is far too slow. The children in public schools need to be at grade-level this year, not in 20 years. We can't afford to wait before we fix what's wrong with the system.