The Mercury News – ALMA FAUSTO
Parents, students and educators may be using colors instead of numbers to see how well their schools rank. The plan, presented at a California State Board of Education meeting in Sacramento this week, would replace giving schools a number — from 200 to 1,000 — heavily based on test scores. The old system, the Academic Performance Index, was suspended in March 2015 in favor of using other factors to rate a school’s quality, such as student attendance, English proficiency, dropout rates and access to college-level classes for high school students. The proposal is part of an overhaul in educational accountability the state has been pushing since the federal government’s No Child Left Behind initiative, criticized by some as a one-size-fits-all plan, was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, hailed as a flexible standard taking into account a school’s needs. The color-coded approach, the California Model, would be online and show boxes under different categories.”(more)