001all right welcome everyone seeing that all the board members are now present I hereby call the March 2025 meeting of the State Board of Education to order at 8:32 a.m. and I'd like to commence by saluting the flag member yoshimoto T would you please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance so I would like to welcome board members staff and members of the public who are attending this board meeting in person uh the consent calendars the proposed waiver consent items are W1 through W9 the proposed regular consent items are items 5 and seven item six approval of the fiscal year 20242 25 Career Technical education incentive Grant allocations round 10B has been removed from the regular consent agenda and will be heard uh public hearing there is one public hearing on the agenda it is
002item nine the petition for the renewal of a charter school authorized by the California state board of of Education consideration of Altus schools South Bay there are a few changes in the agenda we will reopen item one SBE priorities later today to take action on the preliminary report of actions draft January 2025 meeting minutes and report on our liaison assignments there will be no closed session today as I mentioned earlier uh item six has been removed from the consent calendar and we will be taking up that item after the regular consent item agenda and before item eight our community schools item this afternoon public comment will be accepted either in person or by phone members of the public wishing to call in for public comment should view the live stream of the meeting to know
003at what time public comment will occur for each item public comment may be provided by dialing the phone number entering a participant access code and then following each of the operators prompts upon dialing in callers will be added to a caller queue the operator will notify callers when it is their term to provide public comment we will also ask callers to please turn down the speaker volume of their computers if they are following the live webcast to avoid an echoing effect members of the public wishing to provide public comment in person should sign in using the binder at the table just outside the room the binder is on the table with separate pages for each item number this will help ensure that staff is able to track the in-person speakers for a particular item public
004comment will be limited to one minute for each each speaker where speakers require interpretation two minutes will be provided item 11 is the general public comment item during which members of the public May provide comment on matters that are not specifically listed on the board's agenda we'll now take up item one and I turned it over to State superintendent Tony Thurman to provide his report thank you Madame President uh members of the board um board staff CDE staff and to all those who are following today's meeting um I want to acknowledge that Mark kicks off women's history month and a time to celebrate many of the Great accomplishments of those who are leading Us in education and in other fields um we need not look far to remember uh um our our own president uh
005board member who has made history by being the first uh African-American woman to serve as the board president uh in addition to all of her uh incredible accomplishments in Education and Research and I look out to all the women on this board and I was thinking this morning that young women and men see you in what you do and that it sends a message to them that they too can lead in education in government in whatever sector that they serve so thank you for helping to make history um and uh to represent uh for our young women and men um the great things that they can do I think about some who have served and do serve as amb ambassadors to the Department of Education like Dr Karen kuramatsu um who is a civil rights
006leader and a CH a champion for ethnic studies like Dolores wera who continues to uh lead the resistance and to call for ethnic studies and to call for justice there's so many examples and I hope that you all will think about those who you might celebrate um as we kick off women's History Month I also want to acknowledge that there are many who are still trying to overcome the challenges of the most recent fires and as they continue their recovery um I want to thank all of our Educators who have found a way to get through budget votes in difficult times and that they are accepting the message that in spite of the challenges that um we face every student deserves to have a quality education and um I want to acknowledge all the First
007Responders and the folks who are working to make sure that um those who lost a home will be able to one day rebuild build that home that the schools that were lost can be rebuilt um but that we continue to make sure that our students um get a great education I want to acknowledge staff here at the State Board and at CDE who've been working uh over many hours with the offices of emergency services and FEMA and others to address so many of the needs um helping people find temporary housing helping to Think Through how schools will be rebuilt uh schools that have had to come together together um and collocate as a result of damage or destruction to school campuses I know that Brooks and others here have worked closely uh with our office
008and um various departments um Abel guen um and his team and Juan moreles and our emergency team um have worked Around the Clock often times in the emergency units that are delivering the resources and um I also want to acknowledge um our nonprofit Partners who worked with us and have recently helped us to raise another $100,000 that will benefit um students who are now homeless as a result of the fires and we'll be working with Leo um to Adit to administer those dollars um in February we also celebrated Black History Month and um another woman leader Champion I want to share with you uh about is named orl Lee Brown and you may not find her name in any publication uh but imagine a private citizen who does not have wealth who decides one day
009that she is going to help students in Oakland and adopt a Kindergarten class and promise them that if they stay in school she will provide the money for them to go to college or brown did just that and to date she has put 200 students in the Oakland Unified School District through college personally um she is a retired woman who has used her personal means uh to do this and has probably dedicated every single Saturday and after school hour to extra tutoring mentoring and support and so it was an honor to recognize her uh during Black History Month it was an honor to uh recognize um the Sach State University president Dr Luke wood um who is working to grow out the University's presence and among the many Innovative programs has developed a a black
010honors program that is open to students from all backgrounds and and he has seen a dramatic increase in enrollment um at the dis at the state school um because of the Innovation um in the programs and then I just want to acknowledge some students who visited us from Bishop odal High School who um are among those who are taking uh the new course uh AP African-American studies and they gave testimony in the capital uh about uh the importance of having access to uh African-American studies and the program is open to all students and is being uh received with excitement across districts all across the state I want to acknowledge that we are uh still celebrating um read Across America day and it was an honor to uh visit with students in a Kindergarten class at
011Valley View Elementary School in the west contracosta Unified School District and to read with them and talk with them about career opportunities um we are also in the time uh of budget and as we review the governor's proposed budget it contains many resources to build on the many great uh literacy programs that are mentioned it proposes more dollars for reading coaches and uh you know as this is budget season I've been testifying and uh testified in the Senate budget education committee last week I'll be testifying in the assembly budget education committee today and my message is is that uh legislators should support what the governor has proposed for um more money for school districts to have reading coaches but the idea of professional development in general and as many of you know we have convened
012a group that we call the move the needle task force a cohort of 250 school districts that have received multiple state grants that we are asking them to align those grants and to accelerate their efforts to help boost reading um and math scores and the proficiency of our students and so as we talk about the budget uh I've spoken with legislators and will continue to Champion programs that we know uh support academic Improvement like dual language immersion programs and uh last year and this year we've worked on legislation to expand the ability of schools to add dual language emerging programs because we know that it has cognitive benefits for our students it makes them Global thinkers of the world and more competitive and ready to serve uh but we believe that programs like dual language
013immersion uh can help our school districts offset the declining enrollment that they are dealing with it is heartbreaking how many of our districts are seeing a decline in enrollment that which means loss Revenue which means they have to make really hard choices like giving layoff notices to teachers and classified staff who they know they need and and who they know um will be struggling to bring them back um by the start of the school year um we are uh testing a theory that if schools bring programs like dual language immersion and expand the number of programs that they can offer that they will see um a way to offset declining enrollment and in our initial conversations with districts that have added dual language immersion programs and sustain them they have seen uh a demand uh
014in in an increase and a demand and a sustained demand and interest in enrollment at schools that offer dual language emerging programs so we will continue to advocate for them as we are in um this budget season and hope that you will join our webinars coming up next month where we will Spotlight the benefits of dual language imersion programs I also had a chance uh during February um to attend a program U called missing and murdered indigenous persons and I want to thank um the Paula tribe for hosting it um I want to thank uh the other tribes that were part of this event to talk talk about these very difficult circumstances that are affecting many in the Native American Community all across the country that individuals will disappear often um times having their disappearances
015um not investigated by law enforcement because of cultural barriers and other uh challenges and to to see the work that is being done to work through these challenges as I attended this event this Summit uh I thought about our commitment to supporting um the achievement of all students including our Native American students I thought about our American Indian education oversight committee um that works with our staff here also to provide grants for extra tutoring and supports at American Indian education um Education Centers and that we must continue to be focused on um providing additional supports that will help to reduce chronic absenteeism that will help to increase graduation rates and that as we support Native American students we're also supporting all students we know that when we support Native American students and African-American students and
016others that a rising tide lifts all boats and that we're helping students from all backgrounds and so we will continue to uh promote um resources to address chronic absentees where we have seen a decline for many of our students uh but we know that we have much more work um that we need to do as I talk with legislators and others about the budget I've talked about um the need for us to build educator housing and we've developed a bill um called s502 that would provide pre-development dollars to school districts to build housing for teachers and classified staff and others who can't afford to live where they work um we see the Nexus uh to those who travel multiple hours or who leave the job because they can't afford to live in housing if you
017look at the studies that go back to 2017 teachers and other staff uh at some rate only 20 to 30% of the teachers were able to afford housing and a significant number of our Educators spend well over 30 or 40% of their income on housing and so we are working on the concept of building educator housing recognizing that our school districts have more than 75,000 Acres of surplus land that is ready for development today so s SP 502 is a bill that will provide uh resources to districts with pre for predevelopment to help them work through and think through how how to build this housing uh for educators and for other members of our Workforce it's not a surprise that many of our districts are feeling uh under attack they're being told um that they
018can't teach any subject um that deals with race they're being told that the Department of Education will be abolished they're being told that they will lose Federal funding and they feel the impacts of those messages and I want to thank everyone here at the department at at the State Board who's been working together to provide guidance and reassurance to our districts um about how funding can be held and that they move forward with the understanding that no matter what comes out of Washington DC or anywhere else our kids are entitled to have a quality education and that we must continue to make that our mission and I'm proud of those who are working with us as we uh sure up support and protect against the Department of Education being abolished and working with us to
019support our immigrant families we've seen some school districts experience a decline in attendance out of fear for immigration and deportation consequences it's why we developed the bill sp48 that says there's no place for ice on a school campus and that ice cannot be within a one mile radius of a school campus and unless unless they have a Judicial warrant um that they should not be on a school campus and that school should never give any information about students to ice or any other Agency for the purposes of deportation we also have sent notes to school districts to help them understand what do you do if someone from Ice shows up on campus um that to help folks understand that you don't ever have to let ice into your home or into a school um and
020that you can say I don't have to provide you any information unless you have a Judicial warrant and so I I would just say that in spite of the challenges that our communities are experiencing um I just want to acknowledge all of our teachers our classified staff our administrators um our volunteers our families and our students for persevering even under the most difficult circumstances and for accepting that even under these circumstances we must ensure that every one of our students enjoys a great education and receives a quality education this submits my report and I'm happy to take any questions from any of the members of the board thank you so much and uh with appreciation for all of the many things that the department is doing with your leadership to keep us on track uh
021in these in these times um I also want to add my uh appreciation to all those who have helped our schools in Los Angeles and Pasadena recover from the devastating fires uh at their worst more than 1,000 schools were closed uh impacting the learning of nearly 700,000 students um and we've been watching the increase in climate events in this state uh and that's been something that uh we have been trying to address with uh supports for instructional continuity uh thankfully you it was not long before students were back uh in class and all of the efforts that superintendent Thurman outlined uh the governor also issued several executive orders that allowed displaced students to attend school out outside of their District made it easier for the schools that were damaged or destroyed to use temporary facilities
022to get help from State agencies to develop plans for serving the displac students and for rebuilding we also have uh pushed forward um the question about uh necessary waivers for you know from federal requirements that would uh be um problematic in this time um hulet Packard Google Microsoft Apple uh and others made a coordinated effort to uh secure donations of Chromebooks and laptops and other devices needed to assist the schools uh and as superintendent Thurman said there were so many people in uh every agency of the state who who leaned in uh so there'll certainly be more to report on the recovery front uh but for now we continue to be uh to offer our thoughts and prayers to those affected by the fire many Educators and many families of course are still without housing
023uh and without permanent housing uh and are continuing to show up it's been amazing to me all the people who continue to show up for work teachers and county office superintend you know personnel and uh District personnel you know like back in the saddle a day or two after the they lost their homes and so there's just a lot to be both appreciative of and and grateful for um among all the folks who have been taking care of our children uh as superintendent Thurman noted there's also been concerning news from the federal uh level with executive orders with the holding of federal funds you threats to sue local districts efforts to shut down the Department of Education lots of headlines about that almost everything that has been announced uh has when it's gotten to the
024courts been found to be illegal and so the courts are stepping in on many of those um actions uh for our part we continue to coordinate with Statewide and local Partners to provide guidance and reassurance the federal law remains unchanged the Congress has not acted on any of these things executive orders and memos cannot modify or override statutory requirements or regulations they cannot untie Lally impose new terms on existing agreements as I say a lot of this is being litigated and the courts have continuously found that that that is not permissible and so we want districts to be sure that they consult with legal counsel and with the department and and uh uh the state board with regarding the impact of any potential Federal actions uh because sometimes people respond reflexively to what they've seen
025on the news not realizing that their uh the laws are really unchanged uh should they change we'll provide guidance and take action is needed in support of our students and and local educational agencies um but uh that has not happened and we are proceeding a pace with our approach to education in the state of California uh and with our support of our local districts uh thankfully you know as the superintendent said there are many positive things to look forward to in March and in addition to read Across America day which is always exciting and wonderful and many of our teachers are doing uh fabulous things in the classroom to recognize that U March 14th is coming up and that is Pi Day Pi Day is an opportunity for all of our math enthusiasts around the
026world to recite the infinite digits of pie talk to their friends about math and eat pie uh and I look forward to hearing about the activities that our Math teachers are planning and all of the amazing pie that is being eaten uh as superintendent Thurman noted our budget includes uh investments in uh reading coaches and also math coaches as we begin to really implement the uh new math framework uh and so this is a a joyful time uh it is also women's History Month of course a time to look back on how from Far women have progressed and Marvel at the brave women who often defied The Establishment to inch the world closer to equality this year's theme is moving forward together women educating and inspiring generations and it celebrates the powerful influence of women
027who've dedicated their lives to Education mentorship and Leadership uh superintendent mentioned to Dolores herera who is one of our California Heroes uh she started her career as a teacher I don't know if many people know that she received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific's Delta College she taught school in the 1950s and it was as she saw so many hungry Farm children coming to school that she began to organize farmers and Farm Workers and co-founded the Stockton chapter of the community service organization led to voter registration drives fought for economic improvements of course worked with Cesar Chavez to found the national Farm Workers Association and ultimately the United Farm Workers Union and her educational efforts you know extended from the children and families of California Farm Workers to the leaders in
028the state and to the nation her um one of her favorite sayings has been every minute is a chance to change the world and we should really think about how uh that plays out for each of us in our in our lives uh so of course we want to uh recognize and learn from women like Dolores wera and so many fighters for educational quality in these times uh that Mantra every minute is a chance to change the world is really an important uh mantra for all of us to take up and finally in State Board of Education staff news the governor recently appointed Katie hardaman to be State Board of education's new Chief Deputy executive director effective March 10th do we have Katie here no okay we'll have to see her at the next meeting
029in person Katie comes to us from the California Teachers Association where she's been a legislative Advocate since 2019 before that she was a consultant for the California Assembly budget committee from 2013 to 2019 and she was previously a senior legislative aid for assembly member Susan Mania at the California State Assembly and worked as an executive assistant before that for assembly member Jose salorio so she is a member of the women's leadership program at leadership California and a a player for the California storm a semi-professional women's soccer team yeah so please welcome join me in welcoming Katie to the team and we will properly see and welcome her next uh next [Applause] meeting and that concludes my report um and I know Brooks is especially happy that we have a new Deputy executive director because he
030is doing so many things helping us get some goals and I couldn't resist I know thank you thank you might I just also say we wanted to thank Supply bank.org it's the nonprofit that has been partnering with us to receive donations for the families and the victims of the fire and we just want to acknowledge them and thank them for their work Supply bank.org that's where we can make donations I we can make donations they actually do a lot around backpack donations and helping students get the you know the essentials and the intangibles and they've been really great and helping El with that thank you so much uh and we're going to move to item two which is the update on the implementation of the integrated local state and federal accountability and continuous Improvement system
031uh and this meeting we are looking at adoption of the science indicator cut scores for status and change and the color scheme for the 5x5 grid and a review of student growth data uh and uh the CDE recommends that we do adopt those cut scores and uh the grid and the item will be presented by Cindy kazanis and Kimberly monank of the CDE and Katherine Castellano of ETS Cindy please begin good morning uh president uh darling Hammond and members of the board uh my name is Cindy kazanis I'm the director of the analysis measurement and accountability reporting division wanted to welcome um and appreciate the remarks from State superintendent Thurman and welcome our new Deputy Chief Deputy superintendent um ingred Roberson uh to the dis uh we have a full morning of Assessments and accountability
032and I'm delighted to kick it off with um some news to celebrate your hard work uh we have been working on these two items if we look back for over a decade uh so when we look at growth it's 26 memos and information um and actual items that you have either reviewed or your predecessors have and gotten us to today uh the patience that you have demonstrated um as opposed to other states who were who who were early adopters we have learned from the early adopters in both of these instances and so today while you only have action on the science um metric you will hear about growth and you will hear about the next steps for growth as well uh for science this is not going to be your only meeting where you're going
033to talk about science you're going to talk about science in May and July so we'll have four meetings in a row about science four meetings in a row I know about growth uh so so just uh super exciting I wanted to also just share with you just a couple of just brief updates um around um our work we are um very uh focused on November 15th and getting out your 2025 dashboard and so the things that you'll see and the information memo you got in February puts us on track to achieve that um we have been so fortunate and I just wanted to express my um my uh gratitude to the administration to president Darlene Hammond of the amount of support we've had over the years to invest in our state employees and that is
034why you see no disruptions to what we're doing because it's not a contractor it's actual state workers who have developed the skill set to put together what you see today um there is one exception to that and that is our testing contractor and I am so delighted today that you're going to hear from um one of the the most brilliant people in the space of of the growth model uh uh conversation um around why our growth model really excels among others uh but in terms of uh again just um where we're at today and the Milestones that you're going to celebrate with with growth and then potentially um you know looking at taking action on science really puts us to a place where um this dashboard has a achieved a a place where we we
035find room for everyone and we find room for Science and I was reminded that the old system had science as as 20% of it so it wasn't even didn't even you know um hit 5050 it was just a portion of things and so this is really arriving as its own um in its own space um the other uh piece is just to uh to uh briefly talk about our work um and supporting those districts that were affected by the fires the governor's executive order also permitted um schools and districts that were affected to have a longer period of time to actually submit their student accountability report card which you all see each July and uh we have been providing uh service to the field around that and even week two spoke with one of the
036um affected both affected districts the large ones at least to say we're here don't worry about accountability right now just focus on your students um and we've had more of those conversations of late and so just so you know um districts are worried about how this will look in in terms of accountability and while there are things that we will do to to help them um try to put those worries aside those are things that come um come come to light when um fires happen and how will this impact their student population who will be left in their student population too and so we are here to support um those districts and those schools and have already provided um that support over the last um weeks and months in addition to our Emergency Services individuals
037who you heard about from the superintendent so without further Ado uh we do as part of our work plan um are bringing to you uh updates on the growth model with a conversation uh and then um action on our science indicator and you'll hear just a little bit about our Outreach activities over the last couple of months and our recommendation is that you do approve um the science uh the status cut scores change cut scores and 5 by5 color grid for science the science indicator and I'm not going to um I'm going just keep this moving very quickly because you're going to want to hear from Katherine more than me this morning so the first uh thing up is ATT attachment one and uh the incorporation of the student level growth model for grades 4
038through eight into Ela and math um on the dashboard and this um does address and uh is relevant to our dashboard principles that you see on the screen to four five 8 and 11 so just a reminder and reflection of how this is integrated into um the current work of the system so without further Ado I would like to welcome Katherine ciano who is a principal research scientist at etss a research institute she comes to us from the East Coast we are so grateful for her presence and work on this over the last um several years if not closer to five six seven or eight I can't remember but um please welcome Catherine to the [Music] Das thank you Sydney good good morning um my name is Katherine castalano and I'm a researcher at ETS
039um thank you for having me here today I've had the great privilege of working with California Department of Education over the past several years during the course of their adoption of a student growth model um in fact our CEO am me SV is here today to celebrate this partnership and first before I I go further I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues D mcaffrey Jr Lockwood and Joseph marno who I did this work with um as long along with the support of my colleagues marann arcilla and Mary atrey So today we're first going to briefly review the timeline that brought us to this point then I'll describe the California Student growth model and lastly focus on the newly released results on the California school dashboard that summarized uh School Lea and student group growth results okay
040so let's start by retracing our steps through the California growth model Journey I'm sure some of you have been on those various points that Sydney talked about the6 memos and so on um but not everyone um and here I put celebrating the journey because it truly has been a celebration not only hard work and dedication but also a testament to the reciprocal relationship between research and practice at so many junctures of this journey we saw either research informing practice or practice leading to Innovative research so our first steps started with ETS working with CDE to explore the landscape of possible growth models we looked at what other states have done we looked at the literature and and various reports and Aid in this exploration CD identified and the board identified a list of criteria that
041help select the most useful student growth model to meet the specific needs of California these criteria included for instance conforming to rigorous technical standards and allowing for growth along the entire Continuum of student performance and so with these criteria in hand along with detailed information on each model uh Technical and interest groups met with CDE and identified three potential models that were promising that seem to check most of the boxes to meet California's needs and then ETS got to work evaluating those three possibilities uh we looked uh we evaluated their statistical properties such as the Precision of their scores and the relationship with demographic variables and our analyses revealed one growth model as a front runner and that was um called the residual gain score model and through additional analyses of this model we found
042a common but unsettling problem with school average growth and that is that school average growth can substantially fluctuate from one year to the next and this instability in school or laa or student group growth scores LED CD to literally pull the brakes on the adoption of the student growth model um and take a moment to pause because such yo-yoing and growth across time uh can erode confidence in the measure and be problematic for decision making uh so we sorry uh so we we paused the adoption of the growth model and ETS went back to interest holder groups to see what California state's uh needs really are for a growth model but ETS researchers also went to work we saw a clear Challenge and we found an elegant statistical solution to this challenge um we developed
043an alternative approach to averaging the student grow growth stores for school or student group to improve the year toe stability and we tested out this method with California data and the results are resounding success which led us to the May 2021 meeting of the board where we official the State Board officially adopted our methodology and so California then became the first state with plans to explicitly address this unnecessary year-to-year fluctuation in the school growth scores and also addressed inequity and the equality of growth scores for smaller versus larger groups because we also saw that that um yo yo-yoing sort of bouncing around was more problematic for smaller schools or low incident student groups which really brings up a fairness concern that certain groups um were seeing sort of this quality gap and we we reduced
044that with our new methodology um however due to the disruptions and testing from the covid-19 pandemic uh the needed test score data to actually implement the methodology would it be available until this past 23 to 24 school year and that's brings us to here today um in the meantime uh to help familiarize folks with the growth scores CD did release a school and ala uh growth score data using historical California data um that ETS help provide uh the journey at that point while we're waiting for the 23 24 school year to arrive turn to communicating the growth scores so we identified the general public Educators administrators parents and policy makers as our first audience of interest and ETS and CD engaged in iterative process of design and feedback of creating visual displays and supporting textual
045descriptions um to the to the public uh and this process involved engagement with the field we reached out to parents teachers through focus groups we had meetings with technical experts and interest holder groups and it was really revealing to find like what what were points of confusion things that we wouldn't have thought of when we were sort of Deep In The Weeds of it and this was also a truly um sort of rewarding personally experience for me as a researcher to be not only part of the development of approach but also see its roll out and communication plan uh during this time we also shared our results with the broader research Community uh I had the privilege of presenting alongside um Kim at uh the national Center on measurement education and National Conference and student
046assessment conferences uh we my colleagues and I also published peer-reviewed articles goals okay so this brings us now to the present to today with the first release of average student growth scores on the California school dashboard that just came out about a month ago at the end of January 2025 um the summaries of growth results are currently posted for informational purposes but discussions like these today will help decide additional uses I will just like to pause for a moment to say this is a big celebratory moment in this journey um so we're all very excited to see these results on the dashboard um so that kind of shows us the landscape of where we've been but what are sort of the the details of what's what's out there so let's jump down into some of
047the details of this growth model itself um so this California Student growth model produces student level growth scores but we often see the interest in averaging them up to school or student group or Lea level um so in California individual students do not receive reports of their growth but they're necessary to get to this averaging to the average levels of interest and as I mentioned before the California Student growth model is a type of statistical model known as the residual gain score model um and residual gain or RG scores are computed for each subject Ela and Mathematics and for each grade from grades four through eight because you need that prior grade three test score so there's GR in grade three okay um the resal game model expresses growth relative to other students it models
048the average student performance in the current grade level given performance in the prior grade level so specifically residual game scores indicate how much growth a student made relative to students with the same starting point in the previous year so if we take for instance grade five mathematics growth this would there that value would represent how much higher or lower the student scored on the current grade level math test given their um prior grade level four scores in math and El and with the RG model regardless of where you start you can show high growth so even if you're at the high end you can still show a growth I will like to say that rigal gain scores can't tell us why you have high growth or low growth right we can't say oh this school
049had high growth because of certain factors without doing additional analyses um and sorted really deeping deling deep into to what the factor to play there all right so let's walk through example of what a student residual gain score means uh let's consider all the third grade students in California and here they're sort of represented as this a morphous group of stick like figures and obviously it's many fewer stick like figures than there actually are students in grade three in California but I wouldn't be able to fill a a slide with that many figures um so let's organize these students instead of in thisor focus group let's organize them by their performance on their grade three tests and here I've highlighted a group of stud students at the top end of the performance Spectrum in grade
050three and we're going to focus on this subset of students and to understand their growth we want to see where did this set of students score on average on the grade four test so the paches or I don't know it's greenish showing up anyway that little band in the in the vertical um bar shows the average grade four math scores for this particular group of students who scored high in grade three and now we want to compare the performance of each student to that band in the middle and we see one of the students through more than that average band so that student grew more than the average or typical student who had the same grade three starting point and then another student scored right at that band so we say they scored you know
051about average or typical growth and then the third student we see scored less than that band so we say they grew less than the typical student they made less than typical growth so let's now see how this plays out when we the growth results up to the school Lea or student group level so growth scores of students in a school or laa or student group within a school or laa can be summarized with average growth scores um instead of repeatingly say School laa or student group within a school laa I will just use the word group or school to represent any of these aggregate units um the growth scores on the California school dashboard follow the approved approach by the board that it results in improving the accuracy and year over year stability of group
052growth scores and essentially this approach involves combining student growth score data from two years to obtain a better estimate of the group's growth in the reporting year so help to understand group growth scores um we're first going to address some of the FAQs or frequently asked questions that we often receive or hear in passing conversation when trying to Grapple what data is actually being used to um compute the school average gr score so we often see here how many years of growth scores do student individual students need to be included in their school's growth score do they need two years of growth because you're talking about combining two years and the answer is no you don't need two you could just need at least one so as long as a student has a growth score
053either the current year prior year or both years then they'll be included or part of that calculation for their school's average growth we also hear well do the students need to be in the same school for every year that you're talking about that you're tracking the student and the answer again is no um they can move schools and it's whatever the school is of like their valid school of record is for the reporting year as long as they're attached to a school um officially for that reporting year that's the school that their uh grow score will be report of all right so let's again walk through an illustrative example to understand the methodology have our stick figures back again um in this case uh to obtain School grow scores we have to start with the
054individual student scores um where each growth score is based on two years of test score data so here we have a student whose growth score in the 2023 to 24 school year represents their progams progress from grade four in the previous 2223 school year to um the grade five in the reporting year of 2324 and I promise this the only notation I use I'm going to use 5m to as shorthand for to represent their grade five math uh growth score now this individual student is part of a school that has four other students and three of the students are grade in grade five and all have grade five math scores and two students are in grade four and have grade four math scores and we want to understand on average this collection of students at
055the school how how much did they grow by the end of the 23 24 school year and we can say okay well we could just average up those five scores but that's you know five is a pretty small number so to get a better estimate of that school's growth we're going to bring in data from our previous cohort students to get a to improve our estimate now you'll say we do have some students who overlap so two of the students who are in grade five and 23 24 were in grade four in 2022 23 and those are represented by the shade the the stick figures holding shaded signs the colored signs so we do have some students who you know went from grade four to grade five and have grow Sports in both year but
056all the other students in this picture are unique for instance all the grade five students in the previous 22 23 year have now moved on to Middle School say right so they're not even at the school but we don't need to worry about identifying common students and so on interest is at the school we want to understand how did the school do on average so our method um will take the is a weighted average of the of the um of these two years but it puts more weight on the 23 24 school year um and and less weight on the prior school year but it's leveraging the relationship that there is some signal between growth from the past the growth so present um for the same school and this weighted averaging is particularly helpful for
057the smaller schools and student groups that we talked about before um because for those uh there's more chance to leverage this information for the larger schools and student groups we already have a pretty precise estimate um and just using the average with the reporting here okay so you may have had a chance to see your school or District's growth results on the California school dashboard um if you have it look you see a picture like this here shown here's example screenshot where this particular school has an average math growth score of Five Points above typical growth um so this means an average the students in the school in the school scored five points higher on their 23 24 school year mathematics assessment than the typical students with the same part grade level schools over all
058the different grades that happen to be in that school um but what do we make of this Five Points above typical like is it good well it's not below typical so it sounds better but we still don't know like to what extent we should value that um that score and unlike other measures on the dashboard there are no state board approved cut scores um to distinguish among levels of group growth but in the meantime we still wanted to give um some sense of what the value of a group grow score is and to facilitate that sense making ETS and CD used information and the data to determine whether School growth scores were meaningfully different from that typical growth point um and we use the Precision of the scores to help make these classifications so you
059can see that two schools or groups that are different sizes um but have the same score can sometimes be in different classifications and we'll see example of that because larger schools and groups tend have more precise uh scores all right so before we jump into that example here's just overview of the three categories of growth that you might see that you will see if you go to the dashboard uh we have below typical and above and below typical growth are for those schools that have meaningfully below um TP growth uh of their growth as meaningfully below typical growth and those are atypical are either like not meaningfully different or about equal to that typical point and those that are above are meaningfully above we'll show an example of this now so here's an example screenshot
060um again from the dashboard for the same school that we looked at before with the Five Points above typical growth is their value but their category or classification is typical and how do we get to this um to this classification um really what we do is look at a Precision band or range around the school's growth score and look to see if that band includes that typical point so in this case the school's Precision ban runs from two points below typical growth to 11 points above so it it crosses that typical point and so because it includes that we say it's not meaningfully different or it's about equal to typical and it has that typical classification um and the reason um this band is kind of large you're like well they Five Points above why
061is their range so big well it's because this school happens to only have 47 students um who have growth scores but if we turn to a larger school that has the same growth um screen growth value of Five Points above typical here we have one that now has 169 students but has that same growth value and is now classified as above because its Precision range is tighter it only runs from two points above typical to nine points above typical so it's now entirely above that that blue midpoint if you can see in the little graphic there and this is because we have more Precision um around this larger group's or school's uh score okay so I know we've covered a lot today um some points to keep in mind are that you know School growth
062scores help us understand how the students in the group performed in the current school year given their performance in the prior school year on average um this is grow relative to their starting point we're only covering uh grades four through eight uh because of the consecutive testing gr time and you know we're ready for the important next steps which include future discussions on how to use and imw value on group grow scores thank you again for your time today president darling ham do you want us to pause for questions there's just a couple more slides to close out this attachment but um wanted to give you an opportunity to uh either pause now or we can pause in just a minute or a couple minutes on this topic yeah okay oops okay uh so in
063terms of what is on uh your plate for this year uh in terms of growth this is our review of the actual uh data and the meaning behind it from those that helped develop this uh and then in may we will turn to the analysis of growth and options to incorporate growth onto lcff so to to Katherine's Point what does this mean what is the value that the State Board would like to place um uh to say what is good growth uh or otherwise uh we will then take uh the initial findings to the California partitioners Advisory Group in June who advises you of course on issues related to um uh these accountability items and then in July we will come back to you for determinations um on uh performance standards as well as uh
064whether or not we will be including uh growth into the lcff eligibility criteria and then just to piggyback on some of the pieces that Katherine's already touched on uh the department did release uh the uh growth data on the dashboard Bo um at the end of January and uh we were uh so eager to get this out that um I think there's some things that folks are used to seeing from us um that they may not have seen in that release uh in order to support though the release uh we have been updating on a regular basis the growth web page uh in addition to frequently asked questions um we actually met with um some of the core districts who have been using a their version of a growth model for a long time and
065what what could we include in our FAQs to make sure that this was not confused with um things that they're used to seeing especially in Los Angeles for example uh and so there is actually a question just specifically around that that came from um our colleagues um in Los Angeles uh we also uh did not include a data file which we normally is our practice that we would um to prevent this information from being used for unintended consequences there is no measure of what is good in this standard and so to be able to um make sure that the the that the file is being used appropriately and that the board has provided the appropriate in um input on that um we withheld from releaseing the data file we will definitely have that though once
066you have taken action on this um and we will uh be prepared to have uh the appropriate um support manuals behind the release of the growth data so in terms of what this would look like in 2025 again following um the dashboard release in November we would have a release of these growth data in late um 25 early 2026 you'd have a downloadable file and we'd have the growth data and the location that you have determined is appropriate based on your actions about what how you want to see growth in accountability there are um several options before you these are not things that you're going to have to decide today granted we have our May meeting and you have your July meeting for those decisions is how do we incorporate growth in the dashboard and
067so these are four options that we talked about not only in January but we're just bringing before you as a reminder in terms of the Growth work plan um we uh have also talked about in January and we're just uh revisiting this is that we have to complete the actual dashboard indicators for English language arts and math before we can give Katherine's team a completed file for her to start working on the growth uh the growth data and so that is a very um it is a time frame that is on top of uh would be following that November 15th release for example for this year um because we want to get this right and we want to make sure that that there's appropriate time for her team to do their work as well so
068there's this tension between um uh the uh recommendation from the wested report from several years ago around the system of support and giving um information to counties to get into schools and to districts earlier who are eligible for differentiated assistance and how growth would come into the dashboard so that is just you know attention I want to St stay out loud and uh the limitations of of that um of that work so with that I will turn it back to president Darlene Hammond for for clarifying questions if you would like um we do have of course a whole science conversation right that's what I was just trying to figure out how to manage that so we will not have public comment until after we've gotten through the science one but this is a lot so
069I do want to take time for clarifying questions uh on the growth uh model now uh Cindy could you go back to the previous slide which has the options that we will have to consider um in the coming months just so that people have have that you know it could become a full indicator modifying components of the existing academic indicators to include growth data that would mean progress and change in some way is that what that means Cindy yep and then modifying differentiated assistance to include in the growth data and then finally the adoptions of the performance standards and continuing to publish growth data the first three options because of this time um requ requirement this continued moving up of release of the dashboard you know this year we have November 15th next year we
070will move it up for weeks to coincide with the release of the C uh assessment uh results which is October 15 so uh in terms of how the growth data and the processing those data currently work we would not be able to meet the October 15th date to produce uh a differentiated assistance eligibility file with the incorporation of the growth model the growth model the growth data will will lag uh for the foreseeable future really the first three options are not really practicable that's correct based on based on the current requirements all of the the elements here um so with that said we're going to just take clarifying questions now uh and then we'll uh hear about the science indicator and then we'll have public comment and then we'll come back for full board discussion
071so I know that's a lot to hold in your brain uh clarifying questions if you have questions for Catherine yeah uh so I I I have a couple but I want to be sure everybody uh has a chance to get in what um clarifying questions that folks have member Olen thank you wow first of all I just say I'm I'm Blown Away um that is I was trying to figure out how many different types of things have to be um contemplated thought through averaged modeled Etc um whoa that's amazing so thank you for making it so clear for us and it's uh feels like a really great step forward just want to start with that um and then my questions I want to just before I just to stick with what president darling ham and
072just asked about um the options when you said those are not um currently possible one two three does that mean for this coming year or does that mean ever I miss I missed a piece I I don't um I I don't I would say for the time being okay maybe that's that's my my tweener um we it's very it's very difficult to uh do something in such a compressed timeline that has such a high stakes uhuh component to it and uh you know if anything um we don't like producing um Corrections in our files we we we we we actually really value um you know our private previews for that for that exact reason so uh for example you will not see in the current um 2024 data set for growth the extended information about
073English Learners because we did find a a an error in our calculations and we were not able to get that in time over to Katherine's folks to process it so we will actually be updating the information for 20124 in the future to include those additional disaggregated information for our English only students are rfps and then um the uh elps gotcha okay and then a couple other just make sure I'm understanding on the dashboard currently is it only at the district level that we can find at the school level as well so if you um if you do yeah so you would need to go into um the assessment results yeah just few more details so it's okay and you'll see that um on The View more details because the board hasn't decided how this arrives
074right it's there for informational purposes but you haven't attached value to it so that was um our best thinking it didn't it didn't rise to the level that science does and having a tile because you actually adopted things around I mean like we have information around science and for for growth we haven't we haven't quite achieved that yep that makes sense great thank you and then oh wait I had one more question is it on oh individual student um I think I heard you say that in the future that data will be um not individual student we will be able to put out a a data file for schools and District okay we've done for everything else on the dashboard for the most part yes so we'll we'll keep in current standing again once the
075board's adopted what does this mean yeah and so the clearly the the um the methodology for this for this um is relies on individual students which is I think really cool by the way all the different um the way that students are were looking at students who are performing at a similar level the year before I love that um and at the school level the that information will not come to them that how individual students did compared to other students I just want to make sure I understand absolutely absolutely no that is that is accurate so we do um again while schools and and parents do not receive individual growth scores we do have the student score reports that is the mechanism to inform a parent and I know you're going to hear more about
076that um in future meetings but that that is the mechanism to to help parents as far as schools go accountability is not about individual students accountability is about like the whole purpose of what we're talking about is how schools and districts are supporting our students so we get this question often in the college career indicator how who got who got prepared it's not about individual students it's about what supports did the district and the schools provide to to improve um student performance and you know all all students are hopefully rising up to be prepared thank you I think that that's such an important distinction and um really great explanation and I can imagine that as we move forward we all and at every other level are going to be asked that question again and again
077and so having such a clear and um value driven answer I think would really be helpful absolutely and just one other thing that I I did not mention is that there is actually a Prohibition in state law to use these scores to evaluate teachers and so we are very uh keep that in the back of our mind the weaponization of data which we see um in other places in our in our government unfortunately these days and so I'm just uh you know I just want to say that out loud that we actually have Education Code that is in place it has been placed for a very long time because of um concerns around how assessment data could potentially be used inappropriately thank you so much it's going to be challenging to keep our questions to
078clarification and and discussion so just to keep that in mind I have a couple of clarification questions okay you could go first uh vice president Glover Woods thank you and thank you Cindy uh for the presentation and also our partner from etss just to clarify and it's on this on the slide but I want to clarify um just for myself as well because I know some of the concern has been like how do we find this growth level uh information and I know I was also searching in various places so again when we get to the place of publishing the 2020 dashboard and the decisions that the Board needs to make are made then um we'll be able to determine where this data lies on the dashboard again thinking about accessibility and how many clicks
079it gets uh it takes to get to that and also uh something that I know has been brought up as well which is that data file that that at that time will also be accessible so while it is not accessible now um we're anticipating that when that 2025 dashboard is published those items will be accessible and again perhaps a little easier to get to depending on what the board decides absolutely absolutely so than it in in your English language arts or math or if it stands alone like we see science and if it says for informational purposes we you have seen us being able to um uh you know navigate and continuously improve on the the the user interface of the dashboard and so it is absolutely our intent to to achieve that thank you
080Cindy other yes member yes Jamari thank you thank you Cindy for for your report um I D just had a question um particular to the growth data it's currently inclusive of grades four growth in grades four through eight and that's because you have contiguous annual assessment grade three is the Baseline assessment that's used to determine growth between grade three and grade four uh it are would there be two questions would there be plans to incorporate grade 11 three years from now using cohort data from grade eight in comparison to where the kids are three years later U I know that's complex for a number of reasons um and then the second question well I'll I'll start there and I have one more question um currently there currently uh there aren't plans to um include grade
08111 U we could talk about what that would look like um I think where the if it's on a different scale than the three through eight then that could maybe uh cause some issues if you're thinking about a school that say has grade six through 12 right because then some of the grade level growth scores will be based on a defense scale um so there's definitely conversations to be had around what what we could do there that we have that does feel like it's going into the discussion area a yes no and then um the other yes [Music] no is Does it include uh our students who take I read some of the notes that said it does not include students who are taking the alternative assessments currently and so it does not okay I'll
082save that for discussion yeah I know we all all have like lists and lists um I I have a clarification question and if anybody else does please just uh let me know could you go back to slide um which notes I think this may be a semantic thing but it says that a student who has a growth score in the prior year but the growth score would be have to be based on that year and the year before so they actually need to have had three years of testing data but then we wouldn't have a growth score till grade five okay yeah sorry it's a little confusing with the test scores versus yeah I think it might mean test score there is that right uh no so um the student we're saying like a student
083doesn't need to have a score a grow score in the prior year to be included if they happen to have one they'll be part of it but there it's not necessary so uh if they happen to got you so if they have a growth score in the current year they're in there or the prior year or or or yeah so current or prior or both we will have grow scores for four five six seven eight yes that that's helpful um and um I think all of my other questions are going to be discussion questions any other clarification questions at this point all right and so hold all of the things you've learned in your mind do not lose them we're going to shift gears now to the science uh indicator and we're going to have
084clarification questions on that public comment on that and then we'll come back to discuss all of it I know that's hard is not a good example of chunking I'm G to turn this portion of conversation over to my colleague Kimberly mhk um who has been holding this as well as um the team uh who's probably watching upstairs and maybe in the audience but um this has been a echoing effort um this has been a a coordinated effort uh through the department but also just want to acknowledge uh what a tremendous uh tremendous outpour we' have had from the public on this right so growth has gotten a little bit of shadowing this this meaning um but uh the public comment has arrived for Science and I will acknowledge that not everybody's on the same page
085and so you're going to hear um some of the things that we've been working on and we've been working on directly with um our assess our accountability leasons and and very grateful for that uh that guidance that we've had um especially over the last couple of months so without further Ado Kim we'll take it from here thank you so much good morning state board president Linda darling Hammond um Chief Deputy Robertson thank you so much um I am setting my timer because I know we've got some time to go through so we're going to try our best to get through science I'm going to look to see if we're on par if people are understanding if not I will stop and explain a little bit more but we're gonna try this in 20 minutes and
086see what we can do um I am so excited um I began my career as a seventh grade math and science teacher down at Los Angeles Academy Middle School in Los Angeles Unified um many years ago um but I'm so excited to see science fully coming on the dashboard um and honestly taking place right next to English language arts and math because I know um as a math science teacher split with between those subjects in um Middle School there was a lot of pressure way back in the day to just keep teaching math throughout that giant block session just keep going on the math and if you get to science good job maybe one day a week good job and when I developed full science units right my colleagues and teachers were like whoa you
087you actually get a full unit of Science in I said I love science my students love science that's what I want to do and teach right um and it was challenging right it is challenging especially when things get slashed like that English language arts wasn't slashed um but Math and Science were so I'm so excited to see um this come to place with your decisions today um and through July um and moving things forward and have um been truly um the opportunities we've had to connect with the science Community around the state of California has been a real honor to be able to have those Communications directly with folks in the field so we're excited to get through the action today um as you can see as Cindy put forward um we have action today
088in March that sets you up with the adoption of the science cut scores for status change and your color scheme that will allow us to then in May review options to incorporate SC the science indicator into l cff eligibility for the 2025 dashboard through that discussion we can then take that forward to the California practitioners Advisory Group meeting in June and come back in July for the final decision as to whether or not the board would like to incorporate it into that eligibility criteria so that is the steps necessary for us to move forward on this this year today specifically we are going to cover the approval of the status cut points the change cut points and I'll walk through all of those and the differences as well as that color scheme um and all
089of these actions today absent anything else that we move forward with provides science with the opportunity to have a brand new full color on the 2025 dashboard that's what the action today provides so goodbye teal I really liked it maybe another indicator comes through and gets us some teal again but we are able to be able to show that how relative to other State uh schools and districts in the state schools and districts and student groups are performing with that color um present for all leas um schools and student groups across the state now how we set cut scores for the science indicator um is we we have set up this um timetable and bringing this to you is because we have a piles of data that we have to look at specifically we have
090three full years of science um data for performance from 2021 22 22 23 and the latest iteration testing of 2023 24 so I'm going to walk through a bunch of tables you all have those as reference I will walk them through and when we go back to clarifying questions and other things if you need some um additional uh you know clarification we can do that um these are simply the cast scale score ranges I there we have done nothing with this this is just grabbed from the CP website and show to you but this is how um student scores are U presented for both standards level one to uh three and four um and how they break down for those grade levels and if you can look at the lowest level uh for grade 5
091150 and then look at the highest level for grade five the top of the performance for level four 250 you can see that is a 100 scale score Point range and that is repeated across grade 8 and grades 10 through 12 for the high school test and then you have the breakdowns and some are even and and some are not they're not equally distributed across all the grade levels that is the magic and mystery of um settings cut scores which I luckily don't have to do anything with in um accountability but our assessment folks can explain those and walk those through if there's any questions there as for the CAA for science because they are happily included in all of our results I want to make sure that's clear um they also have a similar
092scale score range right from 500 at the lowest level in grade 5 to 599 in level three um however they don't have four cut scores right they only have three and so for California alternative assessments what we utilize is we use the um uh we use a one cut score point and we'll show you that um as we walk through the cut scores um to go through so anyone scoring at level one level two level three receives one transformed score that goes back to the cast scale score ranges so I'll walk you through that as well last July you decided that you would adopt distance from standard as the methodology for measuring science um performance on the dashboard and specifically in the science indicator you evaluated the difference between percent proficient right moving forward with
093um showing results that way or distance from standard um and we heard very loudly that the there was a lot of importance put into to each of the points and the point value um and that differential um on the uh um as a dis I would say a discret um difference versus percent proficient which is just getting every everyone over the line um so we went ahead and transformed that scale score range points that you saw into distance from standard points so this is now if we look at distance room standard how students would score on the dashboard and would be averaged up so now we see instead of um big whole round 100 numbers we see a negative score in grade uh five a low score of -64 to a high score of 36
094with zero representative of the lowest obtainable scale score for level three right at at standard um and you can see across how that differ differs across the grade levels and for our CA conversion here you see that students receive again that lowest that score for that band So for level one any students that scored in level one would receive a negative 36 averaged into their school or District or student group average level two would get a negative one um and level three would get a 16 that's how it corresponds across so that's how we integrate those California alternative assessment scores into distance from standard now following the adoption of distance from standard in July um we've received a lot of feedback back around the challenges to communicate basic our academic English language arts indicator as
095well as our academic math indicator and science seeing distance from standard appear on both of those baseball cards um and in the literature that we've provided um most promising because the scale for English language arts and math is um different for every grade however that range is 467 points to 617 points it's a very large range so we're seeing distances from standard in some instances right from schools at you know in the negative hundreds or in the positive hundreds right we're seeing scores that walk through um and have a very different range than science does from 74 64 to positive 36 so that was a challenge that we had and we did Express these uh the challenges that we had through our board item in July um specifically because the tech technical Design Group had
096raised those to us um in our discussions and working through specifically around the clustering that was happening because there wasn't a broad range of scores um and additionally there was just uh you know um some worry from their point uh from their point of view that we were using the same unit but it wasn't the same unit from English language arts of math to science right a distance from standard wasn't the same thing it was the same concept but it wasn't the same measurement um and so uh you know seeing them next to each other might cause some confusion so what we did for the 2024 dashboard as you know because you've I'm sure you've scrolled all the way down the page is we did our best in this first iteration of release of data
097to see to test this out and see what we could do so we put the science indicator far away from the English language arts and math indicator at the very bottom of the dashboard um on the front page so that there would be direct confusion we gave it obviously it had a teal color so it was a little different um but we tried our best in our flyers and other materials to be able to um share this with the field however um in the feedback we've received and in conversations moving forward um there Still Remains a lot of confusion around this um and a lot of worry coming through from folks who have shared that um they see a uh negative um I I'll say a negative3 and think oh that's not that bad compared
098to a negative 54 on math and actually as we know if the bottom score is a 36 they have -30 that's not the same thing right um and so uh there's a lot of trepidation around moving forward with this so knowing that knowing that we are here to continuously improve um CDE has proposed a solution within um this um item this month in order to provide some clarity and to change the scale um and create something new and different that isn't the same label of distance from standard um and really give science what it is owed is a unique um own measurement for this indicator um so specifically what we've done is we've just transformed the scale now it's not that crazy of a magic trick um it's a seventh grade math trick I guess
099um and really all we're all we've done is moved our point of reference we have not changed the value of anything we've just moved from what we're looking at so previously our point of reference was the lowest scale score of level three we've moved that point of reference now to the lowest scale score of level one that's all we've done so we've just moved it over and now we're counting from the lowest scale score of level one instead of counting for the lowest scale score of level three um and that is all we'll see so when we see these transform scales um I can guarantee you all that we did was add 65 points across that's it from one point value to the next so it's nothing too magical like I said it's just a
100little math trick um but helps sh you know change your point of reference and again provide a brand new metric that doesn't provide the same confusion right um where we were trying to say like is like but it actually wasn't as like as it was before so this is now what um using science points um what the levels look like so in again instead of having a negative value at level one we're looking at uh the lowest value that a school or student group um could obtain is a zero um and then the highest value being 100 so that's how it moves across um and here you can see those scale score equivalent points for um our California alternative assessment as well so that is what science points are and I explain that now because
101I will walk through um with showing you the distributions for both status change um cut scores with both distance from standard as you adopt it and science points if that's how you choose to move forward as well all right so here's the fun let's see how much time we got not enough I got to go faster here we go so you have set cut score points for change you did so with the lb however we have not set cut scorer points for status today so we are all going to engage in it uh this communal activity together for the very first time um and I'm excited for you so I'm going to walk you through how we explained um back in 2022 in a memo to you about how status cut scores have been set
102in the past so status represents the most recent um achievement of a school an activity at a school so it's house uh schools districts and student groups did in the current year um and so to set cut scores for status what we do is we look at the performance and the distribution of performance for all eleas that is all districts across the state inclusive of all charter schools so that is what the list of performance that you're looking at because lcff is based on Lea performance so therefore that is the distribution that we utilize you have to set four cut points those four cut points will allow us to set at five status levels from very high high medium low to very low and the very first cut score that has been traditionally set is
103that of very low the very low cut score OB um tries to obtain 5 to 10% of the distribution this is essentially the level at which our system of support right is supposed to come in right this is the lowest um status level where we would see huh if you're in that bottom band of our 5x5 this is where the most Reds are right for any um on any of our indicators so this is the place where we would say that performance is um in need of support the next cut score point that we set is high and traditionally for all of our indicators that have gone through and been adopted and Incorporated intoa state plan this high High Mark that is actually what we put into our Sate plan to move forward with um
104and we have to identify that within our plan as our goal for the state um and where we expect all of our schools to achieve since we are not incorporating this in the S estate plan Peri your action in January um this is still a reference point however in case at any point you do want to move forward um and or the next use want to move forward um in incorporating this um in the future into our federal plan the remaining cut scores are set around there um and moved forward um so to see where the distributions um fall and lie so it's not an equal distance um this isn't where we just go you know we set it at the fifth percentile we set it at the 20th percentile you know it there's there's
105not um a mathematical calculation around that it really is based on the distribution as he said and again the points that are available to us in this scale score um distribution it's compressed as we talked about before the technical Design Group notice um there's not a lot of points going through and sometimes um things are easy when um the distribution is nice and equal um but sometimes setting the cut scores is a little bit more difficult based on how um they Ally in the distribution so tables seven and eight provide the distance from standard distributions for the past three years of status um for all leas and um the first table table seven shows the scores without a participation rate incorporated into it so that 95% participation rate that you adopted in July as well
106these are not inclusive so here you can see the fifth percentile um performance in the most recent year isga - 26 um for distance room standard um with the 95th percentile the top 5% of leas scoring above 3.6 uh distance from standard points and you can see that that varies a little bit um it's a um uh higher achieving distribution than the prior years but you can see overall there's a pretty similar distribution of scores um for the past three years when we get to incorporating that science that that uh participation rate penalty the scores drop a little and we've talked about that before because science has not um does not presently see the same participation rates as our other assessments but we think this year that might change um because of this so um
107we're excited to see that moving forward but you can also see I think that's the great part of this is um from 2021-22 to the current year how participation rate has improved because you can see the distributions um changing over time so um that's what this looks like for um distance from standard if we want to look at it in science points those are tables nine and 10 so magical math transformation um you have from science points for the fifth percentile at 39 science points um up to the 95th percentile of 68.6 science points um and then when we go to um seeing the participation rate Incorporated you can see that drops just slightly by a few science points so we have a distribution from 36.4 all the way to 68.2 looking at those distributions
108um CDE proposed the following cut scores for the board to consider as a starting point and these are obviously up to the decision today so the um status level a very low would be um for schools districts and student groups scoring 34.9 science points or fewer low would be 35 to 44.9 medium 45 to 54.9 high from 55 to 64.9 and very high of 65 science points or more change cut scores you guys are pros at this then we're just looking simply at the difference between the current year and the prior year um and where we look at for science cut score points again is um how to set which um what we set the lowest cut Score first again so we look at which is the lowest achievable cut point for decreased significantly um
109again so that would be where we are looking for providing support for our leas and um combination with the status that they've achieved um and again we're looking to for this to be representative of the bottom 5 to 10% of Lea distribution and then the remaining cut points we do our best to try and make it symmetrical across um the distribution that's not always possible but we try our best to make it a little bit easier for leas to understand what exactly is you know decrease decline significantly or increase significantly so for Tables 13 and 14 you can see and this is the best point about points there's not a different scale we don't have to do this for science points and distance from standard they're still just points so we can only uh need
110to look in reference at one so without the participation rate penalty we see a uh range of scores from negative 5.9 um points so a decrease in 5.9 points year-over-year to an increase of points of 6.4 points year-over-year at or 95th percentile for the most recent year and then when we incorporate that participation rate penalty it widens a little bit so we have -6.7 um for our bottom fifth percentile and our highest fifth percentile we have 7.8 points therefore the CDE recommended and provided these um uh suggestions for cut scores of declined significantly of declining by 5.1 points or more declined being between two and five points uh maintaining declined or increase by 1.9 points or fewer increased 2 to 4.9 and increased significantly of five points or more now the during your July decision
111you made it really clear that you wanted to align science with Ela and math in as many ways as possible again to alleviate confusion in the field we know it's Unique but we wanted to make sure if there were alignments we could make them um and so one of the questions we brought to our technical Design Group um most recently was about should we set different expectations per for performance on our K8 so grades five and 8 tests versus our high school because in our academic indicator standards we do we set different expectations for those two because they um the their results on the assessments performed very differently um however in examining the performance and the distributions um that you just saw um they did not observe Market differences between those grade performances for elementary
112five and eight and grade 11 and or between 58 and 11 so therefore they do not recommend providing different sets of cut scores for our different School types or District types um and just to be very clear I think I made it before um the technical Design Group did not set any of these cut scores um our state board liaison requested that CDE provide um some Exemplar um Baseline cut scores for them to review and that is what we did but our technical Design Group um provided technical advice like this to say how many sets of cut scores should we provide but they did not assist us in the setting of those cut scores that you see before you so therefore you have one single set of cut scores recommended for both status and change
113your last decision for the day on science regard is I don't know maybe the most fun one um it involves rainbows and it's setting the color scheme for the 5x5 and and previously you also did this with the lp so we have presently adopted two generic um uh color schemes for our 5x5 the first is the traditional color scheme and this is what started at all with um uh the majority of our indicators and this provides um that equal distance performance for red and blue with four opportunities for red um and five or four for blue in that uh parallel distribution um and here you can see that there are a few more oranges than green and then yellow um throughout the entire um across the diagonal inclusive of low and increased significantly now in
1142017 we were able or 2018 rather we were able to adopt some additional color schemes specifically for the ELA and math indicators and that were those were the balanced color schemes these color schemes came into play in order to balance out the um achievement of schools and districts um and really walk through for our academic indicators to get rid of as Katherine talked about bouncing right um so year-over-year change that um really bounce folks from color to color that we saw between 2017 and 2018 and so this 5x5 only provides two colors per row that is the key of the and that's why it is called the balance color scheme um however the State Board today is able to adopt any color traditional color scheme that they'd want if they want the traditional color scheme
115with a change you can do that if you'd like the B B color scheme with a change to any of those boxes you're welcome to do so um these are just the only examples you know that have been set currently but you are welcome today for science to create whatever you would like um and move forward with that so with those three decisions today before you this will allow a color to be on the 2025 dashboard for schools districts and student groups I will go through the very last slide and then we can do clarifying questions um for our educational um Outreach activities I feel like this is going to be um fun because we're going to come back to you every month every two months and tell you what we've been doing um but
116between December 16th um 2024 and February 19th 2025 um we've engaged into policy work groups um one in-person meeting and 10 virtual meetings so far um with a total of around 1500 participants and we um continue to engage um with folks daily and try our best to remember all of the times that we engage so we can tell you about them um at the next meeting so with that I will pause for clarifying questions all right I know it's a lot but are there clarifying questions at this point yeah and you know we are going to go from this right to public comment so uh what we'll do is go ahead and put the public comment slide up so people can start queuing up and then I'll go to clarifying questions um those wishing to
117call in for public comment could call the phone number and use the participant access code shown on this slide uh and then while we're waiting for um members to queue up we'll uh go ahead and take some comments from our liaison and then clarifying questions then go to public comment and then we'll come back and discuss you got that vice president clever Woods take it away going clarify questions yeah and you can also offer any comments you want all of this all right thank you thank you thank we should have divided this into two items and next time I promise you we'll try to do that with all this accountability work all right so clarifying questions qu two first clarifying question when we are making the determination on Cut points for status Med and change
118those points are the science points you are welcome to choose whether previously you've adopted distance from standard so if you would like to adopt a point value for status based on science points that would need to we would like science points to be these okay so we have suggested that okay if you would like to adopt distance from standard science points you're welcome to do so but we have provided opportunity options in the item for for so the chart that we looked at those numbers are science points science points those are changes in science points changes in science points okay those are from year to year whether people went up or down the one that she just quickly went past so that was that was the distribution and so change is all in is doesn't
119matter if that's distance from standard or science points right that happen this happens to be changes in science that chart right there that's based on science points that's correct okay so here's my second clarifying question is it trying to think how to best work this um is it possible to determine what the scale score is based on the science points because if I'm understanding the process that we used that was used to get to science points it was well we started with the scale score and then looked at the distance from standard based on what the board decided and then a calculation was applied um to be able to get to science points so now we have still have a scale we still have the scale scale is from zero to 100 and these are
120scale points scale scores okay that that and that was just that was the point I was trying to clarify for myself whether we go into science points or not which I know will be part of the discussion that if you want it to in a sense walk backwards to a scale score it is a scale score it is a scale score with a calculation applied to make it a little clear they're all the same scale scores and it's just a question of whether you want to start at zero and have a scale or whether you want to start at a different number and have a scale and so this would simply give us a scale that starts at zero and has 100 points and so the clarification so when I spoke about that reference point
121so the reference point for distance from standard is the lowest value on this chart of level three so the reference point we create Zero from on this scale right is we transform all of our scale score points right we're not looking at 400s and everything else so here zero 214 becomes zero 515 becomes zero 615 become zero we're going to change that reference point and now we're going to go 150 now become zero 350 become zero and 550 become zero so in any of our measurements we're we are transforming a scale score we're either just it's just which reference point are we utilizing and this is I think a very important and useful move to make the scale scores more understandable to everyone because these you know when when when I was on the um
122group that started smarter balanced assessments which we had were adoped in California this was before I got to California and um the scale was created in fact in a way that is was intended to make it a little more confusing for people to know I mean the scale is like thousands of points but you can create any kind of scale so this is a much more simple straightforward science Point skill so I just want to in my comments I just want to say yay for the science points uh it's very clear it's you know it's intuitive it's the same distance between every Point as we've always had but it is understandable and so I really really appreciate that um and this is the point at which we would each offer our comments so I'm going
123to do that and then go back to you if you want to offer some more and then we're going to ask for clarifying questions then we're going to go to public comment then we're can come back for discussion so that is the uh that's the way it works um so I just want to say I'm I'm very happy uh just to see the growth model because we're going to combine these conversations now uh you know it has been a long time coming it is also based on scale scores which is a really good thing it's much more precise than the four cut points that we often talk about um I do want to just note that um the the growth model will help us understand how students are growing within the assessment we have we
124cannot talk about grade level changes people will want to do that like is this growth above a grade level or below grade level or something because that's the way testing used to happen and we often had that language before No Child Left Behind and the Federal Law requires that all of our state tests used for accountability only measure such only measure grade level standards they do not measure above the grade level they do not measure below the grade level that does put a barrier on um measuring kids growth across grade levels because there are students who you know if we were using tests that had a longer range you know would show up at different points in the range so it does make it puts limitations on measuring growth you know students who are you
125know potentially working at on standards below grade level aren't getting those standards measured students who might be you know demonstrating standards above grd aren't getting those standards measured so we just we have this constrained range uh it does not tell us anything about below or above grade level it tells us something about what's happening within grade level standards and that will be very I think helpful but we also need to understand that there is a limitation on what we can do with the test that we currently have given the federal law as it currently exists um and I'm mentioning that because we've had this we're going to have another conversation today uh about the way in which we offer descriptors on our um our current assessments and quite often people want to talk about above
126or below grade level they do not measure grade level above or below grade level they measure within the grade level you know how much students can um apply the standards and how comp with what complexity and with what sophistication so um I'm happy to see it and we just want to start us off understanding what it does and does not tell us um happy also to see the science uh indicator moving along uh and really appreciate the science points thank you very much uh because I think that they are the they are the same scale they are the same points but they're understandable because of the way they're displayed and they will not be as easily confusing wi with the different scale that is used for ELA and math but they're the same scale we've
127always been using for science um we did uh discuss uh taking a pause um last meeting uh as to how to consider uh what information we we put on the dashboard uh having enough time to see how the evidence comes out uh what should be used uh for accountability uh and what should be used for information and also uh what kind of accountability is going to be useful for school Improvement so I think I appreciate that we're getting an opportunity to look at these questions in a purposeful and orderly manner and not making an assumption that uh if we put something on the dashboard it has to be used in the way that way back when the federal law said that we had to do accountability uh that is all going to change too this
128is going to be an era of federal change it's going to be an era of of State change and we want to be very thoughtful and very purposeful about what we think will help our schools in California continue to improve so just to thank the team for giving us the opportunity to look at these decisions uh across meetings in an orderly way that's going to be very helpful to us uh with that um I'm going to see if there's any um see if you want to make some comments then we'll go to any clarifying questions okay this is a complicated item these are really important decisions that we're taking um uh a lot of information in uh other clarify questions and of course we will come back for discussion yes um member uh Lewis and
129then member Oaken I just have a question just for my understanding the correlation between slide 6 I'm sorry 65 and 66 where it it gives the science points without the particip participation rate and with the participation rate and how does that impact slide 67 uh let's see which title uh the table 11 is the suggested status cut scores and and the two slides prior to that I just want to understand how they correlate with each other okay so table okay table nine is um all so is the performance right of all alleg across and this does not include the participation rate Incorporated so that there's no penalty included um for um so uh the the way that the 95% participation penalty works is for every um uh for all of the students that are needed
130to get to 95% we have to impute a lowest obtainable scale score in there so we for these we would impute a zero and then that average so essentially we add zeros to the numerator and then we add those students to the denominator so nine is simply the um overall performance absent a participation rate penalty 10 incorporates that we add that that process and 11 is our suggested cut scores based on looking at 10 okay so we provided though we wanted to make sure that you saw what whole performance is as well as incorporation of the participation rate penalty because it is a little bit different right um and if folks were looking either either of those so um and setting the cut scores okay thank you for that I didn't know if it was
131some type of um averaging or correlation between nine and 10 that you came up with the no yeah it's just we using 10 um so we we do and and again the performances looked at across all of those like I said um to walk through um and um and where to set cut scores and when we previously delayed the penalty for science that was for the 24 and not the so it comes into play with the 25 with that's correct yeah so um uh districts had the opportunity and schools had the opportunity to see their um their performance this year but they saw table nine right essentially in distance from standard points um this year they would see reflected of table 10 outcomes um and but they were I just want to make sure and
132clear we do have a participation rate report in our additional reports so they are all aware of what last year's participation rate was so they can assist them this year thank you any other clarification questions rememberin do you mind um stating for the balance color scheme um what we're currently using that for we use this for English language arts and um mathematic indicators and so in 2018 um after uh there's a little a little known fact that there was a spring 2017 dashboard um it's it it no longer exists on the internet so you wouldn't know that um but we had a test dashboard in Spring of 2017 and then we released a fall 2017 as the very first dashboard um and then in 2018 we came back so essentially with our second official one
133um and our third unofficial uh color scheme but what we were seeing across um between 2017 2018 was a little bit of a bounce and change for f with colors and so in the traditional color scheme if you look at the um Row for status High there are four colors in that row and we saw people bounce between orange and blue and without changing status so we expect colors to change if you change status right moving up or down and and you could have if we look across diagonals right you can go from Orange to Green if you move up a status and over right and maintain so there there are obviously options for that but we weren't looking and really thinking about status high as a place where there would be see a lot
134of movement and it was happening in our Smalls right our very small schools um and districts as well as um for in our academic indicator because of the giant range for part for distance from standard and the points so we came back in 2018 and the stateboard approved um the options of the balance color scheme which is proposed by our tdg to only provide two colors per row as well as the 3x5 that we Implement for all of our end sizes below 150 on the dashboard so academic Ela and math receive the balance color scheme and then all of our other indicators if you have under 150 receive the 3x5 which takes off those um tail ends have declin significantly and increase significantly um so that's available to them so if you were to adopt
135the balance color scheme for science science would join its academic friends um with the same color with the same 5 by5 thank you that that was that last sentence was what I was just gonna verify I understood correctly yeah thank you and then um my other clarifying question is about the recommendation um do back to the idea of the changing the going to science points do we need to say anything about that in the recommendation if you adopt science points right it would be so you're either going to be adopting a a a set of cut scores that are science points or again you would you could change them to distance from standard because yeah so if you adopt science points then we would we' take that forward great okay thank you any other clarifying
136questions seeing none we are now going to go to public comment and thank you so much for all of the presentations um and is there any public comment in the room yes we have five people signed up as I call your name please line up at the microphone Sasha Horwitz Eric primac Lindsay toritori Diana Vu and Deborah Godfrey good morning Sasha Horwitz with Los Angeles Unified school district is your microphone on and close to your mouth close to the mouth is the question can you hear me now yeah that's a little better thank you all right so Sasha Horwitz Los Angeles Unified School District uh La USD Champions accountability and understands time should be provided to leas Across the state to understand the impact and the incorporation of student level growth data and science on
137school accountability as well as time provided to communicate the changes with educational Partners leas across the state only received student level growth data in January 2025 Los Angeles Unified supports the exploration of implementing student level growth data and science as added accountability measures beginning with the 2627 school year using the 26 dashboard thereby allowing leas a year to better understand the metrics receive technical guidance from the state and communicate the accountability structure to schools and throughout our learning community in the service of students thank you Eric prac with the charter schools Development Center um we oppose the inclusion of the science data on the dashboard and as part of the colored grids we do think the grids currently have a huge a couple of huge problems first they miss about more than half the grades
138second they don't have any growth data and it's really a deceptive thing for the field uh we would urge you to hold off on incorporating the science data until such time as you've addressed the those larger issues the dashboard frankly is kind of going down the same route that the API did it has lots of problems folks aren't fixing them time is ticking and if the dashboard itself had a dashboard the needle would be rapidly dropping from Orange down into the Red Zone and we would urge you to amend your work plan to accelerate the incorporation of some form of growth data and it uh so that we get out of this track thank you good morning Lindsay tornator on behalf of the California county superintendents we want to start with a warm welcome and
139congratulations to Chief Deputy Roberson you were such a leader while you were at Alam and CCE we're really looking forward to working with you in this role and good morning president darling Hammond vice president Glover Woods members of the board um we would like to lift up our Coalition letter we sent in partnership with other Statewide agencies and county offices in it we urged the board to move forward with option four for the student level growth model um in addition to not being practicable we do think we do not we also think options one two and three excuse me we do not think options one two and three are Equitable for example the growth model data are not inclusive of any students who take the California alternative assessment or any students in grades three or
14011 therefore we feel using the growth model data for any accountability purposes would yield an inaccurate picture of how our students especially those with disabilities are performing we are very excited to see science grow up to indicator we fully support CD's recommendations to get us there science is a top priority and we are very excited to uh engage in the discussions about how science will be used in accountability and where it will live in upcoming board discussions thank you good morning Dr darling Hammond and board members Diana Vu on behalf of the association calor School administrators ax appreciates the state's ongoing work in refining the science indicator and believes that that visual consistency will will be needed for ease of interpretation to help further support understanding we also we also believe that more information needs
141to be included on the dashboard such as which students are included in each indicator um with science on the dashboard it may often be compared with Ela or math but students but the students being administered the assessments are not the same in addition there are also continued discussions as there are continued discussions around where the science will live a respect respectfully recommends the board consider making science indicator a local indicator as part of priority 7 access to a broad course of study in regards to the student growth Model A AXA believes that option for additional information on the dashboard with no accountable indications is essential because it provides valuable insights into student progress without misinterpreting the complexities of Stu student growth instead it serves its primary purpose to support educational Improvement thank you after hearing
142the other four speakers I'm certain I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time um my name is Deborah Godfrey and I'm with the uh state of Cal uh the California U State Fair uh briefly I was a scientist with the California energy commission for a number of years and worked on the prop 39 program with the Department of Education that was very successful but briefly what I'd like to let you know is that we do have a um student Showcase in the State Fair competitions and if I'm in the wrong place let me know and I can come back later should I continue I hear and see since we don't know what you're going to say we can't tell you whether you're in the wrong place well considering this is not this is not
143really about science or math test scores um but anyway we do have a Student Competition through the state fair and competitions in the State Fair have a history back to 1854 with the very for first California state fair we have a number of items um entry divisions that students can enter into uh they are painting drawing digital manipulation photography 3D Ceramics sewing quilting wood modeling and a lot of other things as well the entries would be available to be seen at the 17-day uh length of the State Fair the state fair doesn't receive any tax money and we are having a hard time justifying to our my board at the one minute is over excuse me your time is over thank you okay may I leave um some information on the competition you can leave
144it with staff and okay generally just to be helpful if there's General items we do have item 11 so if there's other folks in the situation general public comment I would love to come at item 11 Happ welc thank you I'll I'll be back I'm the bad Penny thank you and we're we're happy that there are science competitions at the state fair and also I see a lot of work throughout the building that could be the type of stuff that could be entered in our competitions all right I think we're going to any callers on the phone okay um there are eight callers in the queue I will open the phone line now um caller with the last four digits 2777 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute I'm
145Alisa slee educator and science trainer in California speaking on behalf of the case membership thank you to the board and CDE for your support and commitment to include science in the dashboard and accountability system science is fundamental to our democracy economy and public health without full accountability science remains sideline we support the current timeline and urge you to follow through science must be fully included in differentiated assistance and the academic indicator to drive real progress in student achievement what gets measured gets prioritized if California treats science as a second class subject districts won't build internal expertise science is an equity issue it opens Pathways to stem careers and access to those careers is deeply unequal and limited for underrepresented students science also provides a powerful context for learning when all students engage in science they
146develop critical thinking problem solving skills and a real world purpose for ELA and math California has set ambassador's goals thank you now it's time to deliver thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 7768 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi Peter Ahern California Association of science Educators we thank the board and CDE for their hard work in supporting highquality Science Education it's especially important at a time when science is under attack Robert Kennedy Jr is the Secretary of Health and Human Services for crying out loud we are excited to see the science 5x5 full color grid but we need to set a higher bar for success the science status cut points should reflect the same expectations as the state has set for math also for
147districts to take science seriously and make the necessary Investments science needs to be fully included in the accountability System including da and as part of the academic indicator we have heard grumblings that counties don't have the capacity to support high quality science if they believe they lack capacity it's because science hasn't been seen as important they haven't develop the capacity but I assure you that the capacity to support science is there in California organization like case California ngss collaborative K12 Alliance California science project Cal mscs amazing County Office science leaders and a strong sense of community and mutual support we need science we are ready for science it's time to do this thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 1162 you are now live please start your public comment you have one
148minute good morning Madame chair Madam Vice chair members of the board and staff my name is Cindy livers I'm calling on behalf of the Riverside County Educational leaders we're part of the education Management Group Coalition letter I'm calling in support of three items one well item two all related to item two uh one cde's recommendation to explore option four adoption of performance standards and continuing to publish growth data as additional information on the dashboard with no accountability implications second cde's recommendation to create a distinct metric for the science indicator we believe this is a step in the right direction and three we look forward to being part of future discussions as the board considers final decisions in the coming months regarding the science indicator and the state accountability system thank you very much for all
149of your work on this and for the ability to provide public comment thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 6415 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi I'm Katie wilker a 20-year Ka science teacher and consultant and I want to thank the board and CDE for their ongoing support for Science Education it is Paramount that we create generations of capable critical thinkers who are environmentally and scientifically [Music] literate and capable of working collaboratively to solve problems adding science to the dashboard will support these efforts requiring accountability and instilling a sense of urgency for our districts to support Science Education as a longtime Middle School teacher I've seen the impact of students who receive minimal Science teaching because testing is only in fifth grade as a
150result Educators Focus primarily on subjects that they're tested on and frequently are under supp supported in receiving the professional development and resources for Effective science programs students coming to Middle School unprepared to think scientifically with little background knowledge and they have heavily lost the innate joy and curiosity that a company is learning about the Nal World adding science to the dashboard and accountability system and ultimately as an academic indicator will'll push the state and districts to support science programs and provide funding for the resources to do labs and create future generations of curious critical thinkers thank you thank you next caller with the last four digits 8256 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi this is Robert man with children now and also representing the California stem darling
151Hammond suggested earlier about the science item it's a lot uh science has been sitting on the accountability Sidelines for a decade don't rush it now don't bring science into the accountability game with so low expectations uh we believe science points is going to be confusing to the public and that's we recommend delaying the standard setting until the May meeting to provide more time for these discussions uh since we had no idea what the proposed state goal of 55 science points meant children now went and found districts that performed at this level turns out that you're proposing to set the goal for the state and the high level at a district that meets that has 35% of its students performing proficient we find these expectations unacceptably Low by comparison uh our students in science do worse
152uh perform worse than they do in math and yet when you look at these proposed performance standards only 28% of leas would score lower very low exence thank you your time is up uh next caller with the last four digits 8674 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute good morning this is RA Murphy public Advocate senior legislative councel and member of the lcfs equity Coalition we appreciated seeing in the February 14th informational memo that the board and the department plan to modify the priority one teacher indicator in the coming months and we stand ready to participate in that process and we'll be sharing mockups with the Department soon we reiterate our recommendations that the indicator's clear teacher metric should be reflected at the school level right alongside other school
153level data from Statewide databases like test scores and absenteeism rates the indicator should also to include at the district level an equity component to identify disparities and access to fully prepared and properly assigned I.E clear teachers between school sites in the same district among the other recommendations mentioned in the equity Coalition letter we highlight here the Coalition requests that the board support amendments to the statutory dashboard timelines in order to fully integrate the growth indicator into the dashboard and the identification of districts in need of differentiated assistance growth scores are the gold standard for determining which districts are or are not continuously improving and should be a core part of California system of support thank you thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 2736 you are now live please start your public
154comment you have one minute hi I'm siie Randall speaking today as a member of the cas Dei committee and director of communications for the UC San Diego science project in my previous role I supported students and teachers at the second largest District in California San Diego unified I saw elementary students excel in ngss theme learning as an intervention to the District's 20-year-old science adoption with the archaic boss materials unfortunately after a six-year ramp up the district never fully adopted Steam and it ended funding for the program last year current science scores are low because districts have not adequately invested in science PD and materials since it's not on the dashboard and not part of the accountability system when science is integrated as a context for ELA and math in elementary school student and teacher engagement
155Rises over my 17 years as an educator I've seen firsthand just how impactful and integrated curriculum based on curiosity joy and creat can have on a child it opens up possibilities they never considered and creates Pathways for a lifelong love of learning all children deserve access to Science Education thank you CD for your work thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 9416 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi this is Morgan picop I'm a professor at USC Ross here and um I've written for a long time about the value of growth data and its inclusion and accountability systems and I had ponet Source last week on this topic and I applaud that the state is finally um calculating a growth metric but I just want
156to say that I really hope that um we move to include growth data as a real meaningful part of accountability system it's fairer it gives more accurate uh more valid representations of the quality of Education children are receiving it's not correlated with student demographics and the ways that the other indicators are and so I hope that um that that move is made over time and then the other thing I would just say is that I'd like to get to the bottom of why ETS is taking so much longer to deliver these kind of data than they can do in other states like Tennessee I mean why can't California be Tennessee and providing growth data in a timely manner it's a little puzzling thanks thank you uh next caller with the last four digits uh 8945
157you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi I'm Suzanne poy speaking as a parent in support of using growth scores in school accountability in my kids District I advocate for practices supportive of neurod Divergent Learners mindsets are resistant because old ways are comfortable growth data can shine light learning rates indicate School Effectiveness so I was taken a back that the district and County associations are advocating to not include learning rates in school accountability A's letter says removing accountability pressures will lead to a more supportive environment M for all students but my experience is the exact opposite accountability for improvement is lacking and Leverage is needed uh regard regarding the timeline either create a new contract with ETS to fit the timeline or seek a legislative tweak but the tail
158shouldn't Wag the Dog thank you for uh board members for your courageous leadership in valuing learning rates thank you uh that concludes public comment for item number two okay uh this is a big item as many people have noted we do need a quick break for folks to just be able to um take a minute and get themselves straight it's 10:41 we'll come back around 10:50 at that point I'm going to ask that we divide our conversation about the two components and then we'll uh move forward uh to um get to the Motions thank you e e e move expeditiously yeah we we'll I'll we'll do our very much uh we are back to discuss this item it has two parts the first part is the growth model uh there is no needed motion on
159the growth model this is just for our um our own edification and any uh questions we want to ask or advice we want to give to the staff and then after that we'll come back to the science uh which does have uh a need for emotion so Cindy is here uh if people want to uh offer thoughts about the growth model um this would be the time to do it yes member esab I know you reviewed other states when you're looking at methodology of calculating the growth model I'm just really curious in when we meet next time if we can look at how these states are utilizing the growth model for accountability purposes because I my understanding in districts with high Mobility rates some states have been using the growth model to weigh he heavier
160because they have more accuracy in those specific areas I'm just I'm just really curious in in how we can apply the growth model in the future looking at how other states are applying and then um I understand the 10-week timeline and if we can reflect on different processes or Improvement on the processes we we hold right now that make maybe option one two two or three viable in the future sure so let me uh start with the first uh point about what other states are doing uh I I would even look back at one of our 26 info memos because I know that we definitely have looked at this over the years it may not have been um updated based on any recent action by states of course A lot has happened since the pandemic
161and some states have actually looked at what we're doing in California to to potentially make changes to their own approach to growth um so it's something we can get to you it may not be for May it may not need to be for for July just because it's not um we have a couple other things that you definitely need to take action on uh but we can definitely get that um to the board in terms of um the 10we timeline let me be clear this is not an ETS issue this is a department um uh constraint and uh it's around data quality so we want to make sure that what we release and we have a more complex model than any other state is accurate these things are being used for things like Charter School
162renewals these things are being used to talk about the performance of a school and a student group and it is not just running um a couple of lines of code this is a very complex process that starts with the Department receiving an assessment file from the contractor and then us applying the metrics around accountability uh and so we will definitely look as we move along this this process you know where we can um reduce that time frame uh but we do have this looming date of October 15th and I can tell you other states don't release a lot of their data in the year that in which the students actually finished the calendar year in which the students actually left that school they wait until February they wait until the spring to release things like
163cohort and so in California we're fortunate that we have this new um this new goal achievable goal I think of getting everything out by October 15th which um is just unprecedented thank you other questions I okay member yosari just following up Cindy on my clarifying questions um is there a plan to include uh students who take the alternate assessment I'm gonna have Kim answer that question call in a friend so as we saw today with the different scales that the California alternate assessment is on there isn't a transformational way to walk through that it would be a um we presently incorporate the ca scores through that simple very simple transformation right of um of providing um that lowest score value right and so anyone that scores within this range receives one score moving forward so
164we don't actually have any way to measure and act because it's a very different scale very different test very different operational properties so there is not presently when we looked at the development of the growth model a way to incorporate those CAA scores into the same growth model so um we we do not have that on our time table at the par the moment that would actually need to be its own growth model for students that are getting those three different achievement levels from year to year we we would not absent very few schools right there would we would not have the capacity to be I mean it would be they would be measured against themselves right um it would not be it would just be within that same test um and so there so
165yeah there's just so few test takers and so you would not really be able to see results um at many entities due to the low numbers we're able to incorporate them right because they're added presently to that overall academic indicator right an inclusive but if they were separated out I don't know how many growth scores you would even see at a at a at an Lea level specifically at an Lea and let alone a school level right um and then about 11th grade and additionally that was look we when um the state board was considering options for inclusion of a growth model um and the um operational properties of the 11th grade test and skipped grades right moving forward and looking back it was decided that we would not pursue a high school level growth
166model okay I just wanted to bring those up because I think those were some concerns of some of the correspondents that I read and also um just being inclusive especially if we're looking at growth data uh for accountability ensuring that some of our most vulnerable students are also included in the model and um and then leading a district sometimes you're thinking about how to use this accountability [Music] system of course we're looking at the big picture you can include your high school Educators but in this case we wouldn't be able to so thank you I i' just like to add a comment to the one that you've uh made and note that we may want to be thinking about um how we can use uh some of this data for information even where it is
167more less potentially appropriate for accountability and so for example in Singapore I know that they actually do use multi-year growth models as information for schools about you know where their students are uh Visa where they were at a earlier point in time it is something we may want to get a look at as as a something to contemplate not as a policy decision right now but as an informational question um there would be no growth data for science for the same reason if we only go gear to gear it is problematic to think of that for accountability because if students have been in other schools it's not fair to hold you know the school accountable for students that they didn't have for most of that time but there's also an informational question I do think
168that many of the things one of the things that has happened in California is we become much more informationally and data oriented as Cindy get a test because there's a continuing you know um set of questions for more and more data and I think sorting out when it's appropriate to use it for different purposes is part of our CH our challenge this year and in the years to come um because uh there is value in having the information but it's not always appropriate for accountability erased earlier just not using data as a flashlight as opposed to a hammer and creating that culture in our system so that it is used in in that way is is important um and now with the Cradle SEC data system I think there's opportunities for informational purposes yeah and
169I just will will add on a couple of points are you did you finish your piece okay so I'm going to add on yours yeah we we need going to need to think in the growth model and elsewhere about some of the conceptual challenges for um accountability as we may you know eventually use some aspects of it for accountability but one one piece of this is um there's a conceptual problem in accountability systems that we've inherited from the federal government generally around the way in which we treat English Learners and now long-term English Learners because students leave that category so for example if we had five students taking you know whether the whatever assessment the science or or another one and they scored a 10 20 30 40 50 their average in a given year
170would be 30 and then that highest scoring student moves out because they're an English learner who's ready to be uh reclassified and the next year if nobody else changed their score their average would be 25 it would look like the average went down it didn't go down nobody went down Somebody went up and got out of the group and so whenever we use that as a classification and it's going to be true on the growth model when kids are leing aing the classification it can look in a district as though they're doing less well the more they reclassify students out of that um out of that category and it it plagues Us in different parts of our accountability system but it will be a particularly problematic element of a of a growth model where we're
171trying to use subgroup accountability so I'm just flagging that now to say that we need to be thinking about these things like we don't want incentives and I hear about this all the time there are incentives in the system to not reclassify students uh and we need to be thinking about those as we're deciding which of these elements can we use for incentivizing school Improvement and better performance for kids and where should we be thinking differently than what we inherited from the federal government in 2002 I mean we've had a 20y year you know um process of kind of adding on to um in what can be for certain purposes a flawed measure um of of growth so I just want to that kinini I know you're aware of these these issues and I just
172want to flag that we want to be able to think about how to use the data in the right way for both accountability and for for improvement um I had a question about the um designation of um of of a label from you know in the typical band to the above typical or below typical Etc right now there's a statistical significance um decision being made about what would uh allow a something to move to say above typical you know the example that you gave on that was basically based on you know whether there was a s sample size sufficient to get to sort of a statistical cicus but I wonder from a policy perspective whether we ought to be considering a way to look at the Practical meaning of the change rather than uh identifying
173the label based on whether the sample size was large enough to actually you know move them in that way yeah no definitely like I um mentioned in the presentation the the labels right now are just um to fill the vacuum you know to fill in the Gap while we're waiting for um guidance from uh the board so it was just a way to use the data to give some sense of how how different do these look from that typical Point sounds good so these are going to be some of the things we'll just need to consider as we you know bring the growth model uh into whatever uh status it is going to have in our system appreciate that I really appreciate the presentation it was extremely uh well described and understandable and helpful as
174we're moving forward are there any other questions or comments about the growth model we do not have a you know um a motion at this point uh member Clawson yes thank you so much for the presentation um and I appreciated all the detail but I had a question about the 10 week uh processing timeline for the data um I'm just wondering in the future can that be Streamlight how does that affect its integration into the dashboard yeah I think that that's what we've described on on those slides and the the four options for being included so uh we we don't have a the feasibility of those first three options because of the um the sure amount of data processing that takes place between beginning with our team and then going over to the ETS team
175so it does impact uh the options for using the growth model okay and then can that be streamlined in the future like how going forward in future years how can the uh growth data be uh that that process be sped up is that possible sure I think that's what um member escabedo just asked um when we started this conversation was the same thing and so uh we'll continue to look for opportunities to streamline it but we also hold uh data quality at a very high standard and we don't want to release data that could potentially be inaccurate um and then you know used um inappropriately I think part of the question there will be whether we if we want it to be used whether it's lagged data as opposed to current year data which was
176the other part of your answer any other comments or questions I think we want to thank the team uh for all of the work on moving us forward on the growth model oh I'm sorry Gabriella oh I I missed you please yeah oh well we're going to science we're plotting growth model so that we can move to science okay okay so now we're gonna uh do and Cindy if you could just remind us of the recommendation thank you you've got it up here okay um so the recommendation that is in the item says uh that the California Department of Education recommends that the State Board adopt status cut score change cut scores and 5x5 color grid for the science indicator when I was listening to the conversation just now that Kim um had presented and
177then there was the feedback um from members of the board I realized that we left out an opportunity for you to adopt the science points and so a friendly recommendation um to to president Darlene Hammond if you want like to um consider that transformation of the scores would be Instead at the very end adding the words based on science points so that is um just a suggestion this was an oversight by by myself and um it you know things are moving very quickly with this um although it's hard to say they're moving very quickly when we started on this work back in 2018 and we've been talking about science now for um several meetings uh over the last couple years so it's uh it just it's an oversight of something that happened more recently that's
178very helpful thank you and it might be useful if you can easily find it to show again option one and option two that were in the item for the option you're talking option one is the traditional color scheme again with the you can see the distribution we start on the the bottom row that that we see Reds across the way and then we see a red in a low status and then the balance color scheme which Kim mentioned was what we use for academic indicator where we see the Reds across the bottom only okay so I think we're now clear on what we're going to be deliberating about the time for us to have discussion uh about the um uh about this about this um part of the item member Lewis you look like you
179want to ask a question okay still we can still ask a clarifying question regarding you can ask any kind of question you know you can have any kind of comment just go wild we're now in that part of the meeting okay so um if we uh base our adoption of the cut scores and the change scores based on the science points and we get to the adoption of the 5x5 color grid since the and the you said English language arts and math use the balanced color grid um is there anything consideration for us considering the the fact that Ela and math uses the uh balanced and they're based on distance from standard and if we adopt the science points is there one of those color schemes that lends itself better to science than the other
180does that make sense I think it I think it makes sense and really this is this is a policy decision for you all on the technical side they're both technically sound um but if again we provide there's been such an interest in having uh whatever is done on English language arts and math to be replicated with science so that is why we're you know if if you were leaning towards anything it would that would reflect in you option two would be the option that you would want to select and if you could just put those up again maybe I could just uh help us think about so in this one what this is the option to the balance color scheme and as I think someone mentioned in the conversation if you are H have very
181high scores this ensures that your colors don't go if you even if you decline but you still have the very highest level it ensures that your colors don't go below green but it also ensures that if you're very low um and even if you increase significantly your colors remain orange so it's basically adopting two colors within every row rather than three colors so it's a policy decision about about what we're trying to signal with um uh the changes that may go on at the local level and if you could go back to option one I could just point out so an option one uh if uh a very high scoring District uh or School declin significantly then they're they go down to a yellow and that upper leftand corner if a very low scoring district
182has a significant increase they go up to a yellow in the um bottom right hand Corners so those are the kind of each of the rows has like three different colors that are uh applicable at any given performance level so that that's the policy distinction you're making when you look at those okay yeah and the the the scale scores will don't don't affect that anyway any other questions just U I'm sorry I did leave off something for the recommendation um probably you would like like to add in which option or if you want to do the balanced or the traditional color scheme because we didn't have a recommendation for you we left that to you to you to decide so I think we should take two motions one on which option and then the second
183on the overall recommendation of adopting the or maybe I don't know in which order we do them we could vote on this first and then talk talk about which option we want to have Incorporated remember y Shari a question can you clarify um what was shared in the correspondence and public comment about 35% proficient equates high is that because we're our dashboard's based on a norm on a on a so is my impression from um the correspondents and the um public comment that which one on hello maybe okay people say I talk too loud all the time so I apologize um uh so it's my impression that what they did was they looked for a school or District that was scoring those the scoring of of I believe they said 55 science points they looked
184through the file found a school that did that and then found what their percent proficient was so it it's not a there's no um transformation or um looking across that that is the average performance is that that's what they did they looked for a a case study and provided that evidence to you through their correspondence it doesn't change the fact that a school could score 35% for fici yes very much so I mean the because the distance from standard again so distance from standard Andor science points are not equivalent there isn't an there is an imag like we're not hiding a formula of equivalence um so yeah so um and that is also the same for our distance from standard presently right so an average to say that um you know a school or District
185that has let's just say um an average of one distance from standard above like one you know positive distance from standard I can't reflect back to you what their percent proficient is right that's not a a direct correlation or causation again they they just found a case study and shared that with you I do want to move expediently um but just because I also want to move thoughtfully I just want to ask the question uh on slide 46 since we are talking about science for four months in a row uh what happens if we push a decision from today until next month if we if you do not make this decision at this meeting and you push it off two two months until May right two months until May I guess I would change the
186question what do you hope to learn in the next two months because I think we've done an exhaustive work to get to you to a point where you can make a decision today and I don't know what is left to do on the technical side maybe it's on the policy side but on the technical side we're done like I I unless you've got other things that we've left out right like I think we're done like right so I just I want to make sure that like we have this this Con this honest conversation of what are you gaining um for me and if it's to bring the policy um uh you know Advocates along we can we can do that as well but um on the technical pieces like get I'm just at a loss
187as to like can I also add what the uh implication would be which is means yeah it would it would not get we would not get it to the dashboard if we don't move on this today that's that's what I wanted to hear thank you um and I do think you know from spending 30 years explaining these types of scores to families and you know students and board members um even our our conversation here shows how complex it is to understand what these scores mean and we're going to come to it in another item later today around the achievement level descriptors uh and so it's just incumbent upon us I asked the question because I think it's incumbent upon us to make these decisions thoughtfully and in a way that we all feel comfortable being
188able to explain it publicly uh to bring everybody along right with us so thank you thank you um so any other further questions if not I'm going to entertain um two motions one about the uh General recommendation that is here which we're going to get back to in just a moment and um one about the um uh thank you and then one about which option we want which color grid option we'll have those two different decisions that we need to make Sharon you look confused I just wanted to I want to make sure I understand all the decisions we're making so one is whether we are going to move to um adopt the the recommendation to of science points as our metric that's one that's full that would be U Cindy's um amendment is would
189be to incorporate that into this item okay so then this and we would be adopting the proposed in the item the proposed status cut scores change cut scores and color grid before either before or after doing that we have to identify which color grid okay that's so that that's the option part separate separate decision for us to make between option one option two or you know if we were to get creative but I would not recommend us to get too creative so the cut scores and the change cut scores that's one decision and then the other is which color grid we want right wait okay you good I got it thank you I had it all written in my notes say I had it all in one uh one motion but that's to it's a
190lot it's a lot so we're going to take it as two motions um and I would recommend that we uh take this motion first since it's right before us and then come back around and clarify by voting which of the two color yeah which of the color grids we want to uh be attended to so vice president GL Woods I was ready to make okay I move that we adopt the status cut scores change cut scores and a 5x5 color grid for the science indicator based on the science Point methodology thank you is there a second so polite member Rodriguez uh and then um we need to see if there's any further discussion and then we'll we'll uh we don't need to take the we can vote uh at the podium uh any further discussion
191all right all in favor say I I any opposed nay any extensions okay motion carries thank you now the color grid do you need to see the color grids again are you ready to make a motion vice president GL Woods I am I move that we adopt the 5x5 balance color scheme color grid for the sign science indicator which will remind people is the same as what we have in ela and math at this moment well I think I should let member Orosco Gonzalez second it this time [Laughter] since Equitable voting any further discussion all in favor please say I I any opposed nay any extensions motion carries thank you good work uh and thank you to the team to the uh accountability team this was a lot I know and now we're going to
192take uh only we were going to take uh the the next two items before lunch we're going to take one item before lunch uh and that will be uh item three which is the uh California assessment of student performance and progress approval of the receipt of the report advancing excellence in mathematics Smarter Balance support of Big Ideas in the California Mathematics framework uh and uh we the the request is for us to both receive the report and and to offer feedback about the analyses and conclusions in the direction that we should take uh to remind you uh we asked Smarter Balance to look at whether our new uh mathematics framework is well represented on the mathematics assessment uh so that we could be coherent in our curriculum and assessment work and that's what they're going
193to present about and I think um Malang is going to present this item and Tony Albert of the smarter balance assessment Consortium good morning thank you for your patience as I coordinate myself and bring my co-presenter up thank you just okay I will introduce so um good morning Chief Deputy Roberson welcome uh president Darlin Hammond uh vice president Clover woods and our steam board members I'm Malang uh the director for the assessment development and administration division at the California Department of Education and I have uh here with me uh Tony Albert who is the executive director of the smarter balanced assessment Consortium or smarter balanced the item before you today is an action and an information item uh the presentation that uh will give a recommendation to the board for Action followed by a oh
194sorry followed by um a history and some background information on the study that is recommended for receipt a description of the analysis methods and uh results of the study conclusions recommended next steps and a specific recommendation for board action okay and then in this section I will provide a quick overview of the California Department of education's recommend recommendation for approval so the recommendation is that the California Department of Education recommends that the California State Board of Education approve the receipt of the report titled advancing excellence in mathematics Smarter Balance support of the Big Ideas in California's mathematics framework which is provided in attachment one of the item the California Department of educ also requests feedback about the report and direction from the SB on next steps now I will turn over the presentation to Tony
195Albert to continue thank you thank you ma uh I'm Tony Albert for the record uh executive director for spurn balance and really pleased to talk with the board about this important project uh as a brief uh overview and a reminder today we're going to be talking about the summit of assessment principally uh but smarter balance of course is a balance assessment system that has interim assessments and uh formative resources uh to help improve teaching and learning and the summit of assessment is really geared towards that end of view look and and progress check uh that is consistent Statewide so um we're uh in abbreviated schedule so I think we're going to be skipping through some slides hopefully that's not um too confusing for folks uh but just wanted to remind folks that the purpose of
196this study was to uh connect uh the California math framework with yeah thank you thank um is to connect the California math framework with the structure of the spner balance assessment uh system in a in a clear and transparent way and as a reminder in July uh 2023 the State Board of Education adopted the mathematics framework in June of 20124 ETS and smarter balance initiated a study to examine the consistency between the framework and the smarter balance Summit of assessment and then in February of 2025 the CD submitted a memo to the State Board providing background information on the study conceptually uh we have the content connections the drivers of investigation and uh the strategy standards for mathematical practice uh those contributed to and helped uh the the substance of the mathematics Frameworks which were
197organized in terms of uh big ideas and uh content connectors and those are associated with smarter balanced uh claims uh that organize the content standards in a way that is uh accessible uh so we have claim one which is the concept steps and procedures claims 2 3 and four are the mathematical practices organized according to problem solving communicating reasoning uh modeling and data analysis so we uh engaged in two analyses uh one was an evaluation of the task models that is the over the the template that we use to write each item uh and then we evaluated the smarter balance item pool itself for consistency with the math mathematics framework uh when we evaluated the task model we looked at uh the degree to which the task provided a data context and students analyzed the
198data uh real world application the extent to which the task features an application of mathematics and required an interpretation of the real world context and then finally the degree to which the tasks were open and allowed students to uh graph items uh use establish equations or do a numeric data entry some kind of table interaction or a constructed response item typically when they're describing uh their their approach and their reasoning when we uh were evaluating the item pool uh we looked at each item and we categorized the items based on the targets and standards they measured and connected them with each big idea and then we assigned a single rating to the group of the item pools that's consistent with that uh big idea and Target collection so the results for the task model evaluation
199were that when we looked at the items that were delivered in the computer adaptive portion of the assessment we found that those sufficiently address those criteria for uh high quality task and uh the performance task however there was a robust consistency between uh those three criterian of um let me go back because I want to make sure of data reasoning real world application and open tasks and that's consistent with the design of the smarter balance assessment in which uh principally claim one uh the operations and procedures were addressed um in the computer adaptive test and the more comprehensive ensive uh support for the mathematical practices were included in the performance test so this is not a surprising result but it's a confirmation of the design and the consistency with the um uh highquality instructional practices
200that we want to reinforce uh that are embedded in the uh framework for the item pool evaluation in grades 3 through 8 all of the Big Ideas uh were associated with sufficient items such that we were able to assert that was a robust relationship between uh the content of the items and the associated description of Big Ideas uh in high school there were uh two big ideas that received a robust rating um and did not uh all all but two received a robust rating and uh those were mathematics the shapes and structures we rated that as limited and then fairness in data we rated that as n and so we can talk a little bit more about our next steps and I think I misspoke on the task model um sorry we're skipping ahead grade
201four was not robust on the task model for data reasoning and that's simply because the performance tasks that we developed didn't address data reasoning they addressed all the uh other mathematic practices uh included typically in the smarter balance assessment and all the other grades included at least one question that addressed data reasoning but for some reason grade four didn't and so we have a process in place to address that and develop performance tasks for the future that will include data reasoning for grade four so back to the item pool evaluation we have those two areas that similarly uh would benefit from approvement and so uh the next steps that we suggest is that uh smarter balance and the dep Department of Education discuss uh the results of the study and uh move forward with a
202plan regarding addressing uh the gaps that we identified uh as I mentioned for grade four we're already developing performance tasks that include data reasoning uh in the mathematics performance task and then we need to discuss more in detail about high school um we need to think about and review the original design decisions that omitted uh that body of content from the item pool and then we need to talk about uh whether or not the uh adding that content can be done within the current blueprint or whether or not we need to add content which might increase the test length or otherwise require a blueprint change so uh we want to engage in a thoughtful process and manage and mitigate unintended consequences we do want to fully support the mathematics framework and uh give that uh
203confirmation to teachers that if they're teaching to the mathematics framework they can have uh uh uh they can expect that students will be able to demonstrate those Knowledge and Skills on the assessment but we also don't want to create negative consequences for students uh that's a very abbreviated uh presentation but I'm now open and available for questions uh so at this point we're going to go ahead and put the Public's comment slide up um and um in case folks want to call in uh using the phone number and the access code there and then we'll open up to any uh clarifying questions for the uh board um and I'll ask our um liaison member Orosco Gonzalez if she has some comments before me thank you for your presentation it was very insightful um I'm just
204pleased to see that there's strong alignment between the smarter balance subna of Assessments for mathematics and the California Mathematics framework as outlined in the report so this collaboration I think between the ETS smarter balance and the CD is going to be a valuable step ensuring that our assessments truly reflect the Big Ideas in the mathematics framework which is designed to strength our students problem solving and mathematical reason uh reasoning and perseverance um overall I think the consistency is strong and I appreciate the recognition of areas that would benefit for additional attention particularly in high school um mathematics the recommendations for refinement to ensure that our assessments remained aligned uh with the evolving needs of our students so thank you so much for your presentation thank you and I would just like to say it's it's
205uh both um wonderful that we have this alignment and there are some areas that we've identified where we can do a little bit better but the field will I think be very reassured to know that in fact you know the assessment is in line with the framework uh had we chosen a different assessment in California uh we probably would not have had this kind of alignment though Smarter Balance assessment is particularly focused on higher order thinking and performance skills and uh the kinds of mathematical as well as Ela learning that uh is reflected in our framework so uh we're we're lucky that that is the case and I really appreciate that um the uh analysis was done so that we can really uh yeah deal with the uh changes around the edges but know as
206well that um you know as we teach to the new framework we're all so preparing students for the assessment uh and uh are there any clarifying questions for Tony yes member Clauson thank you also for your presentation and your brevity as well um I have a question about strengthening um the the high school assessments um just I don't know if you have an estimate but if you do um you know potentially increasing the length of the test what would that what what are we thinking and then also as for a timeline as in like what school year that that those components of the test would be ready yeah um it's a really important question I think uh first we would have to develop a task so we'd have to understand what the Gap is are
207there existing task models that could s be utilized to address that body of content or would it require a completely different task model that would yet to be developed um and so that would have a strong indication for the timeline excuse me um I need to use my hands uh and uh so in terms of uh what would the additional length be um the typically uh I think students get one to two questions in any given Target and so the question would be are is there a Target that we consider it equivalent enough such that a student could get either this target this new Target or an existing Target or would we really want every student to get assessed on that body of targets uh or on that new Target and so if we said
208everyone should get assessed then we would have to remove a previous Target or add an additional Target to the blueprint um and then um we would uh allocate um probably one to two items each item depending on its complexity uh can take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and that also is impacted by the students ability and and fluence in mathematics so um uh if it were a a run-of-the-mill more selected response probably 10 minutes would be added for two questions uh on average but for some students that would obviously take more uh but I think we're a long ways away from adding the length to the test I think there's a lot of tools in our toolkit that we can look at to to mitigate the the need for that uh and in terms
209of development uh it would probably take about five years uh from the time of of conception uh to this is what the item should be to uh engaging in with Educators to to validate the task model uh to engage with Educators to write the items to the new content to field test the items to calibrate them ensure that they're high quality and that they don't differentially disadvantage any group of students and then they would appear on the operational test so it's it's it's a long multi-step process but critical uh to engage Educators and uh and certainly California Educators especially in any design and development process any other Tony thanks again for the presentation could you clarify the alignment of the fourth grade mathematics assessment with the robust rating I know you mentioned a little something
210in your presentation could you either restate that or just add a little a little bit more to that absolutely thank you uh for the question so um each performance task is composed of about four to six items uh all centered around a theme and so they they build on each other and that's what makes them uh so robust and so difficult to score is uh a student might give an initially a a wrong answer to one question but we score it conditionally assuming their base answer uh in some item types and uh there is a lot of discretion that the item writers have as to whether or not they're addressing communicating reasoning problem solving data analysis modeling um and in this case uh in fourth grade for whatever reason we didn't have a item that
211addressed data reasoning and it could have been that it was originally included but fell out once uh during field testing because it didn't meet our quality Criterion it's unusual that that would happen across the board in a Grade uh but um that's why we do these kind of uh uh evaluations to make sure that we're checking uh what are otherwise our assumptions but it it really was uh um either either it was a systematic oversight or it was just a problem with um an un unlikely problem with field testing where those items just disproportionately uh didn't meet our our quality criteria so when we move forward now we're going to be deliberatively including uh data reasoning as part part of new performance tasks and so that's how we'll fill that Gap all right any other
212questions I think at this point then we're going to go to public comment thank you very much Tony uh is there any public comment in the room there is one person signed up miles timson turn on your mic or something I think I just need to get a little closer hello my name is mil Stimson I'm a math teacher from San Diego like to speak about the state's math standards and framework there are over 25 million automobiles in this state and over a trillion dollars of automobile debt in this country I think we should include information about automobile ownership including car loans in our secondary math courses thank you for your time and there are no callers in the Que uh there there are no color colors in the queue that concludes public comment for
213item number three all right I think we are then ready to have any further discussion and make a motion uh if we could put the motion up here here we go we approve the receipt of the report uh and we've been offering feedback uh is there any other feedback that people want to offer to the the department at this moment before we go ahead and um make a motion all right I think we are ready then for a motion who would like to start us off all right member Clauson I move to approve the receipt of the report thank you very much is there a second okay uh any uh further discussion all in favor say I I any oppos say nay any extensions everyone keep their hands up for a second great thank all
214right all right I think uh the motion is uh approved we are now off to lunch it is almost quarter to 12 and we will come back at quarter after 12 to um make up a little time from this morning thank you than you e e e all right we are back from lunch and ready to tackle item four which is the California assessment of student performance and progress request for approval of the proposed revisions to the reporting achievement level descriptors and the CDE recommends that the State Board of Education approve the proposed revisions to the reporting ALDS and labels for the smarter balance submit of Assessments for ELA and math and cast as provided in tables 1B 2B and 3B this item is presented by Deputy superintendent Mary nicely and Mal Vang of the
215CDE and Tony Alpert from the smarter balance assessment Consortium Mary it's nice to see you please begin nice to see you uh and good afternoon um Chief so bear with me yeah I'm always like up there so this is like oh my gosh I'm actually have to say things this is kind of crazy so bear with me I had to even ask how do I even Advance a slide what's going on here uh so uh but yes so so good afternoon Chief Deputy Roberson uh president darling Hammond vice president Glover woods and board members I'm Mary nicely Deputy superintendent of the information technology branch and I am very very pleased to participate in the presentation as I recently added the assessment development and administration division to my Branch um to assist with presenting as president
216darling Hamond mentioned we we'll have Dr Malang um the director of assessment development and administration Division and Tony Albert executive director of smarted balanced and we also have Maryanne arcilla executive director of K12 assessment programs at ETS who will assist the team in answering questions um the item before you today is an action and an information item and um I don't have to say anything anymore because the the uh president already read the recommendation right so am I off the on reading that that thing again or not no okay so um so we are going to be um so today we're going to discuss the recommendation for approval background of our topic feedback from our recent uh achievement level descriptors uh focus groups as well as the proposed revision to the ALDS and labels and
217so um I'm going to figure out if I can do this so once again I will provide the recommendation what are you seeing okay you're seeing the recommendation for approval so I'm going to go to this slide this is the recommendation that uh president darling ham and okay I'm getting it right left hand is this this is right okay um I'll provide an overview of the California Department of education's recommendation for your approval so once again the recommendation the California Department of Education recommends that the State Board of Education approve the proposed revisions to the report reporting achievement level descriptors ALDS and labels for the smarter balanced summative assessments for English language arts literacy Ela and Mathematics and California science test cast as provided in tables 1B 2B and 3B and so the current so
218a little bit of a background the current labels background current labels uh for the smarter balanced Ela and Mathematics summative assess ments were approved a decade ago by the SBE in March 2015 for use in the 2014 15 school year similar ALDS and current LA and labels were approved for the cast in 2017 for use beginning in the 2018 2019 Administration years so here we are a decade later and questions have been raised annually by parents Educators students and interest holders as to what scores really mean as you may recall the smarter balanced presentation at the September state board meeting was in response to member states requesting additional supports and addressing misunderstandings of what is testing what scores really tell us about what students are learning the differences in testing across States and how they
219compare as well as what scores mean in relation to grade level I know I have these questions and I'm assuming that this is a decades long question so I think we're trying really today to get to an answer as hard as that might be so in September Smarter Balance shared the document what do the scores mean and uh they developed it along with their member states on how to communicate with the public on how best to interpret scores in this brief and Tony Albert will come up and and work with me um and present to you a little um synopsis of what we went over or during the September meeting um and then what is being accessed and what student performance level means so as we discuss the achievement level descriptors we must acknowledge what
220a challenge it is to capture in three words or less what student achievement is and regardless of what descriptors we approve today we should not forget that these assessments are capturing a moment in time and that throughout the year the partnership of parents Educators and students is where the real work is happening every day to support student achievement that means parent conferences grade reports interim assessments regular conversations so let's not forget that this is capturing a moment in time for all of us uh we know that our students are more than test scores and that is why California continues to focus on the whole child and why it has developed a robust dashboard to look at accountability holistically we should also acknowledge and educate interest holders that as a state are smarter balanced I think
221here we are uh that one um are more rigorous and measure our standards more deeply than other states our Ela literacy assessments measure Reading Writing listening and research as opposed to other states that only measure reading our math assessment require analysis problem solving communicating with math as well as operations as opposed to other states that only measure operations so I'd like to welcome Tony Albert of Smarter Balance to recap some of the slides presented at the September meeting to exemplify the depth of knowledge we assess as a tool that can be used by parents and Educators to support our students in in achieving Bright Futures and Achieve life goals so Tony would you like to join me thank you Deputy nicely and uh thank you again board for um allowing me to speak this one's
222going to go a little bit slower than last one I think we're going to spend a little bit more time so but if I'm spending too much time please let me know um so uh as a reminder uh Smart Balance collaborated with uh president darling Hammond as well as uh Deputy Michaela Miller in Washington and other Chiefs uh State School officers from Across the Nation uh to address some misconceptions that uh the public and the media often have and often express regarding the achievement levels and uh one of the uh misconceptions is that only students who uh achieve a level three or four are able to engage in grade level content and uh so we wanted to clarify that there is a range of grade level achievement and and that uh that is related to
223but it's different than the description of proficiency as described by student performance on the smarter balance assessment and so um students at level one may in fact still get some grade level questions correct they may not get any correct and so that's a that's a little bit more difficult to of a category to describe in an asset based uh manner but students in level two must get some questions grade level questions correct in order to achieve a level two um now that's that doesn't mean that they're uh at a sufficient level and uh it mean but it does mean that they are expressing some abilities in math and English language arts and it's important to acknowledge that and celebrate that success uh students who achieve a level three or higher are have a higher probability
224of succeeding in subsequent grades and students who achieve a level three or four in high school have a higher Pro probability of succeeding at postsecondary opportunities like uh colleges and um certifications or or other elements of career Readiness learning so here's an example that we provided regarding uh grade six Math uh showing the progression of content um as it might appear across the differing levels and so uh we could see in level uh an item that represents the achievement of level one uh there's a one-step solution required with a single operation uh and and one basic approach uh so there's a uh a limited number of of in of correct answers plausible and um it's a fairly straightforward problem to address at level two uh we start getting into a multi-step solution where multiple operations
225and multiple approaches can be taken uh at level three a multi solution with multiple operations and approaches are plausible and then we're also including this more um complex notion of rate so uh uh distance divided by uh time and at level four we're looking for multi-step Solutions multiple operations and approaches complex top uh topics and uh trying to engage in in some asking the student to engage in some critical thinking uh to evaluate accuracy for uh Ela uh we provided a an example writing prompt and uh students in for these prompts are asked to uh engage in an explanatory essay uh develop a thesis and and controlling idea explain the impact of the topic support their thesis with evidence from the sources and asking students actually reference the source so uh in thinking about this
226really uh honing in on the type of writing that uh uh high schools and uh postsecondary institutions really identified early on in our design process that were the type of activities that they would want their students to be able to engage in so similarly a progression of student responses are provided across the performance Contin with level one we uh uh we see that a student might respond like this with a a simple statement uh that doesn't provide a lot of supporting information at level two uh we have a little bit more of uh analysis that's Incorporated and some inclusion of references to the uh actual sources of information but it's not clear it's not a well reasoned or well supported statement when we get to level three we start seeing uh less grammatical errors we
227start seeing more support uh uh evidence support and more complex student responses and at level four we start seeing a fully fleshed out explanatory essay with a full uh uh identi support as reference that reference the cited uh material so um consistent with what uh Dr nicely described we want students to learn higher order thinking skills and analytical communication skills so that they are ready for the full range of opportunities that are available to them after high school and uh the smarter balance assessments and Associated Summit of assessments provide these opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills and with the association of the interim assessments they have consistent feedback throughout the year uh as part of a comprehensive approach to supporting teaching and learning uh in California a great score of grade three met standard
228at 11th grade has been validated as demonstrating Readiness for college and we are gathering a lot of information from other states about uh the their implementation of the Consortium test the state of Washington did an analysis uh among their of their data and they found out that large majorities of students uh scoring a level three or four in high school later uh demonstrated success at uh post-secondary institution between 75 and 85% across Ela and math however what's really important to to note is that a meaningful share of students at level who achieved a level one and two also entered college and persisted and demonstrated some success so reinforcing that these uh achievement levels are supposed to be descriptive of the achievement that the student demonstrated on the assessment but there's lots of reasons why a
229student might not do well uh part of that might be uh the amount that they learned part of it might be the engagement uh that they had in the test uh and so we need to think carefully before we act on the data and uh we need to make sure that that uh particular action is appropriate for individual students but also recognizing that these levels are designed to be probabilistic they're not deterministic and so when we're saying that a level a student who achieves a level three or four um is is demonstrating College and Career Success potential that's a probabilistic statement and it assumes uh that that the student will receive the same degree of highquality instruction that they will have the same degree of motivation uh likewise we hope that students who achieve a
230level one and two and do so because they haven't acquired that knowledge and levels knowledge level of Knowledge and Skills that there will be changes in adult practice that will help transform that students uh uh ability their performance into a higher level um which uh in those cases we hope there isn't a correlation uh between their performance on the uh earlier grade assessments and their subsequent performance after high school I think uh with that is ma are you going to Deputy nicely will continue thank you thank you attorney I appreciate you coming up and giving a recap of um what we uh presented in September and so now we're just going to talk about the current labels and as you as you've already reiterated the smarter balance test assessments um handle Ela math and cast
231and uh currently um we have these four levels and uh ALDS that correspond to them uh that we are looking to um change today uh and these are all to be able to describe a Continuum of Continuum of success that reflects students uh increasing accuracy and complexity in the demonstration of Knowledge and Skills So currently the results for overall performance are Cate categorized into four achievement levels Each of which has an Al so level four currently we have standard and exceeded level three standard met level two standard nearly met and standard not met okay and um as we just mentioned again uh in September we went through the what do the scores mean to get a better understanding um for all of you and at the November 2024 state board meeting the CD provi proposed
232some revisions to the reporting ALDS and labels for Smarter Balance um submi of Assessments for ELA and math and the cast uh and the board um after the board and public comment the board members requested that CDE conduct additional Outreach to parents Guardians Educators students students and other interest holders through focus groups the series of focus groups as we move into here um uh represented a wide um interest group uh wide group of Interest holders and in December of 2024 in January 2025 as we look at the feedback and revision table um the CD delivered an additional update following the December focus groups with a December information memorandum to the board following the completion of the January focus groups the CDE submitted a second information memorandum with the summary of the January focus group feedback
233to the SBE in February in this meeting the CDE is proposing revisions to the reporting ALDS for the smarter balance summi of Assessments for ELA and Mathematics and the cast based on feedback from the focus groups and other interest holders uh if the SB approves revisions to the reporting ALDS they would be implemented beginning in the 2025 and 26 test Administration so I'm going to hand this over to Dr Malang to continue the presentation on the comparison of achievement level labels thank you Mary um again angang director of assessment development and administration division at the CDE just takes some coordination you know um so comparison of the achievement levels again uh just reiterating reminded us that at the November SB meeting uh the CDE recommended these revisions to the reporting uh achievement level descriptors and
234labels for English language arts mathematics and science to align with the language in the the smarter balance brief that Mary and Tony uh went over the reporting achievement labels proposed in November just to remind us is that level four was advanced in place of of uh standard exceeded level three was proficient in place of standard met level two foundational in place of standard nearly met and level one inconsistent in place of standard not met okay and then we uh after the board said you go and gather some more uh feedback we did work with our uh testing uh contractor uh ETS to hold a series of focus groups in November no sorry in December to gather more comprehensive feedback regarding the current and the proposed uh reporting achievement level descriptors and labels so in December
235the we um did a number of focus groups we sought feedback uh on those current uh achievement level descriptors and labels as well as the achievement level descriptors and labels proposed in November we also solicited suggested Alternatives from the focus groups themselves and in the January focus groups this is just summarizing for you that we sought input on the current labels the proposed labels and the labels suggested from those December focus groups and then lastly all of the focus groups were asked for recommendations as to what types of information they would find in in helpful in better understanding changes to the reporting achievement level descriptors and labels as well as um the best ways to communicate that information so this is a summary and I will provide the overview of the focus groups and the
236summary of the focus group feedback that we received so that we spend a little bit more time on what those focus group participants provided Us and how we got here today so there were three focus groups that were held in December we had a busy December the participants included a geographic representation throughout California Northern Central Valley and Southern California the two focused groups uh two focus groups were um focused on adults and and they included parents or or Guardians Educators um community members uh education Advocates interest holders several uh participants indicated their involvement in parent organizations as well as like specific programs or initiatives to help parents or Guardians understand a student schore reports and then we did uh one of the adult um focus group sessions was conduct Ed in English and another was
237in Spanish and a separate focus group was conducted with students and they included elementary middle and high school students and many of the student participants uh noted that their parents or Guardians are involved in education to some capacity such as being teachers School staff or uh education Advocates so after we reviewed all this feedback from the December focus groups as well as we did a feedback that we also collected on an online survey so we it was determined at that time that since uh the number of focus group participants suggested below basic and basic as alternatives for level one and two the CDE should seek additional feedback on those terms uh from a larger sample of participants and that led us as a result to five additional focus groups in January that we did virtually
238and then again those uh two of the focused group sessions consist of a adults uh parents or Guardians with one session in English and another in Spanish again and these are different people okay not the same and then other another uh other focus groups included local educational uh testing a uh agency uh local educational agency testing coordinators we thought we uh grab their input as well we have and then another uh student focus group and class classroom Educators and that led us to the focus groups and then summary of the focus group uh feedback so um during the focus groups the participants were uh provided the current achievement level descriptors and the labels as well as the uh achievement labels proposed during the November SB meeting right so regarding those current uh achievement level labels
239uh participants express some confusion about the the word standard and what it was meant to signify okay these are the current ones and then furthermore uh many felt that level two that standard nearly met lack clarity as to whether a student at that level needs additional support and then level one standard not met was interpreted by some parents as their child was failing and some students and teachers view the label as discouraging so comparison of the proposed labels now we're looking at the November ones that were proposed and then the ones we're bringing to you today after the um focus groups so at each of those focus groups participants do view the AL propos uh uh the achievement level descriptors or achievement level labels proposed during the uh November um meeting and then while a
240large uh majority of those participants Express uh clear understanding and approval of level three proficient and level four Advanced many Express confusion or concern with the proposed labels of level one inconsistent and level two foundational so throughout all those focus groups the participant were asked for their feedback on the proposed options they were also asked to provide their own suggestions and then during the December focus groups many suggested below basic and basic as I mentioned for level two level one and level two respectively and then the focus group uh proposals were then tested in the January um focus groups as I summarized earlier so since that first f Focus Group in November and all those focus groups thereafter the feedback again was very positive for the proposed changes to level three proficient and level four
241among all of the options provided for level one and two below basic for level one and below and basic for level two Reed the broadest support So this proposal was generally favor for um Clarity and straightforwardness in representation of the ACH achievement levels it avoids the ambiguity of of other other Alternatives however there were some um Educators and students who found below basic uh the below basic label discouraging and suggested other terms so other uh the alternative terms for level one that were discussed um included minimal emerging and developing and then a proposed um alternative for level to was approaching so we didn't want to not share that with you um again the feedback on the proposed labels uh other from the focus groups also included some themes that they that came out of those
242focus groups like there was a request for more uh concise and clear information more information about what the scores mean you know the need is there and there they suggest suggested um or they ask for what other suggested next steps can families and Educators take from the the results and then a need for resources for in uh multiple languages and modes of communicating the changes such as you know our parent guides teacher guides or teacher training modules some videos and and webinars about what the scores mean and and then handouts or any student facing uh resources that we we can provide so following the review of the feedback from those focus groups and and other interest holders who are giving us feedback all throughout this time the CDE proposes the following revisions to the achievement
243level descriptors and labels we start with the labels first we are proposing um level four advance in place of the standard exceeded level three Prof in place of standard met and level two basic in place of standard nearly met level one below basic in place of standard not met so the proposed achievement uh level labels can be found in the item before you and there's a lot of text so I'm going to look at the proposed reporting achievement level descriptors for English language arts as an example all the item contains the Full uh proposed reporting achievement levels for all three subjects but I'll just go over the ELA here as an example um the for for level four the student demonstrates Advanced grade level Knowledge and Skills and shows a sophisticated understanding of an ability
244to apply the Knowledge and Skills in English language arts literacy needed for success and future course work for level three the student demonstrates proficient uh grade level Knowledge and Skills and shows a thorough understanding of and ability to apply the Knowledge and Skills in English language arts literacy needed for success in future cours work and level two the student demonstrates grade uh basic grade level Knowledge and Skills and shows a fundamental understanding of an ability to apply the Knowledge and Skills in English language arts literacy needed for success in future coursework then for level one the student demonstrates below basic grade level Knowledge and Skills and shows a minimal understanding of an ability to apply the Knowledge and Skills in English language arts literacy needed for success in future coursework so if the uh SB
245approves these changes the CDE will work with the testing contractor to create a communication and Outreach plan uh and resources for communicating the changes to our parents and educ ERS and students in our community at large and then the CDE will also reach out to the interest holders and gather addition uh input on those plans and resources to uh work on and provide and then the CDE will bring back uh and update to the SBE on the communication plan and then if approved um the CDE will also work with the testing company uh or contractor to update the foll ing resources we will bring the student score reports and update them we'll again work on Communications and trainings for families including uh revamping the starting smarter site website for families and then uh work on
246the reporting materials Communications and trainings for local educational agencies and uh revise or update the California educator Reporting System our public reporting website call the test results for California's assessments we will um uh work on that as well and any other relevant CDE web pages or reports or resources that pertain to these changes so with that um we do have a another little addition here I will hand the presentation to Tony Albert our executive director for Smart Balance who will provide some suggested next steps that the focus groups did uh ask for so some couple slides here Tony so um CDE is also working with Smarter Balance to create a document that includes additional information and S suggested next steps to families so and Educators um to support student achievement and progress and so in
247looking at the feedback and listening to the feedback from from the interest holders it was clear that they wanted the achievement level descriptors to do two different things one they wanted to understand what how the students describe their Knowledge and Skills via the assessment in addition they wanted the descriptors to give a clear indication of what adults and students uh should do next to support the the students progress so you've already spent a lot of time talking about the achievement level descriptors uh here are the um examples of achievement level descriptors and then next to it some suggested next steps and attending to uh the feedback that we heard uh from the interest holders looking specifically at level one in level two and identifying that although those students are engaged in grade level learning that
248uh they're they need acceleration in order to be able to have a higher probability of successful engagement in grade level content or in postsecondary content um after uh in their next grade so um and so we tried to differentiate um the two types of accelerating learning where uh students who achieve a level one probably are going to need an increased volume of instructional time uh as an example and again as as I mentioned earlier it's hard to know exactly what is it's hard to describe what students should get when that's really should be an individualized decision but we wanted to give a general overview of the relative difference uh if a student achieves a level two uh our suggestion is that it's a more tailored support with an emphasis on Shoring up uh some areas
249of improvement but also building on the assets that the kid uh student has demonstrated uh to be able to achieve a level two for level three we similarly uh want to celebrate success but with the understanding that there's always room for improvement and that uh we should leverage similarly leverage student St strengths but also identify those areas where growth uh still might be helpful and with level four we don't want students to stop uh just because they've achieved level four so encouraging enrichment activities uh and uh delving a little bit deeper into the grade level content so uh with that um I can uh address any questions or ma uh can address any questions as well well yes I think we're at this part would you like us to pause here or go to public
250comment yeah I think what we'll do is put the public comments slide up and we will ask clarifying questions but uh people who want to call in for public comment can enter the queue by calling that phone number and using the participant access code on the slide that is shown and while we're waiting I'm going to ask our Lea Zone member Oso Gonzalez if she has any initial comments before me and then we'll take any clarifying uh questions thank you make sure I am close enough I would just like to extend my gratitude to the assessment team for their thoughtful and thorough work on the revising of the achievement level descriptors it's clear that it was a great deal of effort went into Gathering incorporating feedback from my diverse range of stakeholders particularly the um
251sorry particularly commendable let's see through the focus groups the inclusion of student voices in the process is especially commendable as it ensures their revisions are grounded in real experiences and their perspectives of those directly impacted by these assessments I thought that was actually the most meaningful voice in those focus groups because these these student score reports affect them directly so from a teacher's perspective I believe th these proposed changes will will significantly improve how we communicate student performance the current terms like basic below basic can often feel discouraging and don't offer a clear actionable understanding of where students stand academically the updated descriptors such as below grade level at grade level and above grade level are a little bit more specific to help those students and their families better grasp the areas where Improvement is
252needed one of my primary concerns in the new um ALDS must clearly align with expectations for College and Career Readiness especially for students at a level two it is crucial that families Educators and students know whether this level indicates that they're on track for future success further clarification would help ensure the system remains transparent and effective in grinding both instruction and student growth I just want to emphasize the importance of ongoing consistent communication about with these changes multi lingual resources professional development for educators which was I think broadly discussed accessible userfriendly materials will ensure the revised ADLs are interpreted and used effectively by all stakeholders it's essential that everyone involved has the tools to understand and support student achievement overall I think the dedication of the assessment team has shown in refining these descriptors based
253on feedback um is just so commendable we started this work way back in August we um continuously had this discussion in November about these descriptors your assessment team went back and did all these focus groups with parents different interest groups and students and that um I think that feedback was so um relevant to this work I just look forward to seeing the impact that this will have on teaching and learning with our students and I I think that they're just on point so thank you Ma and your team it was very extensive work and I'll just uh add that I really appreciate all the work that uh that went into this I know the multiple focus groups and then you know checking and and rechecking uh I think that the um elaboration of the descriptors
254that's been offered about the way in which the smarter balanced um levels deal with increasing complexity across the proficiency levels within grade level standards in every case is very helpful and the next steps um documents also kind of reinforce you know what we can build upon so I'm I'm pleased that we're getting more information out there there's been as uh um Dr nicely noted at the beginning a lot of misinterpretation of of the score labels and uh I think uh we will get to something much clearer at the other end of this process um I know there may be a few questions for clarification so let me just ask before we go a public comment whether there any clarifying questions that people want to ask yes member pattillo Branson thank you um I just wanted
255to clarify on the last couple of slides that were shown with the language around uh suggested next steps those are not part of the vote today correct that's that would come back at some later date but is not technically today's conversation or at least decision Point that's correct those are uh just suggest suggestions and drafts because the focus group wanted us to look into that area so we worked with Smarter Balance to to draft something so to honor and and reflect their input but we will definitely bring something forward to you in a future meeting that's more refined any other clarifying questions if hearing none let's get to public comment do we have any public comment in the room there are two people signed up Lindsay toror and Diana Vu good afternoon president darling Hammond
256vice president Glover Woods members of the board Chief Deputy Roberson Lindsay tornator on behalf of the California county superintendents we would like to thank the board and CDE for hearing our input to diversify your educational partner input we are very impressed with the efforts of the assessment division led by Ma and Chad in a very short amount of time we understand the majority of focused group participants recommend the use of below basic or basic and as outlined in our letter we are not comfortable with these terms and encourage the board to adopt the alternative terms proposed developing or emerging for level one approaching for level two also this process of revising labels has shown there's a great deal of confusion in the field we are very appreciative of the CDE and ets's commitment to implement
257robust communication ESP especially General guidance on next steps our regional assessment network is standing by to support this work and Outreach to Educators Community uh members parents family students thank you good afternoon Dr darling ham and board members Diana Vu on behalf of the association of California school administrators ax appreciates the board and CDA CDE for engaging diverse educational Partners in developing the proposed ALDS and for incorporating the diverse educational partner in how however we believe terms such as below grade level and at grade level and above grade level could be beneficial for broader Communication in order to provide students parents families and Educators with more clarity on students Knowledge and Skills we also understand though that it is important that terms align with intended meaning with the intended meaning behind the ALDS to avoid
258oversimplification additionally we greatly appreciate the state's acknowledgement to provide guidance and communication tools to parents and Educators on the adopted new terms and how to utilize them there was a lot there's currently a lot of confusion on what the current terms mean as such clear definitions on all terms will be necessary as well as robust and consistent communication from the state we believe that this will go a long way in clearing up the confusion thank you and there are two callers in the queue I will open the phone line now um caller with the last four digits 8674 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute good afternoon this is Rachel Murphy with public advocates in the LC CFS Equity Coalition we appreciate the board's efforts to seek additional Community
259feedback on the descriptors and we support the proposed changes to the titles of the four performance categories but we remain concerned with the language used to describe what these labels mean particularly for the level two basic description we believe that the explanation of the basic level as a fundamental understanding could suggest a higher level of understanding than level two and 10s while we agree that a basic performance does not constitute failure for the student or the school it is also true that there remains greater room for growth and depth of depth and complexity of understanding as such we propose replacing fundamental with something more kind of rudimentary in the explanation of the basic level thank you thank you next caller with the last four digits 8256 you are now live please start your public comment
260you have one minute hi this is Robert maning from children now I'd like to align myself s with the comments made by the lcf equity Coalition uh we appreciate the responsiveness to the issues that we raised in November in changing the Des scriptures and we support uh aligning the achievement level Des scriptures with the nape labels that are used um uh in in terms of uh specific comments also wanted to raise the issue of of reframing what is now level two basic which The Proposal is shows a fundamental understanding of and ability to apply the knowledge um we believe that that fundamental may have some different meanings in edu speak um that suggest some type of curriculum or skills that may have been learned and I don't think that's what the descriptor is suggesting um
261alternatives for fundamental understanding might be initial understanding rudimentary understanding or partial understanding for the descriptor for label two thank you so much thank you that concludes public comment for item number four okay thank you very much we are now open for discussion okay member escabedo and then vice president GL Woods you I I think you know what we use and what we decide as descriptors I think is powerful language is very powerful right and I think uh myself and I think we all agree that you know knowledge is a Continuum and how we describe rbe students in different levels has a powerful impact know when you look at our El proficiency levels we we went from beginner to emerging to expanding to bridging powerful our levels of proficiencies are much higher now than they were
262before labels matter you know we see our kids as continual learners I I find below basic as as a word that shows that you're faing I I find emerging as a more fitting word very close to what we already have when we look at our ELD descriptors as well as developing so I would like to kind of share my concerns about the whole below basic and basic and really reframe that not not that the descriptors I mean the the language describing the scriptures will change but the words used I think has a powerful impact and I I would propose to changing the also basic and Below basic to developing and emerging woods and then member Lewis and then member Rodriguez thank you um my comment somewhat align with member excavators and they also do take
263a little bit of a a turn as well and uh I I have to be very honest when I read the terms basic and Below basic I went back to nclb in the California standards test and the levels that we used to describe student performance during that time and uh did not leave with a very positive feel just kind of going back to um that space I do think it is important that we are clear in the descriptors and not just for those of us in education that are working directly with the students but also for parents so the comment that I'm getting ready to make is me speaking with my parent hat on and thinking of parents who don't sit in the space of Education uh to understand some of the terms and I
264want to specifically lift up a thought regarding below basic so level one with level one below basic um I also am not a fan of that particular term I think it's important to be clear though that um students at that level are at a minimal understanding if you will with their grade level with the standards knowledge for that grade level because again there's no the way this test is structured you can't make um a statement that a student is above grade level or below grade level because the items don't t in that way they're all related to the grade level standard from my understanding so um my thought is to take level one and to change from below basic to minimal I think minimal communicates to anyone that there's a minimal um a minimal level
265of understanding of the standard emerging might be interpreted differently so I'm just I'm kind of throwing that out as an idea and when we look at the descriptor I know minimal is used in the description as well um and that word could stay in the description or it might change to limited or something like that I'm not going to try to word Smith here from the table but um again just to be clear I do believe we need to look at a different uh L descriptor or different label for level one moving away from below basic and again I would propose minimal because I think minimal clearly articulates where students are um in relation to their um proficiency with the grade level standards for that subject matter member Lewis and then member Rodriguez anyone else
266member Pilla Bronson thank you I'll be brief and try not to repeat anything that my two colleagues have already said because I agree uh with both of them on on on various levels but was thinking more of especially I had U Alternatives L written down and when I heard Mr Albert say about um the level one that some it doesn't mean that students missed all questions it means that some students may have gotten some uh questions correct or they may not have gotten any questions correct so to me I was looking at level one maybe uh the descriptor or the label being developing because they could be in one of those two categories they could have missed them all or they but they're still learning and when you look at the descriptor um and which
267goes in line with what vice president Glover Woods has said about they may be they're showing minimal understanding so you really wouldn't have to change the descriptor if you said developing knowing that there at some level they're learning something right they're on their way and then you could still leave minim in the descriptor because you're saying they have minimal understanding and minimal ability and then for level two um removing the basic um because in uh and it was listening to one of the callers earlier talking about partial understanding um so level two I was I would like for consideration approaching as the label and then maybe in the descriptor taking out uh fundamental and just you know they are approaching they're approaching proficiency maybe a partial understanding of ability and of partial understanding of an
268ability to apply the knowledge so I'd like to propose those uh for those reasons because you know as someone said we don't want to I think it was um member Orosco Gonzalez uh in her statements about we don't want to be discouraged encouraging and we don't want to oversimplify I think though you know all that's been said are great compromises to basic and Below basic but those are the two that I would to put forward member Rodriguez thank you and thank you for the comments that have already been made I also don't want to be redundant um I do want to say that I really appreciate all of the Outreach and bringing together um Partners to who have a vested interest in how our students receive feedback right from parents to Educators to the students
269themselves um I also had a vis visceral reaction to the word basic because I remember NB and just how finite that felt to students um and then you know bringing it to 2025 my um colleague to the right could uh attest to the fact that calling a student basic like kids calling kids basic is an absolute insult and so I would think that you know seeing that like oh I'm basic um you know could also shut a shut a child down so as an educator I think about the feedback that I give my students and its feedback for growth um right so I don't want to sugarcoat things which I think is the feedback that we received from from parents especially right that they want Clarity and so um uh some of the words like
270uh whether it's um meeting the standard approaching the standard uh I I think that is okay you're you're not there yet but you're getting there um so it doesn't have that that uh you know that like that uh as I said that finite um non-growth of uh the NB basic but it it's it's encouraging and and I believe clear is as well member patillo Branson um there's I think this continuing balancing that we are um trying to do of how to encourage students um recognize the assets they have and also make sure that they and their parents have the information that they need in order to support their continued learning is is what we're all trying trying to balance um I think on the the particulars of the descriptors I um I'm very much aligned
271with some of the comments around uh particularly for level two the descriptors feeling like fundamental understanding um maybe a little too Rosy of a word um I think I can think of many college courses that are called fundamentals of something which suggests that that is the standard that you should be shooting for and that's what you should be learning in the intro class and that's it and I I think uh fundamental in the descriptor for level two might create a um a false sense of security um I I think the suggestions um that were elevated around either partial understanding or rudimentary understanding I think are are a little bit feel closer to um where where we would want to um go I think for the actual labels themselves of basic and Below basic and the
272the implications um that that has I'm I I having two teenagers at home I absolutely hear the word basic as a non-complimentary it is the it is a uh slang term among teens um that is definitely not uh complimentary and uh I I I wonder if we are doing ourselves a little bit of a disservice by kind of just anchoring so much on we need to have one word for each descriptor uh and a a colon does a lot of work so I'm just thinking about or or even a slash as to whether it's something that um kind of is basic and developing as as I think board member escabedo was saying but something that gets to a greater depth than we need that we want to convey and that doesn't necessarily have to be
273a one-word descriptor um that can convey some assets and some sense of possibility but also that will hopefully light a fire under parents to realize that there is work to do um and to my mind at least that seems like two words worth arguing for even if it's a little bit of space and printing to um deal with the last thing I'm just going to say is on suggested next steps I actually think that is oftentimes where the rubber meets the road um the descriptors are kind of a tagline and the encouragement for parents to read further um I as I was reading and I know they're early but um I don't it's unclear to me still as to whether it comes back to us for approval or as an information item but for the
274suggested next steps I think the language around um students in level two and level one may benefit from accelerated learning from um more concentrated supports I think we want to say it more affirmatively in levels two and one that those students will benefit that they actually we're we're trying to light a fire rather than saying it's a possibility um which I I think airs on the the side of being a little bit more agnostic than we should be yes member Rosco Gonzalez and I'm just checking to see if there's going to be others uh member yoshimoto and member Clauson thank you I just want to add I think that um member patrill bonson said something important that I think um with these descriptors they have to be concrete and actionable and I think that the
275department the and your um Team put extensive thought with the focus groups let me just mention that the focus groups like liked these descriptors they wanted uh they as you remember the conversations we had in November around foundational and and I think um uh member Glover Woods you mentioned um minimal and they had we had some language around that originally and it was not well received and so we had to go back to the drawing board and we wanted as much stakeholder voice as we could get and and I think it was extensive and they came back with a language that is being proposed and so uh and or my initial reaction was what um M Rodriguez said about um the word basic and so forth but the parents and the students found that the
276language was appropriate and that it was real for them so that they could then take an action forward and so um I just want to emphasize that that's why these descriptores are now being proposed because it was based on feedback from the focus groups we have um member Clauson and then member yoshimoto T um I just wanted to raise up again just our gratitude for including students um in the focus groups thank you so much as member Rosco Gonzalez said earlier um these labels are this language is important because students especially I'm thinking of our students grade 11 grade 8 um really they are looking at their score reports it's not just parents and teachers and that is informing decisions you know about what classes to take you know College and Career steps and so
277it is incredibly important so thank you for including students of various ages and grade levels um also I think the next steps look great though I do also um Echo you know for for levels one and two more strength in the wording um and then I just wanted to share my opinion about the labels in my opinion I I I recognize below basic and basic um were I assume the majority of focus group respondents uh preference I I do I'm I'm right with basic I am not a fan of below basic I do think it is discouraging though it is of course I think a red flag if you're a parent or a teacher you see that um it is a call to action but I also agree that minimal is a call to action
278as well so that would be my preference for level one and um level two I believe uh would I I would prefer approaching so those are my thoughts uh and again just return turning to the idea that our older students especially are using these labels to make life decisions to make academic decisions and the language matters so I just want to share my thoughts and again thank you for including the students it's so important M [Music] yosari thank you and and M thank you in your comments earlier for just recognizing that U I think it was that it was Mary nicely actually that said uh that this is a moment in time and that it's uh representative also of uh one measurement in a holistic approach uh and I think that's important which connect I'm
279not going to recommend specific words in my comments um I agree with many of my comment my colleagues I think asset B language is important uh as is Clarity uh so both the word or the term that we use as well as the descriptor should be accurate um I just wanted to uplift What U member patelo Bronson said about uh forward action I think how we use these assessment scores is really really important it should never deny a student access to a particular course uh college going course or or forward um opportunity so um however we can accomplish that uh and then the last comment I would say is we also be mindful of different languages and how the word translates into other languages and how parents interpret that as well uh which I know
280you are considering uh but just a thank you any other okay member Lewis regarding the suggested next steps when you put those together to bring to us the next time could there be specificity as to what the teach suggestions for what teach the Educators do what maybe the parents can do to assist primarily levels one and two you know because this is for parents as well so maybe there are things they can do outside of the school environment at home to help enrich their students learning so if there could be some specificity regarding those I'll just note that on the student score reports now there are Lexile and quantile ra uh scores and a link um to where parents can get additional resources and so on so we do have some of that already in
281the score reports when we come back with that we should look at the holistic situation so we're not repeating something we're already doing um uh okay so here here's we've got a lot of ideas uh and we do want to move forward um on uh in the in the item itself uh on page four it mentions that other terms discussed included minimal emerging developing and approaching so those are the terms that had some feedback and there were uh basic and Below basic were generally favored uh some participants also supported terms like developing emerging approaching so there was you know some range of view I don't think we should go outside the terms that have been tested because a lot of effort was put put into to doing that um but I do think that you
282know within those terms the fact that there was support for a variety of ways is it gives us some some room to consider um I will admit that throughout my parenting life you know I uh was variously attuned to the language that was being used uh by my kids in school but I take it seriously that and I didn't know this my kids are grown up and I they're not at that age where they're coming home with what the labels are the kids are applying to each other right now but I take it seriously that if basic is being used as a derogatory term I can only imagine how kids kids would use below basic with each other as a super derogatory term and how that might be received so I I was not aware
283of that I will confess but uh that is I think it's a real consideration that we don't want to be you pulling a term that uh maybe had a different meaning for adults that is being used in in a particular way so um and what I'm hearing from the board is um interest in ass based language that is also accurate that is also descriptive uh and I think that that what I'm hearing is a level one as minimal or emerging uh and possibly level two as something like developing I don't know if we want to be considering that I would be concerned about approaching because approaching what we're trying to get away from the idea that you know there's um this all started with the fact that people were misinterpreting this the levels as grade
284level standards as you know that that level three meant a particular grade level standard which it isn't and so we're trying to be clear about what level of capacity is designated at each of the levels um so uh listening carefully uh I would propose to um uh moderate the recommendation to to uh argue for level one as um emerging perhaps level two as developing level three as proficient level four as advanced I think the point was well made that in the descriptor for level two we may need a different adjective than foundational uh and uh I would you know rudimentary is a good term it's also many syllables and will it be understood initial is a a little bit shorter and maybe simpler um so I I think those terms um that were brought to
285our attention could be more understood uh as having a common meaning than than foundational um and I don't know if anybody wants to comment on those choices either vice president GL Woods I like the term rudimentary but I understand that it's it's a long word and and I would agree I would not go for a word with that many syllables and because I think again we want to be very very clear um I I'm I guess kind of like a dog with a bone I'm going to go back to minimal for level one just just to point out that when a student scores at level one for whatever the reason that should be a red flag and I think the language that's used for level one might need to be a bit more pointed um
286than emerging um again just thinking of something is emerging okay well they're doing fine they're getting there something's beginning to happen yes whereas if something is minimal I think we're pretty clear that you're at the base level um and there's a lot of work to be done so um again that's just my proposal for level one but um not one of the terms that was flagged as having support in the focus group but you know we can we they had alternative terms or level one minimal so I'm just throwing that was a term that was tried yeah it was it was mentioned but it it was not at the end of the paragraph it says the ones that were okay all right member esab I would like to say we have precedent on ELD where
287emerging is a beginning minimal you know place and I think emerging is more positive than minimal when I think about minimal you know you're at a minimum right however you know as we describe what emerging is maybe it's you know minimal understanding on you know those basic things that is that is the adjective that is in the level one description is minimal so um but something is it okay if I say something yes it is okay for you to say something I think you all should have been a focus group um but in terms of the word emerging although it did come up um because we do use it for language and the English language proficiency test students could come into learning English at any age right and that makes more sense for level one
288because you're emerging and or uh to be used in a language proficiency assessment of that sort because you want positive language to encourage them to continue to learn the language but for a academic assessments like English Math and Science you do want to use terms that mean what they really are to so you know I think minimal was one of the terms and it's also used in the descriptor of level one so it does make sense if you had limited options but you all do provide very good input and you could have been your own focus group yes so we're gonna I'm gonna take a few more comments I've got and if you want to get back in the queue please let me know um member Orosco Gonzalez member pillo Bronson uh thank you m
289because I think that clarification is key also remember that all these are um students goore reports are translated into multiple languages and um like rudimentary would be a very difficult word to um go back and translate um a minimal minimal you know there's certain cognets that I think would be and that's just Spanish I don't and I don't know the multiple languages that that are spoken in this state um we have to be aware of that when we choose these these words because we have to be able to translate them and so the complexity of the word has to be uh to a point where we can have a direct transl translation in multiple languages and that in the end our parents can access and can understand that sometimes being below basic what I mean
290by that is that they are at a very minimal right that they a minimal understanding of the content and it is academic it's just like when we use the the letter F and failure right it's not it's not a nice word I mean so I think we have to make introduce any other complexity no other no other words just the words that saying so um just the words that and I think it's important to use the language that was used in the focus groups because so much time was spent on that okay and we have member pillo Bronson so I hear that as a vote for minimal that's what I took okay um I I also am a vote for minimal rather than emerging I feel like it's uh emerging is just kind of value
291neutral to me like I have no sense of that meaning that you're come from behind story at all I just have a notion of it almost seems artistic to me to some degree um as opposed to motivating that there is work to do here um sorry go ahead yes I I'm gonna make push us along to making our comments so that we can get to emotions make a second Pitch for basic and developing um and multiple words there because it does have an edge but I think it should have an edge and I don't think we should fully back away from that and I I also think developing is a little more neutral than we need it to be if we want to motiv parents teachers and you have the descriptor you know in in
292the other you do but I I mean I I feel like having an extra word does not cost us that much but it conveys a lot it gives you the asset but it also gives you the edge so so this would be a slash idea that there'd be two words in the yes or even a Col one in the descriptor and one in the label oh sorry and then last part I agree rudimentary is is likely not a word that will translate well I think one of the others that was discussed was partial initial was another one initial or partial either of those are great M should not gonna participate in the word smithing but it sounds like we're going to go for it so I'm gonna par we're gonna come to a motion soon
293because we have a lot of other items on our agenda for the day I would just throw in the idea that we use the word instead of emerge instead of minimal that we use the word beginning understanding of grade level knowledge and SK skill and in the description we can use the word minimal understanding the way it is uh currently you're talking level two one beginning and then developing and then proficient and advanced so I appreciate that and that was not a term that was in the focus group so I'm nervous about it um remember scab did you want to add okay right yeah okay um all right would you like to make a motion comment before you before you move um I did hear a lot of support for minimal at the at the
294first level as understandable whether whether it's in the label or whether it's in the adjectives uh and I heard the notion of developing at level two potentially with basic but I I just want to say that Having learned that basic is being used in a way that is derogatory uh is understood many of you made this point so it must be widespread that it's being used in a derogatory way I think we just should keep that very much in mind anyway or CH can I just clarify that as a teen parent it's it's not a derogatory term of intellect it more has to do with Aesthetics it's not but whether but yeah but whether it's used you know anyway we've got two more people who want to weigh in on that so I probably shouldn't
295have mentioned it again yeah go ahead quick quick comments please yes um member Olen and then member yoshimar I just wanted to make sure I understood with all of this discussion and there was so much time and thought that went into the process of getting here I'm wondering if we absolutely need to decide this today or could our motion be to I mean I don't even know if we can do this deputize a small group to think it through like I just don't want us to a spend any more time on this or B make a decision that has been decided by committee literally I mean I I don't you know so I don't know what if I guess that's a question for you I just say that we have a we have a report
296about what was discussed in the focus group so we've G back to the terms that were discussed in the focus groups and that had various kinds of support and rationals and I think we should try to you know base our decision on what was there I don't think we should go necessarily to terms that went beyond what was tested that's you know um the place where I feel like we would be in a new new territory okay so I'm not putting out any new ideas I think we've got a member ofc ready to make a motion and we can vote it up or down so remember Yi wanted to make a comment before we get the motion had a similar comment to Sharon I think uh I thought we missed the window to impact the
297next student score reports already and that we were talking about not next this next school uh report but the following year am I off on that that is correct that this is not going to happen in this this change will not be made in the score report that goes out in June July yeah so because of that um I I just had concerns there were a lot of ideas raised today um and in the public comment there were uh sometimes there's a lot of alignment with our decisions and in this case there was no no alignment actually um and so I was just wondering if there isn't a reason it could be I don't want to be known as the Kick the Can person but if it could be pushed so we have more I
298will just say that what I yeah I heard Educators having a perspective on asset-based language and I heard uh others who were Advocates saying we were fine with this but they weren't thinking about it from the same perspective um member escavator do you have a motion I'm I'm curious to see what it is I do have a motion so I would like to move to approve the proposed revisions to the report ing achievement descriptors Ys and labels for the smarter balance assessment for English and math and California science test as provided by tables 1B 2B and 3B of item four with the following amendments that the label of below basic will be replaced with a label of emerging with minimal as a descriptor and the label um basic for level two will be replaced with
299developing and do you want to add the uh descriptor at um a minimal after emerging so emerging would be the yeah okay was was there was that that was level two the one that had rudimentary and I think we had the proposal that it would be replaced by initial or something like that okay yeah so if we understand and emerging with minimal as the descriptor and developing with initial as the descriptor I think was also discussed rather than foundational which people were concerned let's try that do we have a second for the motion yeah surely okay so we move to propose the revision of the reporting achievement levels ALDS and labels for the smarter balance summative assessment for English language arts and math and science as provided by tables 1B 2B and 3B of item
300four with the following amendments uh below basic level one will be replaced with the label of emerging with minimal as the a descriptor of that term and um uh and label basic for level two will be replaced with uh with developing with I believe initial initial as a descriptor of that term we have a we have a lot of puzzled looks so do we need to ask any further discussion before we oh we need to see if there's a second then we can take further discussion then we can is there a second for the motion okay there's not a second for that motion so we need to see if there's another motion that would get closer to the consensus uh member Lewis were you were you you raised your hand I'm calling on you okay
301and I move that we use that we approve the label of minimal for level one and leave U minimal understanding in the descriptor and change the label for level two to developing and change the word fundamental to initial in the descriptor okay we have a motion is there a second for the motion okay vice president GL Woods you're seconding the motion any further discussion of the motion all right all in favor say I I keep your hand up so that Brooks can tally all right and uh those who vote no raise your hand for different reasons I know this is like the Supreme Court okay any extensions all right so the motion carries at 7 to4 and um do we dare take a break take a take a yeah it's 1:46 look like take a
30210-minute break wow all right good discussion e e e all right we are reconvening and uh we're about to take up consent agenda regular items five and seven and I'd like to uh I understand member esab will be includ accusing himself and we're going to open up the phone line uh for the ceue for public comment and consent items five and seven uh and you can uh make a comment by dialing the number and using the participant access code shown on the slide and while we're waiting I'll ask our liaison member mcquillin and member Rodriguez if they have any whoops am I on the right page here [Laughter] no too many pages are there any speakers signed up for public comment you guys don't get to comment on this one are there any uh speakers
303in the queue or in uh in the room for these items we don't have any speakers signed up in person and there are no callers in the queue all right do I have a motion on items five and seven consent items five and seven thank you very much member Rodriguez and a second member Alin thank thank you um and at this point uh show of hands for all in favor say I I any opposed and of course we have one abstention because um mcoo is recused all right we can get here we go and we're now going to take up item six which is the approval of the fiscal year 20242 Career Technical education incentive Grant allocations round 10B uh and the recommendation is that we review and approve those recommendations and this item will
304be presented by Erica Taurus hi Erica nice to see you from the CDE Erica please begin can you hear me okay all right uh good afternoon president Dr darling Hammond members of the State Board of Education Chief Deputy superintendent Dr Rogerson and members of the public my name is Erica Torres and I serve as the interim director for the career and college transition division I'm also the deputy superintendent of the Student Success and career Readiness branch in today's presentation I'm going to provide you with a brief overview of the Career Technical education incentive Grant round 10 allocations the revisions that we have made to the board item and the critical steps that we have taken to increase program Effectiveness and efficiency by improving internal processes so the California Career Technical education incentive Grant or C
305TIG was established by Statute in 2015 as a state education economic and Workforce Development initiative with the goal of providing pupils in kindergarten through grades 12 inclusive with the Knowledge and Skills necessary to transition to employment and post-secondary education the purpose of the C TIG competitive program is to encourage maintain and strengthen Career Technical education programs for our students a total of 300 million was available for fiscal year 2425 so CDE presented round 10A at the January 2025 State Board of Education meeting there were 413 fundable applications for a total of approximately 286 million in order to provide more support to our Alas and students the career and college transition division opened up around 10B there were 24 fundable applications for a total of approximately 11 million so there were two revisions to our board
306item one of the revisions was to reflect the positive consideration factors for round 10B to be corrected to match those used in round 10A for example in round 10A small eleas were allocated $774 per pupil in their unduplicated pupil count we corrected this item to ensure round 10B leas receive that exact same dollar amount per unduplicated pupil the second revision that we made was to remove two eleas from the round 10B allocation list because they were pre previously approved for funding in round 10A so as the interim director of the career and college transition Division I have been working really closely with my team to realign our processes and procedures to better serve and support our leas and of course all of our students as a CK team and I have worked through these revisions
307we've identified several opportunities for improving how we administer the program and we're committed to delivering the best possible support to California's elas and all of our students and we have taken critical steps to enhance program effectiveness and efficiency by improving internal processes uh these include strengthening the collaboration that the California Department of Education has with our state board of education colleagues our legislative staff the Department of Finance and key external Partners who are deeply invested in advancing Career Technical education programs in California so just looking ahead we are actively working on revising the requests for applications or our RFA for round 11 in addition we are preparing robust technical assistants to better support our leas in accessing and leveraging these funds and so we firmly believe in the transformative power of C TIG funds to
308open doors of opportunities for students across our great state of California our commitment to this work is unwavering and we are ready to roll up our sleeves to ensure that all students have access to high quality CTE programs and so the California Department of Education recommends that the State Board of Education approve the fiscal year 2425 Career Technical education incentive Grant allocations round 10B thank you thank you very much uh and we're going to put up the public comment slide please members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so by calling the phone number and using the access code shown on this slide and while we are waiting for um the public to queue up for comment I want to ask our Liaisons member mcquillin and member Rodriguez if they
309have any initial comments member mcquillin yes thank you for your leadership on this and it's really exciting to put money out for this area these are the folks who in the future will take care of our computer needs our electric car breakdowns and health care Healthcare areas the folks in the monies going towards Career Technical education so I appreciate the work on this and in our last committee we heard how students are doing and performing in this area when they have a focus area when they have a selection of a career their graduation rates are higher their attendance rates are higher and I would love to hear that report back here to the whole board at some point in time those students are doing really well so thank you and I I I appreciate this
310area thank you for uh cluing Us in on that that's awesome uh member Rodriguez he said that what what he said okay and are there any uh speakers signed up to provide comment in person no we have no inperson speakers and anyone on the phone there are no callers all right uh seeing that there is no uh public comment we'll open for any board discussion and then for a motion any discussion you want to make a motion okay terrific uh any second remember Rodriguez thank you very much all in favor say I I keep your hands up for Brooks any no all right any extensions motion carries thank you very much thank you very much Erica and we're now going to take up item eight which is the California Community Schools partnership program approval of
311the state technical assistance center contract awarde and the CDE recommends that we approve the recommendation for Sacramento County Office of Education to serve as the uh State technical uh assistance center and the item will be presented Again by Erica Tores and by hammed rwii of the CDE Erica please be thank you so much and good afternoon again uh president Dr Hammond members the State Board of Education Chief deputies superintendent Roberson members of the public my name is Eric Tores and I serve as the deputy superintendent for the Student Success and career Readiness Branch I'm so honored to be with you today and so we're going to present the California Department of education's recommendation for the next Statewide technical assistant center alongside me is Hamed razawi education administ ministrator for our community schools office who along
312with his amazing team has been instrumental in supporting the implementation of this program the California Community Schools partnership program represents a historic State investment in Community Schools between 2021 and 2022 California allocated 4.15 billion to the C cforia Department of Education to establish expand and sustain Community Schools in local educational agencies this investment continues through the 2032 school year the California Department of Education would like to acknowledge and thank the Alam County Office of Education and its estc partners for launching the estc in 2022 and leading the California Community Schools partnership program implementation for the past 3 years the eledia County Office of Education and its Partners stepped up to Lee grantees by creating resources and hosting webinars convening an Advisory Board launching the annual progress report and hosting the yearly Empower Summit for thousands
313of Educators Community School coordinators families Community or organizations the next estac has this Foundation to build upon in its work moving forward thank you Dr Taurus and it's an honor to be before you the State Board of Education and I would like to also say thank you so much for all the leadership and your continued support with your approval the CD has funded to date 419 planning grants to Alas with no Community Schools again with your leadership and support 389 implementation grants to leas with Community Schools supporting over 2,000 School sites and that's yet to uh count into um or that is yet to uh include the cohort 4 we have had 52 County coordination grants and a system of eight Regional technical assistance centers also known as RX and one Statewide technical assistance centers
314thank you so for implementation grants the last cohort is cohort 4 implementation Grant applications were due February 7th except for fire affected areas Los Angeles and Ventura we gave uh those areas 30 extra days so their applications are due March 7th this coming Friday the CD will be presenting the proposed list of grantees for the final implementation Grant cohort to the State Board of Education in May of 2025 this is northworthy similar to cohort 3 the the department has received a large volume of applications and is carefully reviewing them right now unfortunately the amount of funding is half of what was for cohort 3 so although preliminary we do not expect to be able to recommend funding to all eligible applicants the estac for which we are here today has a huge responsibility has had
315a huge responsibility some of them are but they're not limited to maintaining content and overarching methodology in other words ensuring that grantees receive high quality training and support that they facilitate a community of practice that they Foster peer learning and collaboration that they maximize and ensure that all gu anes benefit from proven practices they have been and will continue to collaborate with the CDE and collect and analyze data ensure that Community Schools are measured for success in continuous Improvement and last and definitely not least to maintain and support implementation of the capacity building strategies by strengthening coordination between various statel educational initiatives just a very brief uh timeline for the estac uh October 25th an RFA or request for application was released December 20th the application received by the CDE the due date December 2024
316until February of 2025 all applications were read very carefully and scored March of 2024 today we're here proposing the contract and two weeks after the SBE approval appeals must be received June 2025 finalizing the contract documents July first without any kind of a um gap between the two uh contracts the contract start date and June 30th of 2028 the end of contract the California Department of Education recommends that the Sacramento County Office of Education serve as the California Community Schools partnership program State technical assistance center the Sacramento County Office of Education proposes to partner with the University of California Los Angeles Center for Community schooling the National Education Association and Californians for justice the state technical assistant center contract has a total budget of up to 16 million with a current allocation of 10 million
317from 2025 to 2028 the remaining 6 million is allocated for an optional three-year renewal from 2028 to 2031 the Sacramento County Office of Education will work with the California Department of Education the State Board of Education the regional technical assistance centers the California Community Schools partnership program Advisory Board the youth Advisory Board a diverse partner Network other state agencies County offices of education and local education agencies to advance a whole child approach to education that values Equity collaboration and shared responsibility to improve student outcomes the Sacramento County Office of Education and its Partners have also committed to gathering and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on California Community Schools partnership program implementation to support continuous Improvement and sustainability in addition the Sacramento County Office of Education will maintain its role as the capital area artech or
318Regional technical assistance center so in terms of trans transition if the State Board of Education approves our recommendation the California Department of Education will take the following steps we will facilitate a seamless transition from the current state technical assistant center to the Sacramento County Office of Education I also want to share that the current state technical assistance center um has already reached out to the Sacramento County Office of Education to offer support and assist with a seamless transition in addition the California Department of Education will work closely with the Sacramento County Office of Education to finalize a contract which includes specific terms memorializing commitments regarding quantitative data collection and Analysis the California Department of Education recommends that the State Board of Education approve the cde's recommendation for the Sacramento County Office of Education to serve
319as the next California Community Schools partnership program State technical assistance center thank you thank you very much um we're now going to open the phone line for public comments and um those who'd like to comment can call the phone number and use the participant access code shown here and while we're waiting I'd like to ask our leaon member yoshimoto T if she has any initial comments before me thank you uh I just want to begin with a sincere thank you to the CDE team for all of your hard work in leading this um the sincere thanks to the Elam County Office of Education leadership and its Partners uh for launching the estac in 2022 when that was launched there were no Regional uh technical assistance centers so uh alone acoe really lifted that entire infrastructure
320and stepped up to lead the new grantees who had received implementation grants so thank you for your leadership over the years acoe um I see superintendent Gordon here today so thank you for being here today and for sko's commitment to uh continuing the authentic engagement and partnership and also for your commitment to collect the collection and Analysis of um quantitative data in addition to the qualitative data uh we know Community Schools decrease absenteeism um increase engagement in learning and uh we want to incapsulate all of that information uh as we move forward uh and then finally as our leaders suggested this morning highlighted this morning the tremendous response to the fires um and other unplanned events across the state it reinforces the power of community schools um in providing safe and secure learning environments for
321in a holistic way so um and in doing in in a different way CDE extended the deadline for Ventura County and La counties um in order to apply for cohort 4 so thank you for your response in that way as well so we look forward to approving the final round of um implementation grants at the following meeting and for Action today thank you and I will uh I'll plus one to those comments and uh note how nice it was H to see the statistics that you offered about how many uh 2018 you know community schools that are now up and running and then others to be added to that um the um competition for a new State uh technical assistance center uh uh raised up uh many more creative ideas for how to support the
322Community Schools initiative in the State uh and I think that uh we will um be uh increasingly talking about the outcomes that are being measured now of of this effort um and look forward to the ongoing opportunity to make this the way we do school in California so thank you um and I think at this point I want to see if there's any clarifying questions seeing none I'll see if oh yes member McCullen thank you for the presentation I'm just uh that I remember when this initiative was launched it just seemed like yesterday how quickly the years go by and I'm very interested in the sustainability uh what you talked about and described as crossing over into other uh funding opportunities and that kind of thing of maybe hearing some followup later on at other
323board meetings of how those efforts to sustain because the time flies you know so thank you that would be great um if there are no other clarifying questions we'll go ahead and get public comment if there is any in the room we have three speakers signed up in the room Steve McDougall Dave Gordon and Lindsay tornator members of the board Steve McDougall with CFT a union of Educators and classified professionals CFT supports staff's decision to move this stac to Sacramento County Office of Education one of the reasons is everything starts at the top and let me tell you something of the 14 leas in Cort 3 where CFT as representation of employees over half were unaware over half of the union leaders in those leas were unaware of the applications when I brought it to
324their attention and some of them I had to educate them on what a community school even is now I don't teach math but using the transitive property of mathematics I would say that they weren't included in the process as a stakeholder group to establish a community school from the beginning as we start a new at Sacramento County let's be sure that the stac ensures that the r taacs ensure that those leas that are involved in Community Schools present future whatever ensure that all stakeholders are included from the beginning certainly the folks doing the work labor Partners I would grade acoe as below basic in that respect thank you for your time president darling Hammond Chief Deputy superintendent Robison and members of the board uh I am Dave Gordon the county superintendent here in Sacramento and
325if approved uh my organization skoy will be humbled and thrilled to lead this effort in collaboration with CDE UCLA Nea and Californians for justice this is a big priority for us and we appreciate the board's confidence in our team uh and our work while districts schools and communities are making tangible strides in moving from planning to action the journey remains very complex it demands continued advocacy careful collection and clear communication of student outcome data and strategic Co coordination to ensure long-term success and most of all from our perspective sustainability after the grant funding runs out we look forward to collaborating with the RX to drive more strategic advocacy strengthen Partnerships and ensure intentional planning again for long-term sustainability so thank you for your confidence uh in US uh and uh we will we will do
326the very best we can to make Community Schools work throughout our state thank you very much good afternoon president darling Hammond vice president Glover Woods members of the board Chief Deputy Roberson Lindsay tornator on behalf of the California county superintendents congratulate the Sacramento County Office of Education on their nomination to serve at as the California Community Schools partnership program State technical assistance center um as we heard from Dr Tores the foundation for this program has been laid under the Visionary leadership of the Alam County Office of Education and we are very grateful for their service and dedication to this important initiative County offices remain committed to serving our students and communities via the ccpp and are appreciative of the leadership of the state board and the Department of Education thank you for the opportunity to
327provide our support that's the end of public comment uh we do have some callers in the queue I'm not sure if they're for the next item or not but we will open the phone line now um we announc which item this is we are currently um taking public comment for item number eight uh caller with the last four digits 914 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute your time starts now good afternoon president darling ham and members of the board my name is Karen Hunter courtz and I am representing the UCLA Center for Community schooling we are really excited to build on our past three years of work to provide transformational assistance to the state's Community Schools in partnership with the Sacramento County Office of Education as well as
328our current Partners the National Education Association in California for justice we look forward to deepening our relationship with the artx and local grantees through our deep dive transformation strategy as well as the collection and use of data on implementation and student outcomes to support continuous Improvement UCLA is well positioned to continue this leadership role given our commitment to public scholarship as well as our track record of supporting powerful Community Schools thank you so much thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 7978 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute thanks that's me uh thank you and good afternoon president darling Hammond superintendent Thurman and members of the board my name is Dave Greenberg and I'm representing the National Education Association in support of the community school state
329transformational Assistance Center contract for the next three years of funding the National Education Association is proud to partner with UCLA Californians for justice and the Sacramento County Office of Education to advance the work of Community Schools across California Nea is the nation's largest Professional Organization of Educators and we've been involved in the community schools movement since 1902 Nea will continue to leverage its Community Schools expertise and resources to further the SPAC NAA will also continue to elevate the role of Educators and School staff in the community school process California has been a national leader in community tools and this contract will allow us to build on the transformative work already underway I urge the board to approve this fat contract thank you thank you um next caller with the last four digits 0874 you are
330now live please start your public comment you have one minute greetings esteemed education colleagues and thank you so much for the opportunity to speak on behalf of Californians for justice and our our estc application my name is marentes co-executive director of cfj and we would be truly honored to continue our important role on the estac knowing that our organization provides unique and valuable insights into the roles of students families and Community organizations in the implementation of Community Schools um we strongly know that we are well positioned to provide expert guidance across the state regarding the bottom up and top down integration of Youth and Community voice and decision-making in particular we would also be really excited to continue stewarding the youth Advisory Board and to continue bringing these perspectives into the annual Summit as well
331as the capacity building work with our taac and districts across our diverse California regions thank you so much thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 1816 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute good afternoon State Board of Ed and family this is Elise Castro Alama County super tenant of schools and I just wanted to take a moment to share an appreciation for this board's commitment to making Community Schools just the way we do schools in California I really want to appreciate Dr Torres and Hamid and all of the CDE colleagues for recognizing and supporting the efforts over the past three years and a special thanks to RI rigel masaro at the state board for her guidance and support I also I'm going to take the opportunity
332to give a shout out for Dr Roberson for her role in getting this work up and going and and most especially to the aracs who have provided the day in and day out support to all of our schools as they make this conversion to a true Community Schools approach uh at the alamaa County Office of Ed we are fully committed to a smooth and effective transition plan as we finish our work and pass the Baton to Sacramento Coe team and a special thanks to superintendent Gordon for making that happen we will continue to support the arax and the grantees and we continue our Firm support and commitment to the Community Schools model the whole child approach and continue this work through transforming together Partnerships for bridging mental health funding and ultimately communic um ultimately working
333and committing to the sustainability of this work longterm so we want to just thank you again for the opportunity acoe has had to lead this work and please don't hesitate any of us to he reach out to our awesome AE team as we support thank you thank next caller with the last four digits 8674 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute good afternoon Rachel Murphy with public advocates in the California partnership for the future of learning we wish to provide comments on the need to provide additional funding to meet the large demand for the California Community School partnership program grants as the board is aware Community Schools are critical resource hubs and safe havens of belonging at a time when our students and families most need this support this
334approach has been especially effective in addressing chronic absenteeism and supporting schools serving more than 80% High need students nearly 2700 such high need schools have not received Community Schools grants including over 900 in districts that were awarded planning grants California Budget and policy Center found that funding just these 900 schools would cost about 1.3 billion yet only 680 million remains for this final cohort of grantees we hear that the current applicant pool for cohort 4 grants is similar in size to cohort 3 yet roughly half the amount of funding is available to ensure all School communities that are counting on this lifechanging opportunity can have access we encourage the board to advocate for ongoing funding in this proven and transformative approach if not in this budget year then the next thank you thank you uh
335that concludes public comment for item number eight thank you very much at this point we can take any board discussion and a motion um to um uh approve the renewal of uh approve the new uh uh allocation of the stac do we have any further discussion do I have a motion remember yosari I move that the board approve cde's recommendation for Sacramento County Office of Education uh to serve as the next California Community Schools partnership program State transformational Assistance Center thank you is there a second remember mcquillin thank you very much uh any further discussion all in favor say I raise your hand keep it up for Brooks okay any oppose say nay any extensions motion carries thank you very much uh and now we are going to move and thank you very much for
336the all the work that went uh into getting us to this place as well as for the presentation item nine is a public hearing regarding the petition for the renewal of a charter school authorized by the California State Board of Education it's consideration of ala School South Bay uh the California Department of Education recommends that the State Board Grant the charter schools petition for renewal for a term of 5 years beginning July 1 20125 ending June 30th 2030 with two technical amendments uh add that this SB designate the San Diego County Board of Education as the chartering Authority the item will be presented by Susan Park of the CDE uh Susan uh please begin thank you good afternoon today we have a petition for renewal for a charter school authorized by the state board called
337Altus School South Bay represented by a lot of blue t-shirts behind me um a quick summary of the issue the State Board authorized Charter School submitted its petition uh to renew to the state board but if the State Board grants renewal uh it will be it shall be designated by the state board to either be assigned to um the county or district and in consultation with the school the school has requested to be assigned and delegated to the County Board of Education oh I didn't show you that slide apologies um CDE recommends that the State Board Grant the petition for renewal for the full five-year term beginning July 1st 2025 ending June 30 2030 with two technical amendments that have been discussed with the charter school and agreed upon and they mainly address a change
338in law and student discipline as well as a process for the home language survey uh the recommendation is continued to just let you know that we checked all the boxes and that the petition is consistent with sound educational practice with the and with the interest of the community where the Charter School is located it includes a comprehensive description of all the 15 required elements in statute and also all performance requirements under state and local indicators and alternative metrics it's a little bit different for a d School uh dashboard alternative school status Das program and so we can go into that in as much detail as is helpful a little background about the school it was initially uh denied at the local school district level in 2016 the charter school appealed to the county it was
339denied there in 2017 and then later that year the State Board did Grant Grant the petition and um we have a term that ended 2025 but due to covid extensions um we had it go I'm sorry to 2022 and it went all the way to 2025 so that's where we are today um as required by law Altus originally submitted its renewal back to the Local District the district did deny it for state board authorized ster schools they skip the county and they come directly back to the State Board board and that's the action you have before you today on November 4th The Advisory Commission on Charter Schools approved the CD's recommendation to renew this Charter and that's um today's action in terms of where the Charter School is located it is an independent study non-classroom
340based school it serves grades 7 to 12 and it operates four Resource Centers within the boundaries of the district so those are the four Resource Centers by address and by Resource Center name the standard of review for all Charter Schools is set forth in the Education Code and as I mentioned we did determined it is consistent with sound educational practice and with the interest of the community in which the school is proposing to locate and attachment one has a very detailed review of each of the 15 elements further for Charter Schools participating in Das as does Altus the Education Code provides that to Grant or deny the renewal the chartering Authority shall consider in addition state and local indicators as well as performance on what we call alternative metrics and these are very unique to
341the school before you they're not Statewide alternative metrics they're agreed upon metrics between the charter school and the authorizing entity finally if the chartering Authority which uh seeks to deny a renewal of a Das Charter Schools it must make written finding set forth with specific facts related to the that the closure of the charter school is in the best interest of the students so that's very unique to D charter schools with regard to cde's Renewal analysis as I mentioned we have alternative metrics with regard to altta South there were 18 alternative metrics that would be applied to this school for Renewal the CDE reviewed all 18 metrics and determined that alst met met or substantially met all them in fact we found they met 17 of them and substantially met one of them this next
342slide gives you just a topic of all 18 metrics you can see they're very comprehensive in addressing um academics as well as absenteeism as well as satisfaction confidence in by students and parents expressed in surveys so it's a very comprehensive list of 18 state and local indicators regardless of how the uh authorizing Authority and the charter school green on metrics the law still requires that the authorizing entity look at state and local in indicators as well as noted in the second bullet Altis out performed Statewide averages on four of seven State indicators and met all of the local indicators based on the most recent 2024 dashboard fiscal analysis is always considered in terms of CDE review and overall the CD reviewed the multi-year budgets and found the school financial plan to be sufficient below is
343a table that tells you current enrollment by grad span 422 and the school projects a moderate growth over the next 5 years to 468 which CDE determined is very reasonable giving it given its past enrollment patterns this list is the 15 elements in statute for all charter schools and then finally just to reiterate in the conclusion CDE recommends the full 5-year term for Altus beginning this July ending June 30 2030 and uh with two technical uh amendments regarding the student discipline policy as well as the home language survey and to just reiterate the charter school has already indicated that they are agreeable to both technical amendments thank you that concludes your presentation that concludes my presentation so uh thank you very much um I guess we're GNA uh show the public hearing slide briefly oh
344you're sting no we well you go right ahead and get the plaintiff U the uh presentation set up as you were um I'm going to open the public hearing at 2:38 p.m. we'll hear from the petitioner Al to schools South Bay they'll have up to 10 minutes to make their presentation after the petitioner presentation we will open the phone line for public comment from individuals who are not part of the presentation and so when you are ready petitioners you can begin Al righty well good afternoon president darling Hammond vice president Glover Woods board members and CDE staff my name is Wade Ash Bruner and I am the lead petitioner for ala School South Bay we are here to share the importance of ala School South Bay some of our accomplishments our impact on the community
345and first and foremost we're seeking the your approval so that we can continue to serve the families in San Diego South Bay ala School South Bay serves over 400 students in grades 7 through 12 with an independent study model C custombuilt student schedules provide flexibility and are tailored to each students's academic and personal goals from UC a through G improve courses to Resource Centers built to engage students our approach is designed to empower every learner uh our four Resource Centers are located throughout the South Bay communities and within the geographic boundaries of the Sweetwater uni Unified High School District they serve as integral hubs for student learning these centers serve as the heart of our instructional model uh offering students a place to connect with their teachers receive personalized support and most importantly Thrive academically
346in a personalized setting our student demographics are as follows 66.9 of new students enrolling are credit deficient compared to their grade level two grade levels below in English language arts and up to three Le three grade levels below in mathematics students stay in our school for an average of 12 months we uh offer a yearr round school schedule so students can be in school for a continuous 12 months our student reflects the rich diversity of the community in the South Bay alt to school South Bay uh Ser students from a wide variety of cultural linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds this creates a vibrant and inclusive learning environment 75% of our students are socio economically disadvantaged nearly 25% come to us with special education plans or IEPs and unfortunately we have up to 7% of our students
347experiencing homelessness current currently by focusing on Equity inclusion and an excellent multi-tiered support system we ensure that every student is supported to reach their full potential since our Inception in 2017 ala School South Bay has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to compliance and accountability our track record with meeting theou with the state board and our ability to exceed Charter renewal criteria reflects our dedication to maintaining high standards the table on the slide summarizes the 18 alternative metrics Andor renewal criteria that were analyzed by the CDE staff as a basis for its renewal recommendation as a Dos school ALA School South Bay must have an unduplicated count of at least 70% of the students cumulative enrollment upon first entry entry into the school comprised of high-risk student groups the majority of as assb students fall into three
348groups as as far as D criteria is considered they are one students who are credit deficient this means students who enter one semester or more behind in credits towards graduation number two students with a high level of transiency This Means students have been enrolled in two or more schools during the past Academic Year or have changed secondary schools more than two times since entering high school and third uh group of students is uh habitually Trent meaning they have been reported as Trent three or more times in in a school year so the Dos metrics which I know are coming before this board is very important to a school like ours that uh we continue to serve this at risk population when it comes to Casp English language arts our Ela scores demonstrate our students ability
349to excel academically often exceeding expectations for comparable schools Al to school South Bay students scored over 125 points higher than the San Diego County dos School average and nearly 110 point points above the state do school average these outcomes highlight our rigorous academic support effective teaching strategies and and the success of a personalized learning plan in math are students consistently outperform their peers proving that personalized instruction Works in mathematics our 2024 CP results were 50 points above the San Diego County do school average and 60 points higher than the state dos School average our ability to address students unique learning needs we we ensure that there that they experience success in core academic areas such as English language arts and math our English learner progress indicator is a commitment to supporting English Learners and this
350has led to them thriving achieving results that significantly surpass Regional and state averages in 2024 ala School South Bay results for the English learn progress indicator were 15 percentage points higher than the county Doss average and 16% higher than the state Doss average this reflects again that tailored interventions one-on-one instruction and focus on langu and focusing on language development ensure that English Learners Thrive academically and linguistically chronic absenteeism our proactive approach to student engagement has led to a remarkable chronic absentee rate of only 5.5% in 2023 this res this rate is 20.7% lower than the county dos average and 41.6% lower than the state Doss average these results again emphasize our strong student support system personalized attention and the ability to foster a learning environment that uh motivates students to attend and attend school succeed
351and engage with their teachers our dos graduation rate uh despite enrolling many students are who are behind in credits or struggling academically ass B has maintained a graduation rate of 94.4% which is well above the county and state dos averages with a dropout rate consistently below 5% we have proven that even the most at promised students can achieve academic success and graduate prepared for their Futures a testament to the power of individualized learning it wouldn't happen without our dedicated group of teachers and support staff our teaching staff is the backbone of our success we recruit Educators who are passion about personalized learning and com committed to the school's Mission with a 98% approval rating from parents and students our teachers exemplify Excellence they receive ongoing professional development including Leading Edge certification from San Diego County
352Office of Ed and participate in a CTC approved teacher induction program additionally our teachers benefit from a 12-month contract which is of 228 contract based days with a comprehensive 100% employer paid benefits including that of their eligible dependents reflecting our commitment to attracting and retaining the best Educators for our students some of the achievements that we are proud of we are very proud to be a top performing dos School in both San Diego County as well as the state of California our steady enrollment growth reflects the trust families place in our programs with a solid uh Financial foundation and full compliance with all legal and educational standards we continue to be a leader in independent studies throughout the state these accomplishments are a testament to the strength of our mission and the dedication of our
353team in closing ala School South Bay is proud to have helped nearly 500 students complete their High School requirements many of them were not on track to graduate we are committed to strengthening the public school system here in California and ensuring every student has access to a quality education alt to school South Bas stands as a model of success academically financially and operationally we respectfully request your approval of our renewal so that we can continue to serve the students of the South Bay Community thank you so much for your time and consideration today thank [Applause] you uh we're now going to open the phone line for public comment from IND individuals who are not part of the presentation uh and U members of the public wishing to provide comment can do so in person or
354by calling the telephone number that is listed on this slide and using the access code that is there uh before we turn to public comment we're a bit behind in the schedule and I see that we have many individuals interested in providing public comment on this item as we have received quite a bit of public comment in writing on this item and to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak I would ask that for those commenters who support the Department's recommendation for Renewal uh or oppose it unless you are providing a new reason for supporting or opposing that hasn't been stated today please simply state that you support the recommendation for Renewal or oppose it so that we can get to everyone and hear every voice uh members of the public um uh who
355are in the room and want to provide public comment uh shall we start um hearing from you yes I will name the first five signups we have azaret lascano and aat rangal Sebastian Garcia Daisy Jimenez and keani dun we thank you for coming all the way up here from San Diego hello everyone my name is aidet lascano I've been a part of the school for six years and I'm excited to graduate this year in June and joined the Air Force Academy to study computer science I'm incredibly grateful for the support and guidance I've receive for my teachers and counselors throughout my time at ala School South Bay please help support my school thank you just say this I support Outlet School South Bay hi I support Altis schools of South Bay uh I support all
356School South Bay good afternoon board members I'm Daisy Jimenez I support South Bay Al South Bay the next five are Aaron Henderson Tristan rangal s marala Lopez Jayla Madan and Aurora V good afternoon I support Altis School South Bay uh good afternoon I support Altis School South Bay good good afternoon I support Altis School South Bay thank you board for having us I'm a I'm an student alumni thank you and I support South Bay alst Al South Bay next five are Aaliyah kovar rubias Brenda hobo Ryan Olsen darell olssen Johanna Chavez hello my name is Brenda I'm a parent at um salpe alos I support Alto salpe thank you good afternoon I'm Aaliyah and I support Altis School South Bay good afternoon uh my name is Ryan olssen and I quite like Al to School
357South Bay so I would like to see it renewed please hi I'm Daryl Olsson I'm Ryan's father I support uh ala School South Bay hello B members of the board and CD staff I'm zahar Johanna Chavez and I support ala School South Bay thank you the next five are Rebecca Chavez Nomi Henderson Scott Henderson Jaden Madan aiyah Madan good afternoon sport um this is Rebecca Chavez and please support our all school thank you good afternoon board members my name is Naomi Henderson and I support Alta School South Bay good afternoon my name is Jayden mun and I 100% support alter School South Bay thank you my name's Aliyah mat Yun and I support alter School South Bay thank you good afternoon my name is Scott Henderson and I support Altis School South Bay and I
358have two daughters there and finally uh Lea MAA Allison Fleck Nicholas Watson and Eric prac good afternoon my name is Lisha McKay and I support Altis School South Bay good afternoon thank you for having us my name is Allison Fleck I'm the school coordinator of Alta School South Bay I ask you to approve the school renewal good afternoon I'm Nicholas Watson from the California Charter Schools Association in support of the staff recommendation thank you Eric Prem Charter Schools Development Center me too um there are three callers I will open the phone line now uh caller with the last four digits 1312 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi everyone my name is Raquel Maiden I'm Raquel Marquez Maiden actually and I am a parent to a 15-year-old at
359ala School South Bay I'm also a former Schoolboard trustee for sedal school district and I also support the recommendation of the staff to approve Altis School self pay thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 6952 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi good evening my name is Denise bis and I'm a proud student at Alto School South Bay and I also um approved the recommendations thank you uh next caller with the last four digits 7271 you are now live please start your public comment you have one minute hi my name is Alexa pis and I support alter School South B renewal thank you that concludes public comment for item number nine all right thank you so much and we appreciate um the uh input from
360uh so many of you and and the fact that you are willing to be here in person I hereby close the public hearing at 2:54 p.m. and we'll now begin board discussion first I'd like to ask our Lea vice president GL woods and member oen if they would like to make some initial comments thank you president darling Hammond and yes I would like to make some comments um first for the board to know the um accs overwhelmingly um supported the renewal of uh this school and I have to tell all of you who spoke so briefly um I had an opportunity even though I was not president at the accs meeting I took time to watch the entire meeting and the stories and just Jo testimonies to what the school has done and how the
361school has impacted you as students as parents and even staff members was absolutely phenomenal and board members I would encourage you in all your free time if you can go to the recording for the last accs meeting and listen to these phenomenal stories um I have to tell you I was moved to tears and my husband came in he said why are you crying and I just couldn't even get it out and they were tears of joy just to hear how impactful uh this particular school has been in the lives of so many so boards as as we have heard I I too support the renewal and the staff recommendation um I I will just add a couple of things one is um the way that the students and staff and family members spoke about
362the school at accs is I think what we want for all of our schools and all of our students um we want our students to know they matter they have great opportunities ahead of them and that their education is about them um and so um it was just really a great day um to hear you all and thanks for being here today um and also just on a sort of technical note um I just want to reiterate that the there was a thorough review of the um the charter itself as well as the achievement of the school um by the department and um found that this school is one that is um in all ways meeting expectations for Renewal so anyway it's it's a good day thank you all right um is there any further
363discussion and I will entertain a motion when you're ready any discussion may I have a motion I am happy to make a motion and actually we're gonna there's there's two motions on this item um so I'm going to start with the uh renewal motion which I have right in front of me so I say it with all appropriate language one moment I know okay I move that we Grant the alt to school South based petition for renewal for a term of five years beginning on July 1st 2025 and ending June 30th 2030 with the two technical amendments described in the item you second all right we have a motion as second any further discussion of the motion all in favor say I I keep your hand up for all right any opposed say nay any
364extensions motion carries [Applause] congratulations and we have a second motion sure so in um we have another responsibility as a board which is to designate um the chartering Authority so I move that we designate the San Diego County Board of Education as the charting chartering Authority for ala School South Bay the County San Diego County Office of Education Office of Education yep sorrys good got all these boards in my head today is there a second uh member uh Glover Woods uh any further discussion of the motion all in favor say I I any opposed nay any extensions the motion carries all right thank [Applause] you would that all our public hearings were so [Laughter] straightforward and at this point we're going to go on to the waiver consent calendar thank you so much uh Susan
365for presenting the item uh we're g to uh take up waiver consent items W1 through W9 and we're opening the public uh the phone line for public com ment and we'll now ask uh first is there any in-person public comment on W1 through W9 there is no in-person public comment all right and we'll just give it a minute for everyone to happily file out and [Laughter] um is there any public comment on on is there any public comments on the phone for W1 through W9 there are no colors in the que all right hearing none do I have a motion member Lewis I move that we approve waivers items number one through number nine and do I have a second giving us see M give someone else a chance to get in h yeah show
366of hands okay everyone in favor please say I raise your hand any anyone say nay any extensions the motion carries thank you and we're now going to take up uh item 10 which is the can I'm waiting for everyone to be ready the Academia Advance Charter uh cons consider uh issuing a notice of violation pursuant to California Education Code section 47607 g uh and the CDE does recommend that we issue a notice of violation uh the item will be presented by su Susan Park of the CDE and we'll invite you to begin thank you good afternoon again um today is a summary of the issue is the Academia Avance charter school is a state board authorized charter school and the CDE has red viewed and determined that substantial evidence exists demonstrating that the charter school
367engaged in fiscal mismanagement pursuant to the education code 47607 F3 uh pursuant to the Education Code The Authority that granted the charter petition shall notify the charter school of any violation and provide the charter school with a reasonable opportunity to remedy the violation the CDE recommends that the State Board issue a notice of violation to Academia Vance which is an attachment one pursuant to the Education Code as the school has engaged in fiscal mismanagement as determined by cde's review the California state law allows for four different reasons for revocation in the cde's review the third reason failed to meet generally accepted accounting principles or engaged in FIS fiscal mismanagement is the one before you today some background about the charter school the charter school operates under the authorization of the State Board of Education with
368oversight duties delegated to the CDE and the current Charter term ends June 30 2028 the charter school offers a classroom based program and serves approximately 200 students in grades 6 through 12 the charter school previously operated two sites but Consolidated recently into a single site as part of addressing declining revenue and and declining enrollment as well uh the table here provides a synopsis of the chronology of the treasure schools stablishment which was originally with the Los Angeles Unified School District in 20 in 2005 and the charter school opened that year at renewal Los Angeles UniFi denied the renewal and the charter school appealed to the Los Angeles County the appeal was granted however at renewal the county denied the petition so following an appeal of that in 2015 the State Board granted the renewal and
369became the third chartering author authority of the charter school in 2020 the State Board granted a renewal and this that is the current renewal term that we're in right now and then in May of 2024 based on fiscal report submitted to the CDE the CDE issued a letter of concern the first one in the following fiscal year the current fiscal year in on November 6 2024 the CD issued a second letter of concern pertaining to fiscal issues just by way of overall background with regard to cde's relationship with the school the CDE provides regular technical assistance to Academia Vance along with all other state board authorized Charter Schools this translates into meeting monthly with the charter school leadership which might include the executive director Andor Charter board members and they review fiscal condition as well
370as other oversight areas in addition as required by law the CDE conducts an annual in-person site visit which includes interviews as well as document review a discussion topics at the monthly oversight meetings and the annual site visit have included cde's concerns regularly about the Charter School's budget about assumptions in their enrollment projections as well as the noted decreasing Revenue the increasing debts and liabilities as well as the lack of internal controls as noted the CDE has issued two letters of concerns in the past 10 months with regard to fiscal mismanagement for purposes of determining that finding the CDE considers the fiscal crisis and management assistance team indicators of risk or potential insolvency specifically for charter schools there laid out to you here as 15 and we focus on five of them in the next couple
371slides the first one is ineffective internal controls so the thick mat um identifying risk factor is defined for you there but in some beginning balances that are not posted and reconciled with the ending balance from the prior fiscal year so basically balancing your checkbook register so that the ending balance matches the beginning balance and here with regard to AC Academia Avance unfortunately the beginning fund balance for the present fiscal year did not align with the ending fund balance of the prior fiscal year and so that concerned CDE was noted and the beginning fund balance of a negative 2.25 a911 million um was not matching the1 million 1,98 87 and that's a very large Delta of3 8,14 as particularly given the school size and so in cde's review it demonstrates an ineffective internal control and supports
372a finding of fiscal mismanagement the second fmat indicator relates to decreasing fund balance and decreasing reserve for economic uncertainty so here in California there is anou between state board authorized charter schools and charter schools to have a minimum of 5% financial reserve for economic uncertainty while the school maintained it for a period of time it was noted um by the May 6 2004 letter of concern that the school had dipped just under the 5% at 4.86% so CDE immediately went into a letter of o uh concern to make sure that that would not fall further and that was an area that was noted for fiscal scho mismanagement um in addition it unfortunately did fall further and the school's projected negative ending fund balance for the current fiscal year um dropped into below not only 4.86%
373but into a negative a third fmat finding or indicator of risk and concern relates to inattention to enrollment uh as the school has noted and reported it did have over 400 students at a point of time however in the past seven consecutive years the enrollment has declined from 391 um all the way to 200 as of January just um a month and a few weeks ago the CDE has noted in those monthly calls concerns so these are not surprise findings these are findings that are uh discussed with the school regularly also with regard to enrollment uh the CDE noted in its May letter that the current fiscal year budget would need to be very reflective of that projected enrollment of 200 students unfortunately two revised budgets received from the school were based on a projected
374enrollment of 220 students now given the school's small size that's a 10% difference and when the revenue related to that it's significant so 20 students for a 200 person school is very significant and so what alarm CD in particular is that this was a charter board action in its fiscal corrective action plan on June 1st so we have a disconnect between what the charter board committed to do June 1st and what the charter board submitted as budgets to CDE on July 1st and July 22nd the fourth uh finding related to fiscal mismanagement that CDE reviewed and I apologize for the small font um but we have unreliable budget development um In Sum that checkbook idea that you need to know what your ending fund balance is to plan your beginning fund balance and when you
375don't have that the budget that's developed tends to not be reliable because you were not starting with a reliable um balance and so the reports that are required by law are summarized for you on the left and what we call the unaudited actuals for the prior fiscal year is due every year by Statute to the CDE on September 15th you can set your clock by it unfortunately this was not submitted by the charter school until January 31st so that we're well into the fiscal year before we have submitted what our prior year-ending fund balance was the first interim so this is now in the present fiscal year was uh submitted on time however it's based without un audited actuals so I have an untimely report I have a timely report but it's not reliable because
376it's not based on actuals and then finally annually an independent audit report which is relied on for many different purposes is required to be submitted to the CDE every year by December 15th it as of today it has not yet been submitted we have been in numerous talks with the charter schools to go over status so again these are not surprises these have been discussed with the charter school at length and at regular intervals but as of today March 5th we do not have an independent audit for the prior fiscal year finally our fifth finding for your consideration is in attention to debt so I mentioned some very large numbers of negative ending fund balances and those projections are based on statements of financial positions as well as aging reports where the CDE looks at
377what types of debts there are the amounts of the debts and how old those debts are and so if a debt is over 120 days past to that's very very alarming and you can see here in bullet point 3 1.5 million of debt of that 1.1 million are 120 days past due so the inattention to debt ratio and past you outstanding invoices indicates significant risk of potential insolvency which supports a finding a fiscal mismanagement based on those five areas highlighted by CDE we do recommend today that the State Board of Education issue a notice of violation to the Academia Avance Charter pursuant to Education Code 47607 G as the school engaged in fiscal mismanagement sf4 and education code 47607 F3 with regard to CD's recommendation this is a summary of the Charter School's right to
378respond in terms of process for revocation which is of course the very very serious action and it lays out the next three dates so by March 13th the charter school can submit a written response to each of those findings that I laid before you provide evidence remedial action taken proposed remedies and to each of those five and I want to note that this information was shared with the school um well before today's date um beginning on February 14th regard to the notice of violation as well as informing them of the posting of this specific write up on February 21st and then um following the next portion of action would be on April 8th which is the accs advisory Commission on Charter Schools meeting at that meeting Academia Avance will have the opportunity to present evidence
379to accs to refute or remedy each of the alleged violations after that we get into the May 7th and 8th state board uh public hearing if the notice of violation is issued today uh following the March 13th response that's reviewed following the accs April 8th consideration on May 7th to 8th the State Board uh in a public hearing could consider whether there is substantial evidence to or remedy each violation and then determine whether to issue a notice of intent to revoke so this is not a fast process this has a lot of opportunity to respond and so I want to make sure that that is very very clear if you have any questions about that process this concludes my presentation and have the next slide up thank you thank you very much uh well this
380is um we can put the public comment slides that people can queue up for public comment by calling this number and using the participant access code here uh while this item is not a public hearing we would like to provide an opportunity for the charter school to make a brief presentation Victor Airi will now have five minutes to address the State Board I believe he is available on zoom and we need to see there he is we we you Victor um please begin good afternoon president Dr Dr Mark darling Hammond vice president Dr Glover woods and honorable members of the State Board of Education I have been serving Academia Avance as executive director since October this year this school year um I apologize for not being able to be there in person however I did
381want to express that we are disappointed by the recommendation to issue a notice of violation to close the school as we believe we were making Headway in the school's financial turnaround up until we learned about this recommendation two weeks ago and fact fact um our accounts payable reflects a um our AP is now under 1 million um and so we are making strides there however in light of the school's ongoing Financial challenges and also in respect of conserving State Board of Education and cde's resources we do not want this to be an expensive and protracted fight that would harm stakeholders as of today's day our board and school leaders need a little time to explore whether it may be viable may be a viable option to bring in an experienced and successful Charter School operator
382to take over the charter and continue the planned Financial turnaround and we would appreciate your support on that in the event we are able to go that route otherwise we would soon be exploring that with CDE staff how to close the school in an orderly and in as orderly a manner as possible at the end of this school year while supporting families and exploring their act school children choices we have communicated all of this to CDE staff our school leadership team is also communicating to school staff and families our school has long been an important part of the Highland Park Community has made a significant impact on students we serve for example of our 52 students at present or uh to be graduating this school year 80% have an have been accepted to a CSU
38318% have been accepted to a UC and 23% have been accepted to private university and we will continue to put students first in addition in early February 99% of our current staff submitted intent to return letters because they believe in the school and what we offer our students as a brief um background our school Community as other schools in the and districts have gone through significant post-pandemic challenges in our Urban neighborhood in Los Angeles ultimately causing the school's enrollment and revenues to decline from Target enrollment numbers our founder and former leader team separated former leadership team separated from the school from August to September the school has spent this school year in transition and turnaround mode we've been making Headway on what we believed would have would be a financial turnaround including shrinking from three
384uh campuses to one exiting and resolving several contractual obligations entering into long-term payment plans for some of the schools outstanding vendor debts Etc we've been in constant communication with the California Department of Education staff on these issues on Fe February 14th 2025 in one of our meetings the CDE staff informed us that the CD would in fact be recommending an issuance of a an noov today we are well aware of the school's financial situation but had believed we were making progress on the turnaround and we mistakenly thought the agreed in the past two weeks since learning an noov might be issued we've put extensive time and effort into exploring what's realistic for the future of our school we currently work we are currently working with the financial expert to review and address discrepancies in our
385financials and to ensure accuracy and compliance strengthen internal controls and conduct a thorough review of our debt and expenses as noted we do not wish to engage in a lengthy and expensive legal battle over revocation we would respectfully request the opportunity to continue with our turnaround plan under the current Charter but if the State Board of Education disagrees and issues an noov then we will prioritize an orderly transition or closure at the end of the school year we want what's best for families students and staff we will of course share with parents if the noov is issued today and we will ensure that the school has a parent communication plan in place for the duration of the school year the school would if it closes also assist parents with with plans for the next school
386year in the best interest of our students thank you for your consideration thank you uh and now we're going to put up the public comment slide members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so by calling the telephone number and using the access code shown on the slide and while we're waiting I want to ask our liaison vice president GL woods and member Olen if they have any initial comments thank you president darling ham and um just a couple of points before we go into public comment that I think will be important for the board to keep in mind um during our discussion one is the extensive support and communication that the California Department of Education has engaged in um in relation to this particular school as um Susan Park
387reviewed during the presentation there have been a lot of communications a lot of opportunities to work together to try to remedy this um the second is understanding that the action that's before us today is regarding issuing a notice of violation a notice of violation is not a notice of revocation that would close the school the notice of violation as uh Susan put up gives opportunity for the school to respond show um remedy remedy situations if you will or remedy ideas um and then in May the information would come back to us again after it's gone to the accs so again just keeping in mind that the action today is not to close the school the action today is to um issue a notice of violation if that's what the board should decide the last point
388that I want to uh just kind of point out is timing with this and the fact that um if we don't issue a notice of violation for the concerns and the school continues to meet it with challenges there wouldn't be opportunity for them to move forward as um Mr agar had shared to close the school be before the new school year begins so we might be faced with a consideration of a notice of revocation perhaps in the middle of a school year which would be very disruptive to families so just a few points to keep in mind as we engage in our conversation after public comment member oen I I mean I would only I agree with all of um what president vice president glver wood said um and I appreciate your framing it for
389us and just to you know to note that while this is a heavy and important decision to make today um it is one step along a process um one that um still gives um would give the school time if it's feasible to turn things around or to find a solution so thank you is there uh are there any clarifying questions before we go to public comment seeing none I think we want to see if there's any public comment in the room or on the phone have two speakers in the room Steve McDougall and Eric prac please step up to the microphone we're having a hard time hearing you but um members of the board Steve McDougall CFT a union of Educators and classified professionals uh CFT agrees with the staff recommendation to um issue that
390notice it's very troubling um to hear the financial concerns with this school having been a a Schoolboard trustee in a very small school district for 9 years previously of just under a thousand students maintaining that Reserve is so critical uh one of my early years on the board we had one student with special needs that cost us about a quarter of a million dollars in a year that threw our Reserve out of whack fortunately we had a cushion that we could weather that um expense that obligation that we had to that student and that student's family the school really needs to take the these concerns seriously and turn it around otherwise you're going to have to close up shop very concerning the fiscal crisis for the school that's all I have to say and thank
391you for listening Eric preac with the charter schools Development Center we thank the CDE for this work they've done on this and understand that this is a tough decision that you're going to have to move forward with today uh and support you in doing that but I also want to uh commend the school for taking a lot of very difficult decisions the pandemic and the slowdown in Immigration have really caused their de uh enrollment to decline by more than half and I think that's created a financial Tail Spin that's very difficult to come out of um I do hope that you can give them every uh opportunity to explore mergers and other uh things so that they can uh help outplay their students and serve them uh most effectively going forward and uh commend the
392school for taking a lot of very hard decisions here uh and uh not contesting this procedure thank you and there are no colors in the queue all right uh so uh we will now open for board discussion is there any um comment or question among the board members member I just have one question um so you noted in your presentation a that you've been that CD has been having um monthly oversight meetings um is that um what we do with all of the State Board authorized Charters yes we meet with all state board authorized charter schools on a monthly regular oversight meeting so that is not unique or reflective of um fiscal mismanagement it's just one of the areas we look at fiscal in that meeting so that's standard practice for CDE I just want
393to say as a um former Charter School operator that's awesome so thank you for for um building that partnership with the schools we have a great staff that does that teamwork thank you any other commentor seeing none do I have a motion uh vice president GL Woods I move that we approve the cde's recommendation to issue a notice of violation to Academia Avance pursuant to Education Code section 47607 g as Academia Avance engaged in fiscal mismanagement as set forth in Education Code section F3 and is there a second uh M escabedo thank you um any further discussion of the motion all in favor say I I any opposed any extensions motion carries thank you very much um we're now going to reopen item one uh would to take action on the preliminary report of actions
394draft January 2025 meeting minutes and to report on our liaison assignments uh so are there any um we we've got our draft preliminary report actions minutes are there any speakers signed up to provide public comment uh in person and can we put the public comment slide up uh for anyone who might want to call in this is on our our public comment in the room do we have the public comment slide to put [Music] up there we go uh anyone who wants to uh call in for public comment can use the number and uh access code on this slide is there anyone in person to provide public comment on this item there was no one in person all right and is there anyone on the phone uh we do not have any callers in the
395queue all right so uh with that uh I'm going to ask if we have a motion this is to approve our draft minutes from last minut thank you m esab this is not contentious and then a second for member Rodriguez it's not dangerous we could we could do this yeah good wait time all right all those in favor of approving our minutes from the last meeting raise your hands I any oppose nay any extensions all right motion carries woo it's been a long day I want to invite um SB members to report on on their leaz on activities that are not related to any it items on our March agenda and we'll start off with member Clon okay over the past two months I've continued to enjoy engaging with students from across the state but
396also Across the Nation um I've continued to collaborate with other State student board members to develop policy proposals for Nas's High School transformation State Network and so far um our proposal is a very rough draft but we're centering around making schools more engaging and exploring feasible ways that state boards can encourage and support Community Partnerships and Innovation within the classroom to ensure that our schools are responsive to the needs of young people and then as for the Statewide model curriculum coordinating counil um in November we did share that last September the Southeast Asian model curriculum is complete and it is posted online on its dedicated platform in collaboration with uh UC Davis and the Orange County Department of Education um the three model curricula are available on that platform and they are now bus or
397that is they is in Orange County um they are now busy conducting rollout activities Statewide there's been uh one event for each curriculum in 2025 and there are additional events scheduled in the near future uh they have the W history and cultural studies in Fresno in may they will have Vietnamese American experiences uh in Garden Grove in September and then they have the C Cambodian American studies in Stockton at a date that is to be determined um and they are all listed on the Orange County uh website through their model curriculum projects landing page and then as for the Native American studies model curriculum the humbled and San Diego County offices are completing their work on the lessons and the resources before they are submitted to the department in June the curriculum will be complete
398and available online by September and I've really truly enjoyed the opportunity to review the curriculum this past uh couple months I focused on the Middle School curriculum and I almost wish I wasn't graduating this year so that I would have a chance uh to to to have these in my classroom um but I know that this curriculum in addition to the Southeast Asian curriculum will have great impacts in the future for our students and for our communities I'd like to highlight that the California Association of student councils or Cas has just had their election for officers uh for the upcoming school year and I'd like to congratulate the new president El and vice president-elect on their roles and I'm sure they will have a lot of fun with uh my successor next year um and
399I'd like to uplift that California's delegates to the US Senate youth program are in Washington DC right now um and I've heard from bod they're having a great time and and uh I look forward to hearing what they've learned and I'm sure they will be returning to California with more ideas more resources a bigger Network to continue being leaders in our state and that concludes my report thank you uh member es Cabo last month uh the US Department of Education cancelled over $350 million in Grants and contracts to several Regional educational l Laboratories or known as ra and westad who has operated ra Northwest and real West is closing down you know those those uh Laboratories um you know for nearly 60 years these congressionally mandated centers collaborated with state and local education agencies on
400you know various issues in the area of research among the suspended projects that westad was has been working on or was working on were mental health issues um addressing chronic absenteeism um focusing on uh Oregon's statewise literacy instructional program and improving an early career teacher uh retention in response to these Federal contracts cancellation uh West dead obviously is is um reviewing their budget we're going from in person to Virtual meetings in the future and hopefully um they they will be able to um shift their budget and make sure that they um are able to continue their great work um we had a meeting with our regional uh English learner uh um Regional meetings uh last week and uh truste Alis to was with uh was in person I was attending uh virtually uh made some
401opening remarks and they had a great session uh supporting the first Focus was on supporting our immigrant students families and Educators um they delved into improving outcomes for M multilingual students with exceptional needs particularly regarding classifying for dual identified students and continuing their uh alignment with um the California English learner road map that is all thank you very much I I just want to add that um the cancellation of many research grants and contracts and um other grants for example the teacher quality partnership grants and so on uh is being litigated uh so there are uh ongoing court cases um in relation to those um vice president GL Woods thank you I'd like to just give a brief update on the California collaborative for educational Excellence most affectionately known as CCE um last week the
402community engagement initiative um had a convening in Ontario California and there were well over a thousand people in attendance uh from parents to teachers to administrators and students they had 180 students that were there having dialogue amongst themselves being able to be very authentic and how they felt schools could better engage with themselves and their communities and they also um had a very strong keynote speaker that spoke to how to ensure that we look at our communities with an asset lens and ensuring that we are cognizant of the lived experiences of those in our communities as we seek to engage them so um it was a very powerful time that they came together the next convening I believe is going to be um in May um I may be misspeaking there but I know it
403will be in Anaheim so U just please keep in mind for that just a couple of other quick things the Statewide system of support toolkit has been launched and this is a centralized hub for the Statewide system of support work and the web- based tools that are Prov provided so again encourage you to go to the CCE website and look at those tools and hopefully sometime in the future we'll get to hear more about what is happening with the Statewide system of support which is a very strong arm to supporting our all of our districts um especially those who might need additional um support in um direct technical assistance so next week the CCE governing board will be meeting and we will have an update from the teaching learning and leading Center led by Dr
404Stephanie greggson to discuss the plan for direct technical assistance for those leas that have reached that level of direct technical assistance from a state agency the CCE and given the increase in districts requiring consultation with the CCE what will happen at that meeting is that the team will highlight a tiered direct technical assistance plan for addressing um again the large number of leas that are now eligible for direct technical assistance so again please tune in I'm sure no one has anything to do and you'll want to tune in to next week's governing board meeting or if you have an opportunity please go to the website there are a lot of great resources there thank you thank you member Lewis thank you I'll give a recap of the activities for the iqc and just for information
405uh Vice president globber Woods is also a liaison to the iqc and uh we met on January 29th and the 30th and we also introduced U member Oaken as the new liaison uh for the personal finance committee as well so as I said the meeting was on January 29th and 30th and it was on the first day it was the orientation for the Commissioners uh where they received an overview from the California Department of Education regarding their roles and responsib abilities and as well as the committee protocols and processes uh they also had the Commissioners rank their preferences for which subject matter committees that they wanted to participate on and that was all on the first day the second day uh the Commissioners held their elections for the new chair and the vice chair and
406Sharice Guerrera who is the district relations manager for the S early academic language seal uh model as the chair chair and Jennifer Hicks the assistant superintendent of educational services at the Placer County Office of Education County Office of Education was elected as the new Vice chair uh the appointments and elections also took place for the executive committee and the subject committee uh matter committee chairs the vice chairs and the member assignments there were uh several action items on the agenda which included approval of the 25 26 iqc meeting dates approval of the 2025 iqc goals and the approval of the new newly created personal finance subject matter committee which will review and make recommendations for the 2026 personal finance curriculum guide and as you know this guide will be based on the foundational principles documents
407that came before us as an action item uh in January and finally uh during the those two days the I QC heard an overview and update on the California preschool transitional kindergarten learning foundations presented collaboratively by the cde's curriculum Frameworks and instructional Resources Division as well as the Early Education division uh for this month the iqc will hold a one-day meeting on March the 20th um and that meeting agenda will be posted on the CDE website on this Friday the main action items this month is is to approve the CD's recommendation for panel assignments of the nearly 200 instructional material reviewers and content reviewer experts for the upcoming 2025 mathematics instructional materials adoption and the facilitator assignments will also be confirmed uh in that action as well Commissioners will also hear an update on the
408California math science and computer science otherwise known as Cal MCS Grant as an informational item presented by the Santa Barbara County Office of Education which serves as the math lead it is this is a $50 million Grant and was authorized in the 2022 23 California state budget to support an infrastructure for providing professional learning and family engagement in math science and computer science education for grades 4 through 12 and the the lead uh for this work is the San wien County Office of Education and they will be partnering with the Fresno County Office county superintendent of schools to support preschool through grade three through what is called the count play explore CPE initiative and this initiative provides professional development and support for family engagement in math science computer science augmenting the work of the early
409math initiative and if you want more more information they do have a website uh cal- mscs that'll provide more detail information and for uh information to the public for the iqc meetings are open and are posted on the iqc uh web page and that concludes my report thank you uh member mcquillin all right thank you my lison report is um in addition to what we heard already with the Statewide model career curriculum I've spent numerous hours reviewing some of the lessons there on the Native American studies uh model curriculum along with Julia uh humble county and San Diego County are taking the leads on those humble has developed I think over 240 lessons in San Diego well over 200 lessons so a lot to review um fantastic uh lessons that I have to say uh
410very honest and truthful full I I hope they all make the classrooms in California um things that the tribes have felt have been swept under the rug for years uh in terms of boarding schools and en forced boarding schools some of the early laws that U impacted tribes here and what was considered genocidal uh acts um sponsored by the state of California um pretty heavy duty stuff um there's a a new documentary out that was nominated for an Oscar last weekend uh called sugarcane that speaks to the boarding schools uh uh take a look at that if you if you will um very uh powerful lessons I just hope they make it to all the way through the process uh so um and then the last thing I'd like to say is just a shout
411out to Lisa Hopkins and all her work behind the scenes and taking care of our our basic needs of room and board and thank you Lisa for all your work away thanking you Lisa our Creature Comforts taking care of us we all want to associate ourselves with those comments thank you remember oen thank you um I have a couple of updates on my um Lon assignments the first is around environmental literacy um I've been reporting for couple of years on the development of curricular units for each grade level K through 12 um that are focused on climate change and environmental justice um this curriculum which is now has a much easier to remember name called seeds to Solutions um because last month last report I couldn't remember what it was called um seiz to Solutions
412um was made possible through um through a budget allocation um and it's been LED jointly by by 10 strands which is a environmental um literacy nonprofit the Sano County Office of Education and um community- based organizations who are doing the work of creating the units um the exciting news is that the units which have now been field tested um they are um almost ready to go and they'll be available free these free educational resources will be available this spring um so I'll be back in the next meeting with how to access them and the next steps are all around dissemination and professional development uh training so that those units can get um full implementation around the state um and then On a related topic um um as a result of that work um or I
413guess as Rel to unrelated to that work um I attended a summit called the climate resilient California and Californians Summit which was um organized by the governor's land governor's office of land use and and climate Innovation the University of California and interestingly The pontifical Academy of Sciences and social sciences um and it was um brought together it was a group of leaders mostly um Regional but also there were um folks from all over the world um governors of other states leaders from other countries um really looked looking at um how we can um together create a world that um is climate res resilient I mean and um I would say that the the rallying call of the event was really big problems require all hands on deck um and so um it was it was
414really um heartening to see for example the incredible leadership of our governor um who led a um panel and talked a lot about the work that we're doing in our state and his commitment to um environmental resilience and sustainability um it was also really interesting to see um major sectors so two just to give an example of were health and education um coming together around this idea that um they these sectors themselves what they see is the people that they serve particularly the most vulnerable um are most impacted by climate change and that because they're such big sectors they can play a really important role in um making change so anything from um working to decrease the impact for example of the Health Care system on the environment um to thinking of doctors or teachers
415as um you know our first line of Education um related to the impact of climate change um on individuals um and things that we can do to protect ourselves um to education about um climate change itself so it was really um heartening to see that work and um it was reminder that even in moments when um the priority as a whole in our country may not be this may be changing um we as a state are standing firm on um the importance of protecting our environment and the people um in our state um particularly are most vulnerable from the impacts of climate change um just also on that topic um I was there was a panel that was um students um sixth grades through colle colge students all of whom in one way or another
416think of themselves as climate Warriors um and um as the moderator said we have an urgent need for climate Warriors and so investing in climate education is as important investing in climate science um which I think is a really important Point um and these students talked about everything from Eco anxiety to the need in school to balance talking about the problems of the environment with Concrete Solutions that they can be part of um and the idea of engaging students um not just those who are interested in science around climate change but those who might become marketers and can um sort of spread the word or those who um may go into public service or so just the importance of um bringing everybody on board um so that was my environmental literacy hat and then my
417other hat um is related to um artificial intelligence another really timely and interesting topic which um it feels like every day the recognition of the benefits challenges and risks of AI in education um are in the news and in public dialogue um and so I was really um proud to attend a series of um webinars hosted by CDE part of their learning with AI learning about AI program um they in the month of February host Ed three events AI for inclusive learning equity-minded instruction in an A in an age of AI and highlighting and addressing inequities with AI um yesterday they hosted making AI visible building awareness amongst teachers and families um and on March 27th there will be an AI literacy webinar March 28th Ai and the classroom um celebrate celebration of AI all
418day um and all of those webinars um the the recordings are accessible on the CDE site so if you missed them and you want to go and watch in your free time um you can and the upcoming webinars um you can still sign up for so that's my report for now right um member Rosco Gonzalez well the work of the assessment committee was thoroughly discussed in items two three and four so those cover my updates but I just want to really say that every time we have a meeting the assessment team is an ace team they come out and they uh put an extraordinary report together for us and we give them recommendations and they go back and Tinker away and they put down um all the work in heart and soul into all these
419presentations so I just want to say I really appreciate today was was definitely um an indicator of all the work they did with the focus group so I want to commend that work so that's it very nice thank you uh member Patilla Bronson thank you um I'll start by aligning myself with the earlier comments of gratitude to Lisa Hopkins who's may be around um for all that she does uh for all of us behind the scenes and in in front of the camera occasionally too um I'll also continue the theme of gratitudes um around the many uh students and affected communities um uh in the Palisades and the Pasadena Altadena area um I I think it's just been an incredible Testament to resilience um to see school Communities going back to school first on some
420still online um but many for quite a bit um and this is not possible um without incredible school systems wrapping around um so I just want to shout out to Lots of uh gratitude for the students and families themselves the teachers administrators support staff at the school sites um to the SB staff here um to the governor's office for the many executive uh orders that came through to CDE um and the office of emergency services as well as uh the many uh corporate uh Partners from hulet Packard Google um and apple who came through uh to support and really wrap arms around a community I think that that was struggling and will continue to need support in the future um I also just want to recognize that um as all of this was happening I
421was really heartened uh to see that the um the P20 alignment um across our systems is starting um to happen as as well it should I think families certainly see it all as one Continuum it's just it's their same kids across different systems and uh it was very helpful I think that the governor's office put out executive orders um around K12 as well as um Early Learning um both community based settings as well as school-based settings um these are all sites of learning and it was very helpful to have that support um at the end of February the Early Childhood policy uh Council met um and there was something of a look back and look forward um an acknowledgement of the state's incredibly historic investments in TK um which I think we are now coming
422to our very final year of implementation in the uh 25 26 school year which is very exciting uh the investments in reduced adult to child ratios also I think very much transformative and important um an acknowledgement also on the um sort of mixed delivery side of the importance of reducing family fees um for pipeline program programs that prepare children to enter TK classrooms but that are often times in family child care homes and F uh Child Care Centers um and also lots of shoutouts for the early literacy grants which I was delighted to see um there are ongoing work groups um also that the Administration has supported around rate uh rates and quality um and trying to um move that system to reflect the actual cost of care um and and uh also to provide
423on-ramps into the Early Childhood Workforce so this work is is ongoing um some of it is through budget some of it is through work groups um but it is absolutely the feeder system for tk12 um my last report at is around um the California summer school for the Arts um which sort of aligns with the the feeder um analogy and I I oftentimes do not think about the degree to which the Arts are also a career prep pathway um in the same way that CTE is um and the visual arts and entertainment Arts are among the largest business sectors in California's economy um so the California summer school for the Arts which has been around since 1985 plays a critical role in actually uh bringing some of the best and the brightest um to a
424summer school program that uh just actually closed its applications got a bumper crop of applications for animation dance film music Visual Arts Theater and writing um they received a uh $2 million budget allocation back in 2022 which is enabled them to do really exciting and new Fantastic things to make sure that this incredible offering which has launched the careers of many people in the entertainment industry I will not go into name dropping um but but has has had an impact in career Pathways and uh business for jobs across California um so they have um expanded the number of low-income students so it's not a Prohibition that you would have to be able to pay to experience this type of programming um so they've expanded the number of students who are lwi Income who are underserved
425who represent all 58 counties um and they also launched a onewe short program for students who are coming from um areas that have not had as much Arts uh investment in the past and may not yet be ready for the full five-week intensive um but need a pathway in and the the Summer School for the Arts has actually responded to that so it is incredible to to see it moving uh they are at the end of their three-year allocation for the budget and uh I think we'll maybe be coming to talk to many people around this room um and and I I think I'll leave my report there that's good um M Rodriguez thank you president darling Hammond um so last month the commission on teacher credentialing took up several important items first the commission
426approved initial recommendations of its workg group to review the design and in implementation of the teaching performing assessment pursuant to sb12 3 these recommendations focused on improving Communications and supports to candidates around technical issues that impact the submission or scoring of their assessment and the commission's data collection on TPA outcomes staff uh will continue to bring the commission additional recommendations as they emerge with the overall goal of ensuring the TPA is an authentic assessment of educator Readiness the second item I'd like to share is that after a Statewide field survey the commission approved proposed changes to the Child Development parent uh permit work group recommendations for uh three educator and two administrator permit levels for early childhood education next steps will be regulations and further work on the permit specializations we are in the final
427stage stages of revamping our child development permit structure to better serve our earliest learners which is very exciting the commission also voted to approve several flexibilities to teacher candidates affected by the wildfires the commission continues to be in communication with candidates and preparation programs in the affected areas and last but not least executive director Mary Sandy announced the commission priorities for 2025 in addition to work I've already mentioned the commission's first priorities to complete the lit literacy program certification process which includes implementation of literacy performance assessments pursuant to s488 which was signed into law in 2021 uh and that concludes my report thank you hi good afternoon everyone uh my partner uh Francisco uh shared about the regional e but I just wanted to share that I was particularly um always impressed in the afternoons
428they come back to their specific goals for their regions and they're very databased so they're working on goals anywhere from systems level um how do they increase the percent of districts that are getting or reduce the percent of districts that are getting differentiate assistance to um reducing the percent or increasing the percent of ltels that are reclassifying and so each meeting they come back to the their goals and U share across the state strategies for that and uh in the world of um students receiving special education services um at The Advisory commission for special education each year there's an impact award given so the commission selects um an organization to give an award to and this year's awarde was Pathways to possibilities in Orange Unified School District for their outstanding uh special education program they
429founded it in 2018 and it supports TK through transition age students with literacy co- teing mentorship a mentorship model behavioral strategies and um vocational Pathways and so um congratulations to Orange UniFi and uh also at the last meeting there was a presentation on inclusive access via the diploma initiative and so as as you may know the inclusive access to a diploma initiative expands how students uh especially those with disabilities are can demonstrate learning for graduation so it provides Educators and families with tools for flexible assessments including performance task projects and spoken or written responses and the team has developed uh practice briefs and guidance materials for stakeholder input uh so while public comment is closed feedback is welcome at alt me.org that's Al T ms.org through June so I encourage um each of you to
430not only take a look but to share that as well so resources will later be available on calan and California Educators together websites and um so please explore the resources uh available to support EAA diploma access for all students and then on the Civic learning uh area in the Civic learning area uh there we can look it forward in March later this month for the intent to award for the California service grant for the 24 uh 25 school year yeah for this school year and so the grant approves um $500,000 annually to eligible leas to support service learning uh through teacher planning time professional development instructional materials coordination and participation costs and then I just wanted to share a little bit of quick data about the St State C Civic engagement um and again because
431Julia's colleagues across the state the young people are extremely interested in Civic engagement right now so the number of seals has gone up from another 3,000 from 12,000 something to 15,000 over 15,000 the number of participating eleas increased from 87 to 110 the number of school sites increased from 260 to 345 so we're talking about 500 transcripts getting the seal 15,000 High School diplomas uh and four students of uh certificates of completion so we want to keep keep our eye on that and keep encouraging that and uh the last thing is um applications have now been posted for the Civic learning Awards was is a great opportunity through the power of democracy Civic learning uh initiative with support from the CDE and that's with our chief justice and so students get to uh go and
432perform and be awarded this award so applications are due April 18th this year if you know anybody who's interested in that thank you thank you very much um I'll just add a couple of things on my end just uh to augment the report that member escabedo gave um in addition to West Ed's loss of its contracts for reel's the American Institutes of research have just be had just become our um you know what do you call this comp Center yeah and they lost that contract as well um as I noted earlier much of that is being litigated and so we will see whether that remains but meanwhile these organizations are closing down the their operations and it may be hard to restart them um there's also um I know uh relevant to many uh districts
433and to uh many higher education institutions uh a letter that went out from the Department a dear colleague letter uh s indicating that uh giving people 14 days to uh cease and assist all uh race-based activities or Dei activities which is very broadly defined in a fre in a frequently asked questions document that just came out they suggested that social emotional learning or cell and culturally responsive practice might be considered uh Dei activities for which the department could sue the uh District or the um higher education institution uh that uh is being litigated as well uh there was a suit brought by the um American Federation of teachers and the American sociological Association uh earlier this week and a lawsuit brought today by the National Education Association and the ACLU uh to Halt that you
434know uh process uh so just to um let people know that while these scary things are coming to and I know this is coming to a lot of districts uh that there is litigation there is an expectation that there will be a stay and that this will get sorted out over for the coming coming weeks in a variety of ways um on a h happier note uh California's been invited to join an uh activity of the National Association of state boards of Education around redesigning high school and we have been selected as one of the states to participate in that activity and um I will be participating that with Brooks uh and then our team will include Sonia Christian who heads the community colleges in Califor californ uh Abby snay who's Deputy in the Department
435of Labor here in California and Chief Deputy ingred robertonson who is representing the CDE uh and it turns out that our liaison for the activity at nasby is our own Naomi Porter who was our student member and is now working with the uh Association and then there's a number of other organizations supporting our process of learning about ways to I think you know the conversation will be both about sort of moving uh high schools from the factory model that we inherited to you know uh more um to designs and and uh ways of learning that are more relevant to the world we're in today uh but also many many states are looking at how that is reflected in ways to evaluate competencies in graduates uh Port portraits of a graduate and uh the ways in
436which you would measure whether students have achieve those skills and support the development so it will be connected to our other work that we've been uh talking about and we be keeping everyone posted and including uh others in the conversations along the way uh so with that uh I think we've concluded our liaison reports uh and we're now ready to take a general public comment on agenda item 11 uh it's invited on any matter not included on the printed agenda uh members of the public wishing to provide comment on this item may do so by calling the number and uh using the participant access code shown on this slide uh are there any speakers signed up in person to provide public comment looks like there is someone ready to roll speakers in the room Deborah
437Godfrey and Mar bule all right no uh please take the mic thank you president darling Hammond and members of the board my name is Marta bich part-time Watsonville resident addressing safety violations involving Saba charter school and the parro Valley Unified School District Saba's authorizer in 2013 Watsonville officials allowed Saba to temporarily operate in a heavy industrial Zone falsifying zoning to evade traffic environmental standards and CTE sighting guidelines inevitably students have been critically injured along the neighboring truck route and railroad still City officials approved permanent Zoning for Saba in 2023 prompting SQL litigation now this City and Saba are lobbying the district for a zoning exemption during a judicial review of illicit land use indicating arbitrary decision making waging institutional Warfare on Industrial zones and competent zoning Administration is not a legitimate role for public education
438authorities zoning exemption by the district should be discouraged and the city advised to Zone legitimately I urge the board to intervene this photo of sabba students shows the dangers of when you allow your schools and districts to abandon CDE sighting guidelines and intentionally evade state required railroad safety thank you thank you thank you are there any other public comments on the phone there are no callers thank you okay thank you very much um at this moment I think we are now uh ready to adjourn the March 2025 State Board of Education meeting at 4:10 p.m. thank you very much