Increasing Equity and Increasing School Performance ''Conflicting or Compatible Goals?:Addressing the Issues in

Abstract

This work addresses some of the arguments regarding equity in public education versus school performance at issue in the case of Williams v. State of California. The plaintiff’s expert witnesses have argued that the state is responsible to reduce the inequities in California’s public educational system. In contrast, the state’s witnesses argue that some of the plaintiff’s proposals have limited educational effects at the cost of reducing local autonomy. In this paper, I use four years of data from California’s Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) to evaluate these claims.

High-Stakes Accountability and Equity: Using Evidence From California’s Public Schools Accountability Act to Address the Issues in Williams v. State of California

“…The plaintiffs further argued that the disparities in access to educational resources that they documented were fundamentally unfair in the context of the high stakes accountability program that California initiated in 1999 with the Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) and subsequently expanded to include a high school exit exam (Rosenbaum et al, 2000b). As I will explain in more detail below, the Williams case can be viewed as an effort both to affirm the promise of equal educational opportunity that is at the heart of the Brown decision and to address the continuing reality of deep inequities in public education that have proved resistant to legislative and judicial action (e.g., Carey, 2003;Harris, 2004;Haycock, 1998Haycock, , 2000Powers, 2004).…”

“…As I discuss in more detail below, the plaintiffs argued that the state's system of accountability based on school rankings is fundamentally unfair, given the systematic inequalities that they documented in California's educational system. Likewise, the state's experts have used the API data and other indicators of school and student performance to argue that there is little empirical support that increased spending on the school resources identified in the case would increase student achievement (e.g., Hanushek, 2003;Hoxby, 2003;Raymond, 2003;Rossell, 2003; for a detailed critique of the Hanushek, Hoxby, and Rossell analyses, see Lucas, 2003; for a detailed critique of the Raymond analysis, see Powers, 2004).…”

“…One state expert analyzed a different subset of the API data used here to argue that the latter position was correct. However, that analysis suffered from a number of serious flaws in method (Raymond, 2003; see the critique of the analysis in Powers, 2004).…”

“…4 For an overview of the changes in the API over time, see Powers (2004). 5 In the first 2 years of the program, the California State Legislature allocated $100 million for a reward program that specifically targeted low-performing schools, defined as schools falling between 1 and 5 on the decile ranking.…”

“…Fox (1991) recommends taking the square root of R 2 j , noting that when this figure approaches .9, collinearity becomes a serious problem for the estimation of regression coefficients. In this case, when I created a variable for percentage of minority students, it was the most highly correlated with the other variables in the analysis with R j = .87 (see Lewis-Beck, 1980, and the analysis in Powers, 2004). 10 This variable counts the average total years of educational service in any school setting (public or private) but does not include substitute teacher or classified staff positions.…”