This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
The promise of American public education rests on a simple premise: Every child deserves a quality education. Holding schools accountable for delivering on that promise is essential, but accountability is only as good as the tools used to measure it.
When those tools are misapplied, it is students — not administrators nor policymakers — who suffer the consequences.
That tension sits at the heart of how California has tried to address school accountability. For decades, the prevailing approach was blunt: reduce school quality to a single standardized test score, rank schools accordingly, then act on the results. The problems with this approach were well-documented.
To put it plainly, California’s old approach punished schools serving the highest-need communities without accounting for the complexity of the challenges they faced.
We chose a different path when the state launched the California School Dashboard in 2017. The dashboard was designed to give families and educators a more complete picture of how schools are serving students. It incorporates a range of measures, not just academic performance. The explicit design principle was that no single data point can fully capture a school’s impact on students.Â
Data matters, but nuance, context and judgment matter, too. The dashboard was never intended to serve as a cudgel for local school districts to kill competition and punish parents and students. That is what makes the situation at Aspire Golden State Preparatory Academy so troubling.
Aspire Golden State Prep, founded in 2008, is a public charter school in East Oakland serving a predominantly low-income community of color, like the two charter schools I founded in Oakland in the early aughts when I was mayor. Golden State Prep’s students enroll in sixth grade performing three years below grade level, but by graduation they are outperforming their peers at other schools.
As a result, it has one of Oakland’s highest high school graduation rates. It is a school that, by most accounts, is doing meaningful work in a community where educational options are scarce and the consequences of getting this wrong fall hardest on the kids who can least afford it.
Nevertheless, Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Office of Education have moved to close Golden State Prep. Their decisions rely heavily on a narrow interpretation of performance data, including a single high-stakes math assessment administered annually to a limited number of students and skewed toward the school’s younger grades. Those results are not irrelevant, but they represent only one piece of a much larger picture.
This is not how the system was supposed to work.
When consequential decisions like school closures are driven by a narrow reading of data, the broader question gets lost: What is in the best interest of students?
By law, Oakland Unified and Alameda County must find that closing Golden State Prep is in the best interest of enrolled students. Reaching such a decision demands more than a test score. It demands an honest accounting of where displaced students will go, and whether those alternatives are genuinely stronger.
In communities like East Oakland, the stakes of getting it wrong could not be higher.
The implications extend beyond Golden State Prep. If California’s accountability framework can be reduced to a single, cherry-picked data point, the same logic can be applied elsewhere. That would be a disservice to students and families.
This week, the State Board of Education will have an opportunity to address this directly. The question before the board is not whether accountability matters — it does — or whether Golden State Prep is beyond scrutiny. The question is whether California’s accountability framework is being applied in the way it was designed.
Done right, accountability is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure that every child gets the education they deserve. But accountability must be grounded in evidence, context and a genuine commitment to student outcomes. When it isn’t, we don’t just fail a single school; rather, we fail the students that school was built to serve, and we weaken the broader promise that inspired California to build a better system in the first place.
The state board should hold that promise.
