New California school data project fulfills campaign promise Newsom made

Gavin Newsom can — and should — be faulted for making campaign promises six years ago that he must have known were impossible to achieve, such as his vows to create single-payer health care and build 3.5 million new housing units.

When reminded of them after becoming governor, he dismissed them as “aspirational,” a caveat he neglected to attach to his original pledges.

Nevertheless, credit is due when one of his promises becomes reality, as it did this week when the state launched the beginnings of a long-needed system of tracking how the state’s public school students fare in classrooms and later in life.

The Cradle-to-Career project released its first batch of numbers, along with video tutorials on how to access the data.

“With the C2C Student Pathways Dashboard now live, Californians can visualize their futures by seeing disconnected data from across sectors and previously unavailable insights, all in one place,” Newsom said in a statement. “The Golden State is once again leading the way in innovation, connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure everyone has the freedom to succeed.”

However, not everyone in the rarified ranks of education researchers and reformers echoed Newsom’s boasts.

Alex Barrios, president of the Educational Results Partnership, a business-backed education policy coalition, complained that “the dashboard fails to do what it promised. It doesn’t represent the journeys of all students and how they navigate to and through careers.

“By following the career trajectories of only college graduates, it assumes the only path to success for students is through a four-year college degree,” Barrio alleges.

The new data system should include all of the factors that Barrio’s organization lists, but its criticism may be premature, since officials say they intend to expand the project’s scope as rapidly as it can obtain data.

Assuming that the project does widen its reach, C2C, as it’s dubbed, not only will be a lasting accomplishment for Newsom, but it will fill a void that’s existed far too long. Without reliable data on outcomes, the nation’s largest school system operates in an accountability vacuum, which the education establishment seems to prefer.

The state Department of Education has a “dashboard” that purports to give parents, taxpayers and voters a picture of how well schools are doing their job. However, the current system is a mishmash of educational jargon that is difficult to decipher. It also skews the ratings in ways that minimize actual academic achievement, such as in reading, writing and mathematics, and elevates peripheral factors it calls “multiple measures.”

Thus, it downplays the fact that California’s students fare very poorly vis-a-vis those in other states and the “achievement gap” still broadly separates low-income and English-learner students from those with more privileged circumstances.

Education reformers have long pushed for obtaining and publishing more objective and complete data, especially after former Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature overhauled school finance a decade ago to provide more funds to schools with substantial numbers of what were called “at-risk” students.

Better numbers would, the reformers said, provide a clearer understanding of whether Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula was working.

Brown, however, backed the education establishment’s preference for getting the money without strict accountability for how it was spent and whether it was having a positive effect. He said he trusted that local school officials would spend the extra money wisely, calling it “subsidiarity,” a secular version of an obscure religious principle.

After Newsom succeeded Brown he quickly reversed that position and called for a comprehensive data system to track how students were faring during and after their journeys through the school system. The Legislature responded by authorizing the C2C system.