CDE, LEAs plead for override of CalPADS veto
Published: November 8, 2010
The data chief of the state’s third largest school district last month begged the state Legislature to restore nearly $7 million that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger cut from the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System or risk derailing CalPADS just when it was beginning to work.
John R. Novak, who oversees CalPADS for the Long Beach Unified School District, asserted in a letter to lawmakers that the governor’s $6.8 million line-item veto unfairly targets California School Information Services staff who help local educational agencies upload their CalPADS data. The governor’s veto, Novak wrote, “has generated a tremendous amount of angst, anxiety, and anger among those of us at the LEA level” who rely on the “highly trained, experienced, and very savvy” CSIS staff.
The California Department of Education estimates that CSIS fields some 70 technical assistance calls from LEAs every day. CalPADS administrator Keric Ashley said the governor’s veto, which forbids release of federal funds already provided for the system, will terminate that technical support later this month, leaving school districts and county offices of education to make difficult data submissions on their own.
Novak acknowledged that the state and its system contractor, IBM, were partly to blame for bugs in the system that initially made it impossible for some LEAs to file data. But it makes no sense to shut CalPADS down now that it’s finally working, Novak wrote. About 90 percent of LEAs have successfully submitted so-called Fall 1 enrollment and dropout data; Fall 2 numbers are due Dec. 16.
CalPADS administrator Ashley said that both the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, which oversees CSIS, and the CDE are looking for ways to avoid laying off key staff.
“We’re in a very precarious situation,” Ashley said. “We don’t want to dismantle our support system. Yes, we’ve had struggles. But turning the clock back makes no sense.”
The information system, designed to track individual students and provide detailed data about enrollment and dropout rates, course assignments and other key measures of student performance—and ultimately teacher performance—was launched late last year. It has not been smooth sailing; serious problems prompted a major system overhaul by IBM last spring and beefed-up technical support for beleaguered users, many of whom were laboring under increased workloads due to state budget cuts that have severely impacted LEAs.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has on several occasions sharply criticized Schwarzenegger’s veto of the CalPADS funds, and he even pointed out an important benefit that might not be immediately apparent.
“By utilizing CalPADS, districts were able to directly certify an additional 212,000 students for free meals in just three months, about a 47 percent increase” from a year ago, when certification relied on a system other than CalPADS, O’Connell said Nov. 1. “The students were immediately eligible for free, healthy lunches and breakfasts at school, and districts eliminated hundreds of thousands of pages of paperwork. The governor’s short-sighted veto of CalPADS funding means system improvements that could directly certify another 10 to 30 percent more students are now on hold.”