CALIFORNIA LACKS A LONGITUDINAL DATA SYSTEM ON EDUCATION
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, California is one of 12 states that does not support a statewide, longitudinal data system (LDS) that assesses students’ academic accomplishments and personal information to maximize future performance from early education to the workforce. The absence of such a system is irresponsible and perpetuates an education infrastructure that lacks accountability. A data system like the one described should be expeditiously integrated into the California education system in hopes of optimizing academic success and future opportunities for students.
“[The fact that] California’s academic ranking compared to other states [was] 37 out of 50, the lack of an expansive data system explains a lot,” senior Stanley Liu said. “I firmly believe that since this system does not exist, academic progress is not being optimized.”
Despite growing support for an LDS, the education establishment and its political allies are vehemently against this system because of the wide scope of potential collected data that could be misused and its ability to dismantle previous legislation that the establishment had supported. In 2013, Gov. Jerry Brown, a predominant dissenter of an LDS, signed into law the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), a piece of legislation that grants school districts autonomy in allocating their provided state funding. A byproduct of the LCFF is that many districts are not held accountable for irresponsible spending habits. An LDS would provide the accountability needed to maintain appropriate district spending, dismantling the LCFF, one of Brown’s major legislative achievements. Other opponents of the proposed system state that data collected through this system could be potentially misused for purposes other than improving student performance. However, this data collection system could be designed with integrated parameters that restrict the collection of certain data that may be classified as confidential.
“It is immoral that the LCFF is obstructing a clearly better system,” junior Aeris Ma said. “A system that affords transparency should be supported by legislative efforts in hopes [of maximizing] students’ success.”
Although there has been a need for an interconnected database for years now, there has recently been increasing public support for changes to the education system. An LDS would be able to aggregate data around students’ testing choices, standardized testing scores and college readiness variables that would be vital for policymakers to formulate plans to further improve students’ accomplishments. With reasonable restrictions that prohibit the collection of confidential, personal student information, an LDS would prove to be a vital and efficient system that would enhance the future performance of students within the classroom and beyond its walls to the workforce. Additionally, while assessing students’ progress, the data could illustrate the performance of individual school districts and the effectiveness of district spending habits. With the potential to better education practices and to increase schools’ spending accountability, an LDS would improve California’s institution of education as a whole for the foreseeable future.
“I think that invaluable data can be uncovered by a longitudinal data system that could benefit future academic achievements in the classroom,” AP U.S. Government and Politics and AP Economics teacher Len Lyberger said. “This data could be used to show districts how and where to target their resources and optimize performance among students.”
