As part of the California School Dashboard, the state’s new school accountability system, 1 in 4 school districts will receive assistance from county offices of education and the state to help improve the performance of groups of students who have done particularly poorly on criteria set by the state. But an EdSource analysis found that 561 additional districts are not targeted for formal state support, despite large and persistent achievement gaps between African-American, Latino and low-income students and white and Asian students in those districts. Under the state’s rules for determining county help, those districts, serving several million students, will now face the challenge on their own of narrowing large academic disparities, as indicated by scores on standardized tests in math and English language arts. In many places, those achievement gaps have persisted for decades and failed to narrow during 15 years of state- and federally dictated school reforms during the era of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, many districts will proceed without an alternative system of strategies and effective supports in place to guide them. Districts’ ability to figure out how to improve academic measures and other indicators of student achievement will serve as a fundamental test of local control, the principle underlying the state’s 4-year-old school finance law, the Local Control Funding Formula. The longer it takes to show tangible results, the louder will be the calls in the Legislature to reassert state control, tamper with the formula and demand stricter accountability. “Coming out of 20 years of high-stakes testing, where districts have not thought through school improvement, this is a real shift,” said Janelle Scott, associate professor at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and African-American Studies Department. “It’s not clear districts are ready and prepared to think differently.” “The dashboard data will be quite valuable for districts to address highest-need kids,” said Julie Marsh, associate professor at the Rossier School of Education at USC, who, with other researchers, have tracked how districts used resources under the funding formula. “But the state has never fully invested in district capacity — the knowledge, expertise and good working relationships you need for different outcomes. So it is not fair to expect immediate improvement.”