When then-Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature created the Local Control Funding Formula a decade ago, their professed goal was to close the achievement gap separating poor and English-learner K-12 students from their more privileged contemporaries by providing more targeted instructional money. Education reform and civil rights groups applauded the effort but worried aloud about Brown’s unwillingness to provide accountability for whether the extra spending would, in fact, narrow the gap. He said he trusted local school officials to do the right thing. The education establishment liked Brown’s hands-off attitude but the criticism continued. Several years later, the state school board responded with a “dashboard.”  Schools and school districts would receive color-coded grades on a variety of factors, of which proficiency in language arts, math and other academic skills would have parity with other less important areas. Heather Hough, executive director of PACE, a Stanford-based education research organization, told EdSource that the dashboard’s emphasis on one year’s changes can be misleading. “That can mask the concern that we should still be having: A lot of students are far behind where they have been, and large portions of students are not attending school,” Hough said. A more useful dashboard would make academics at least 50% of overall scoring, since improving them is the declared goal of the many billions of dollars that have been spent over the last decade. If kids can’t read, write and do math, the other stuff means nothing.