Under the “waiver” from the U.S. Department of Education that freed them from some of their federal obligations under NCLB, the CORE districts developed a comprehensive multiple-measures school performance system. With state and federal policy now requiring multiple measures, there is much to learn from CORE about how multiple measures can be used to support school improvement. Our work thus far has aimed to answer the following questions:
This study, Local Control in Action: Learning from the CORE Districts' Focus on Measurement, Capacity Building, and Shared Accountability, examines how the CORE districts understood, implemented, and responded to their accountability system implemented under the NCLB waiver as a case study for how districts can effectively utilize multiple measures of school quality, develop shared accountability, and build capacity for schools and districts to improve.
Using the innovative measurement system developed by the CORE Districts in California, this study, Identity crisis: Multiple measures and the identification of schools under ESSA, explores how schools can be identified for support and improvement using a multiple measures framework under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.
This policy brief, Making Students Visible: Comparing Different Student Subgroup Sizes for Accountability, explores the implications of utilizing various subgroup sizes using data from the CORE Districts, showing that the 20+ subgroup size presents clear advantages in terms of the number of students represented, particularly in making historically underserved student populations visible.
The CORE districts have been collecting data on chronic absenteeism as part of their school performance measurement system since 2014. As the state integrates chronic absenteeism into the California School Dashboard, there is much to learn from CORE’s data about how such measures can be used to support improvement. In 2019, a book chapter in Absent from School describes differences across students and schools, comparing these measures to a broader set of school performance indicators. In 2016, a PACE report showed that chronic absence is feasible for use in California’s accountability measurement system, to inform inclusion on the California School Dashboard.
