Lessons From California's Public Schools Accountability Act

This interactive, online presentation will summarize the main findings from an independent evaluation of California's Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) of 1999 and focus on practical lessons from the implementation of the PSAA.

Presenters

Jennifer O'Day (Primary)

Managing Research Scientist
American Institutes for Research

Description

This presentation will focus on lessons from the implementation and effects of the California Public Schools Accountability Act (PSAA) of 1999. The presentation will particularly highlight practical lessons from the Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II/USP), a key component of the PSAA. These lessons have relevance for districts and schools as they face the added accountability demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). These include:

• the reasons for variable response among low-performing schools to accountability interventions;
  
• the promise and pitfalls of school improvement planning; and
  
• the critical importance of a coherent program of instructional guidance.
  

Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the implications of the study's findings for their own efforts to improve low-performing schools with the study's principal investigator, Jennifer O'Day. O'Day will supplement the II/USP findings with those from her own and others' research on low-performing schools in other states.

This independent evaluation of the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 was conducted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), with support from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and EdSource.

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