Using Multiple Measures for Accountability Purposes: One District's Experience.

This paper describes the approach to consolidating multiple measures of student achievement used by the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) in the 1997-1998 reporting cycle. Beginning in 1996-1997, all California schools that served Title I students or were involved in the state's Coordinated Compliance Review process were required to submit a Student Achievement Report based on multiple measures of student achievement. The LBUSD was relatively well situated to deal with the challenges of this requirement because it had already implemented a district-wide testing program that used performance assessments at multiple grade levels. It was necessary to consider the challenges involved in using component weighting models for combining multiple measures. Problems in combining these measures lead the school district to implement a compensatory standards-based approach. Decision rules for this approach are described, and an example is provided of the decision matrix used to determine student proficiency. The final approach used by the LBUSD did not give the district any unfair advantage over other school districts, while at the same time the LBUSD was able to maintain an internal standard of performance that perhaps was higher than that set by the state. (SLD)