Aims and Purposes of a State Schooling System: The Case of California. Technical Report. Getting Down to Facts II

Evaluating a school system requires benchmarks of success. In order to know whether it is successful we need to know not only what is happening, but what should be happening. This paper interprets, and comments on, the aims California has for its public school system, and offers ways of thinking about the evidence in the light of those aims, and about how to set goals over the coming decade. California's constitution, adopted in 1879, requires that the state provide a system of public education for the purpose of the "general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence" and explicitly mentions the promotion of "intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement." The constitutional text does not provide much detail about the content or distribution of education. These important aims are fleshed out in California law. This paper examines how California defines what students will learn and the aims for how that learning will be distributed. The authors analyze the official state curricular standards to understand the state's aims for learning, and they examine aspirational statements as well as the financing system for underlying assumptions about goals for the distribution of learning. They continue by observing that the metrics used to measure the effects of the education system are highly imperfect, but should not be discarded. In conclusion they explore how the State could devise a set of goals that it would be reasonable to hold itself to over the coming decade, in the light of the evidence about where the facts stand today.