With great uncertainty still clouding the 2020–21 school year, the State Board of Education focused much of its attention at its July 8–9 virtual meeting on the tools available for local educational agencies to prepare for the in-flux return of students and staff to the classroom.

“One thing is clear, it’s that we are going to be in a very unpredictable situation for quite a while,” State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond said in her opening remarks. “Clearly, teaching and learning will be organized in many different ways this fall in in-person, some distance learning, some hybrid learning, et cetera. It will need to be governed by purpose rather than by place.”

For local governing boards, State Board members said the most important of these resources is the Learning Continuity and Attendance Plan outlined in Senate Bill 98, the budget education trailer bill. The document, which replaces this year’s Local Control and Accountability Plan, is intended to offer a strategy for the continuity of instruction wherever students and staff are located. California Department of Education staff said the final template document will be available to LEAs by Aug. 1.

By Sept. 30, the document must be adopted by districts and filed with the county superintendent, who may return it with recommendations for consideration. The same deadline applies to county office of education plans, which must be filed with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who also may return it with recommendations for consideration.

Newly sworn-in State Board member Cynthia Glover Woods, chief academic officer at the Riverside County Office of Education, emphasized the importance of the new plan as a road map for LEAs as they face a slew of difficult choices. “There’s a lot to be done in the next 90 days. All of our schools and districts and LEAs and our charters are grappling with how best to reopen school within the next few weeks with the pandemic that continues to shift from one wave to the other,” she said. “It’s essential that the Learning Continuity Plan is thoughtfully developed, that there is stakeholder engagement at all levels, so that this plan is one that helps to really chart the path for what will take place in the 20–21 school year.”

In addition to new board member Glover Woods, James J. McQuillen of Crescent City and Haydee Rodriguez of El Centro also joined the State Board. McQuillen has been education director for the Yurok Tribe since 2004, while Rodriguez has served as a teacher at Central Union High School in El Centro since 1998 and is the Advancement Via Individual Determination coordinator.

Inherent to discussions on the Learning Continuity and Attendance Plan were many concerns about learning loss and where students will be academically when they return to the classroom or continue distance learning. Darling-Hammond advised board members of a new document, “Guidance on Diagnostic and Formative Assessments,” which offers tools and strategies for measuring students’ learning; none of the assessments are required. Options include Smarter Balanced interim assessments, and practice and training tests for the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress and the English Language Proficiency Assessments for California.

“It’s going to be very important that we have good formative assessments when students return to school to understand where they are in their learning, to deal with it as a continuous progress forward rather than a deficit approach that labels or stigmatizes students when they return to school,” Darling-Hammond said.

An additional resource is the Tools for Teachers website (https://smartertoolsforteachers.org), a new formative assessment component of the Smarter Balanced assessment system that replaces the Digital Library. The preview website features many of the instructional and professional development resources that will be available with the official launch on Sept. 30.

Outside of urgent COVID-19 issues, the State Board also heard an update on the development of a long-awaited student-growth model. A presentation by the CDE and Educational Testing Service offered an overview of a proposed new residual gain methodology developed by ETS to help stabilize the state’s proposed student-growth model (residual gain is the difference between a student’s predicted test score and actual test score).

ETS is now slated to conduct a test run using residual gains data from the 2016–17, 2017–18 and 2018–19 school years that will be presented at the September State Board meeting. The board could possibly adopt a model at its November meeting, but state testing disruptions caused by COVID-19 mean data won’t be incorporated into the California School Dashboard for at least a couple of years, said Cindy Kazanis, director of the Analysis, Measurement & Accountability Reporting Division.

CSBA will continue to participate in the CDE’s Growth Model Stakeholder group as the process moves forward.

For a more detailed summary of the State Board meeting, visit http://blog.csba.org/sbe-july-2020.