This fall, students in UCLA’s Teacher Education Program created SARCS for the schools that they observed. These SARCs represented the culminating activity in a course I taught on the social foundations of teaching. The course examined educational theories that discuss the impact of society on various aspects of schools. One underlying goal of the course is to help teachers understand that good teaching means looking beyond the classroom to creating a society where good schools are available for everyone.

"In considering the current School Accountability Report Card (SARC), it became apparent to us that the SARC did not provide an accurate portrayal of schools. The focus on test scores overshadowed many other elements that greatly affect a student’s ability to learn and perform in school." - Jane Lok & Genessee Quizon

The SARC assignment called for students to design more accurate and democratic reporting strategies for the schools that they observed. These UCLA student teachers investigated which data would be most meaningful to parents, teachers, and students and how this data could be presented in a way that was accessible and useful. To accomplish this, the student teachers incorporated in the data collection the powerful voices of parents and students—voices traditionally absent from school reports.

The student teachers believed that SARCs, properly done, could help schools identify and communicate their triumphs as well as pinpoint their needs. They criticized LAUSDs SARCs as a rigid template, presenting, almost exclusively, information about scores, averages and other things that are easily counted (see the reports from groups 5 and 6.) These numbers and averages can be useful information, but it leaves out other pertinent information such as the overall schooling conditions—including curriculum (see groups 2, 5 and 7), qualified teachers (see groups 5, 6, and 7), facilities (see groups 2, 3 and 6), school climate (see groups 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6), and school funding (see groups 1 and 6). The student teachers found that the current process requires uniformity which supposedly allows different schools to be compared to each other. However, this uniformity is misleading because the reports say so little about the very different conditions and resources available at different schools.

The student teachers noted that the omission of important information often leads people to conclude that all schools give students equal opportunities. Further, people conclude that if schools with high populations of non-White students are failing in greater numbers than other schools, they could do just as well as high-achieving schools if the students and teachers simply tried harder. The student teachers concluded that SARCs must give information that lets the public know if students across the city are struggling on “uneven playing fields.” One group noticed that effective individualized school action plans were rare because of a lack of awareness that urban schools face very different sets of problems (see group 3). Their overarching conclusion was that SARCs do not present a way for schools to report on their individual needs; therefore, it is nearly impossible to know what types of resources will help them to turn things around. But, with a more accurate reporting tool, low performing schools in particular can identify the areas of the school that are most in need of additional district, state and federal support. Additionally, groups reported that more accurate SARCs also give parents and community members a chance to identify and build upon the school and community assets that already exist.

"Our concerns and ideas to make our schools better frequently go unnoticed or unaddressed by administrators and/or government officials. Instead of building a community where everyone’s ideas matter, our schools keep us divided and isolated. They require us to conform to their policies, to compete with each other." - Claudia Rojas

A Final Thought

As it stands now, our system of school accountability flows in one direction through channels that look something like this: the State Board of Education blames the state superintendent of schools, the state superintendent blames the district superintendent, the district superintendent blames the school principal, the school principal blames the teachers, and the teachers blame the students and parents. Students and parents end up scapegoated for systematic failures and other people in the system escape responsibility. A properly designed SARC can open the channels to allow a two-way flow of information and responsibility.

^tcla

Jeff Duncan-Andrade is a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA's IDEA where he facilitates "Teachers as Agents for Equity and Change."

Exerpts from SARCs created by TEP Student Teachers
For a complete copy of a group's SARC and/or actual class assignment, please send an e-mail to tcla@gseis.ucla.edu.

Group 1 SARC (PDF, 1.9 MB)
by Nathan Malan, Monica Marrero, Sherry Redditt, Amanda Styris, and Shirley Wang

Group 2 SARC (PDF, 768 K)
by Kate Dorr, Barb Freeman, Sandra Kim, Lori Lambaren, and Stephanie Rodriguez

Group 3 SARC (PDF, 140 K)
by Gabriela Contreras, Rebecca Flynn, Rene Gube, Nathaniel Pickering, and Claudia Rojas

Group 4 SARC (PDF, 84 K)
Dan Baird, Adriana Diaz, Catherine Foote, Cristine Sato, Linda Yaron, and Lupe Valdovinos

Group 5 SARC (PDF, 144 K)
by Jane Lok and Genessee Quizon

Group 6 SARC (PDF, 132 K)
Ingrid Gaines, Elizabeth Rivera, Asara Tulyathan, Alex Adams, and Marla Mason

Group 7 SARC (PDF, 4.3 MB)
by Jenny Cheng, Shelly Chin, Janet Lee, Alicia Nelson, and Trung Quach

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