Why California Keeps Failing to Grade Its Schools

The State Is Inexcusably Late in Delivering a Revamped Public School Index

It’s a California educational reality worthy of Kafka. Our state’s leaders keep asking parents and communities to take bigger roles in making local schools better—even as those same leaders keep us in the dark about how our public schools are doing.

In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how their kids’ schools stacked up among schools across the state. API wasn’t a perfect measure, but it offered a clear and consistent language for judging schools that could …