California’s public school system is not unlike a huge city. There is a central core, with far-flung neighborhoods radiating out in every direction, each offering different cultures and ethnicities. Trying to find common ground in these enclaves would be difficult, if not impossible.

But that’s exactly what the state’s education leaders try to do every year, using standardized test scores and exit exam results — from both the state and federal perspectives — to determine if our students are making progress.

This issue is of paramount importance, because of what has happened to public education in California in recent years. This state’s students were once the gold standard of education. High levels of achievement were expected, and accomplishment was a foregone conclusion.

Not any more. Today, California students rank among the lowest-achieving in the United States, based on comparative scores in the core academic disciplines. This fact is particularly odious because California puts so much money and resources into public education.

Slipping from first to almost worst in a matter of just a few school generations is disturbing.

The latest round of statewide test-score results offers a mixture of good and bad. Most schools seem to be inching upward in their students’ levels of achievement by state standards — but fewer than half of California high schools are meeting the federal government’s No Child Left Behind requirements for “adequate yearly progress.” Yet, when state-based test results are factored in, high schools seem to be doing OK.

It’s a bit of smoke and mirrors. The state’s standardized tests, given to elementary and middle-school students, measure how well the kids are doing relative to their grade level. The high school measurements are based on the state’s exit exam, which was originally designed to make sure high school graduates met certain academic criteria.

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The math section of the high school exit exam, for example, tests youngsters on their knowledge of math — based on seventh-grade standards. Is that really a measure of what we expect from graduating seniors?

In many ways, the state’s lower grade-level testing is more comprehensive than the high school exit exam. Intuition tells us the process should be reversed.

Still, if it’s true that you dance with the person who invited you to the prom, we must live with such disparate testing programs, at least for now.

The problem is that using different standards for testing students in, say, elementary school and high school really doesn’t measure their academic progress across the educational spectrum. Such procedures show strong indications of strengths and weaknesses, but in too many cases, educators — and parents — are left wondering what the specific results of different testing systems really mean.

A prime example is that local high schools appear to be making progress toward meeting goals of the statewide testing program, but don’t do nearly as well when being graded by federal standards. Since the objective is to have better-educated students, shouldn’t state and federal officials be working toward a set of common rules and standards by which to judge the overall results of education?

The process is littered with confusing acronyms — API, AYP, STAR, APR and CAHSEE. What California’s students really need is just one — EGTACG, something we made up, and which stands for Education Geared Toward A Common Goal.

And that goal should be a system that offers the kind of educational foundation that will give every California youngster the tools he or she needs to function in a complex society.

Humans tend to complicate things, sometimes unnecessarily. The California Education Code, for example, is bigger than the phone books of most major U.S. cities, combined. Maybe we just need to simplify.

September 15, 2008