BILL ANALYSIS

S.B. 1310

By: Davis

Public Education

Committee Report (Unamended)

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Current law requires the commissioner of education to adopt a set of indicators of the quality of learning and student achievement and to biennially review the indicators for the consideration of appropriate revisions. These indicators currently include student achievement on standardized tests, graduation rates, and dropout rates. Interested parties contend that, while tests provide important and objective data on knowledge acquisition, they are not complete measures of student performance and learning, they can penalize students who are unfamiliar with certain cultural references, and they prove unreliable when it comes to measuring teacher effectiveness and the quality of instruction in a classroom.

S.B. 1310 seeks to address this issue as it relates to standards for school district, public school campus, and open-enrollment charter school performance ratings.

RULEMAKING AUTHORITY

It is the committee's opinion that this bill does not expressly grant any additional rulemaking authority to a state officer, department, agency, or institution.

ANALYSIS

S.B. 1310 amends the Education Code to require the commissioner of education, in evaluating performance, to consider the performance of each campus in a school district and each open-enrollment charter school on the basis of the campus's or school's performance on quality of learning indicators, in addition to student achievement indicators. The bill requires the indicators of quality of learning to include the percentage of teachers who teach a grade level or subject for which the teacher does not hold the appropriate certification, the rates at which teachers are not retained, and, for each applicable grade level, the number of exceptions from the class size limit. The bill's provisions apply beginning with the 2013-2014 school year.

EFFECTIVE DATE

On passage, or, if the bill does not receive the necessary vote, September 1, 2013.