Photo courtesy of the Sacramento Bee

There isn’t a state that isn’t scrambling for federal Race to the Top funding. But California, already mired in battles over spending priorities and bloated budgets, has the most intriguing proposal for using some of those dollars: Finally connecting its sprawl of education data systems into one longitudinal regime.

Earlier this month, state legislators defied the California Teachers Association by eliminating a restriction on tying together the state’s student data and teacher data systems. At the same time, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is championing measures that would create performance pay scales for teachers, essentially tying teacher compensation to student achievement.

Even if all of the measures (which includes eliminating the state-mandated cap on charter schools) get past the CTA and the legislature, California isn’t guaranteed Reach to the Top funds. And even if they get the money, it doesn’t solve the long-term reasons why state school data systems have been anything but: The lack of political will in overcoming the structural obstacles to unifying the systems. Until California addresses how it governs it primary, secondary and post-secondary education systems (including the atrociously balkanized college data systems within the University of California, California State and community college systems) and determines who will actually operate these systems, the funding will simply be spent with little in the way of results.

You can read more in my chapter on school data systems in A Byte At the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. Eric Osberg also offers his thoughts.