Nine years ago, as the state Board of Education was working on a system to inform Californians about what was happening in schools, one of its professional advisors, Nancy Brownell, delivered what she described as a “very brief” summary.

Quoted in full from a recording of the July 28, 2015, meeting:

“The conversation around what we’re learning and the development of the evaluation rubric obviously applies in the context of accountability at the larger context. So what the specifics of really being able to build a larger system that emphasizes the cohesive framework that leads to a sense of how we are going to operationalize the demands and expectations in Ed Code around the rubric around how the components, then, of an accountability system that focuses on multiple measures and tries to, as several of you have said, weave the pieces together to help think about the context of the state priorities and how the guiding principles are a lens, we want to continue to develop the details. I have taken to using a picture of an iceberg in some of the presentations on accountability. There is a lot of agreement in some ways on the surface level. None of us would question the importance of the principles. It’s really below the surface in the huge picture I use of what does that really look like in an operationalized system.”

Brownell’s jargon-heavy word salad encapsulated the shortcomings of the so-called “dashboard” that the board later adopted. Academic performance should have been the main focus of the California School Dashboard, but it is just one of its “multiple measures,” thus allowing schools with sub-par test results to boast of high ratings due to their ancillary scores.