LCAP Year 3 Outcomes

The state of California designed the LCAP to be "a tool for local educational agencies to set goals, plan actions, and leverage resources to meet those goals to improve student outcomes."  An important part of accountability is evaluating the outcomes for each metric to see if the actions selected and money and time invested were effective to meet the target.  But take a minute to review any district's previous LCAP cycle (2021/2022-2024).  You'll notice that the Year 3 outcomes are often blank.  Why?  The State's guidance allows districts to leave the previous cycle's results incomplete because the summative 2024 data became the baseline for the current cycle (starting in 2024/2025). However, this is a major hindrance to the accountability that the LCAP is intended to provide. At times, the current cycle LCAP uses different metrics from the previous cycle, leaving some outcomes unknown and therefore some metrics unable to evaluate.  But even if the metrics are the same, evaluating the outcomes requires the invested party to transfer data between documents.  When we're talking about hundreds of pages, it's easy to see why most stakeholders do not take the time for such a laborious task.  While I suppose this is feedback for the State, let's challenge our districts to complete the LCAP with Year 3 outcomes as an investment to promote and secure trust and accountability.