Anaheim Collaborative: New Ways to Measure Students’ Progress

Anaheim public schools embrace projects that reflect creativity, critical thinking, and a sense of purpose

By Carnegie Corporation of New York December 4, 2024

The Anaheim Union High School District’s 22 schools prioritize hands-on performance tasks, akin to a road test, over state assessments, while aiming to offer students career-oriented courses, certifications, internships, and scholarships.

With his hair combed back and his white shirt tucked neatly into black pants, Matthew Franco took the stage in April to tell his schoolmates about the death last year of his father, who tragically died of a fentanyl overdose. “While my little brother was knocking on the bathroom door, there was no answer,” Franco said. “My father was in there unresponsive.”

Franco reeled off facts about the death toll of the fentanyl epidemic and called for young people to be taught how to help someone who is overdosing. He ended by saying, “I won’t stay quiet.” The audience burst into applause.

This “Soapbox speech” was a key part of Franco’s schoolwork and assessment at Anaheim Union High School District, about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The district has taken a dramatic step: it has moved away from traditional tests in the conviction that, overall, these mostly measure classroom compliance — and not much more.

Instead, the district’s teachers evaluate students’ projects, such as short speeches, labs, essays, and public service initiatives. District leaders say they aim to measure skills that are needed to thrive in the modern workplace and in a democratic society. They want to capture growth in each student’s personal voice, sense of purpose, technical skills, and the “5Cs” — creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and character.

By the Numbers

Graduation rates at the Anaheim Union High School District rose to 91 percent in 2023.

The share of students who met admission requirements for California’s public universities increased to 54 percent, up from 44 percent in 2017.

98 percent of the Class of 2022 graduates who entered the University of California, Irvine, were still enrolled in Spring of 2023.

Changing from routine standardized testing to performance task assessments has taken an enormous amount of teamwork among members of the Anaheim Collaborative. Partners in the collaborative, launched in 2015, include the City of Anaheim; area school districts and community colleges; Cal State Fullerton; the University of California, Irvine; TGR Foundation; and the nonprofit tech company eKadence.

To Franco, the district’s shift to a more holistic approach in evaluating students has been a game changer. Researching statistics behind the fentanyl crisis and the policies that exacerbate it was far more engaging than taking a test, he says, and it was deeply meaningful to feel heard by his peers. “It was wonderful,’’ he said later. “It wasn’t just a piece of paper that nobody ever looked at. They were there and they were listening.”

Amy Kwon, the district’s director of innovative programs and instructional systems, says the results are compelling. In Franco’s case, she says, because of the district’s emphasis on priorities like student voice and reaching an authentic audience, “he was able to not only see success but be uplifted.” Franco, who had spent time in juvenile detention due to gang involvement, graduated from high school in May and plans to start community college to study business.

In an area that is home to Disneyland, Anaheim Union High School District has roughly 26,000 students in grades 7 through 12. Most are low-income and Hispanic.

The district’s 22 schools must still give state tests, but its leaders say they focus much more on homegrown assessments of a student’s ongoing work. Some educators liken the importance of such performance tasks to the value of taking a road test to get a driver’s license, rather than merely administering a multiple-choice quiz. The collaborative also has set high goals for itself, and is looking to offer students career-oriented courses, Google certifications, internships, mentoring experiences, and scholarships.

June Ahn at the University of California, Irvine, is the district’s research partner. With support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his team is creating an AI tool that analyzes students’ performance and reflections so that teachers can understand a student’s growth so that they can quickly see how to improve instruction. The collaborative’s nonprofit tech partner, eKadence, is developing a software platform to host all of this work, and is now working on building a professional “community of practice” to help spread expertise among the district’s 1,200 teachers.

Students add artifacts of their projects into digital portfolios as well as their reflections on what they have learned. The AI tool pulls out evidence of whether each student is “progressing, emerging, or excelling” in the “5C” categories. For example, if the AI tool spots a student’s comment that he learned to appreciate a peer’s point of view during the course of a project, that would show the development of their sense of compassion, an element of character.

Robert Gaudette, an instructional coach and history teacher in the district, likes the emphasis on work that feels relevant to teenagers. In a history class on climate change, for example, students wrote indictments against corporate polluters, and a local judge joined them to explain the indictment process. In another project, students explored what skill sets humans should bring to sustain human life on Mars. The task took an unexpected turn when students said, “Hey, Mr. Gaudette, why should we colonize Mars? Why should we ruin another planet? We should fix ours.” His response: “That’s the kind of passion we want.”

Parents have bought into the district’s approach because they see results, its officials say. Graduation rates rose to 91 percent in 2023. The percentage of students who met admission requirements for California’s public universities increased to 54 percent, up from 44 percent in 2017. About 98 percent of high school graduates entering the University of California, Irvine, persisted through at least the spring of 2023.

With support from eKadence, the district is also piloting an AI tutor, which comes in the image of a dog named Skrappy, to nudge students to find the right answers in interactive online activities.

Going forward, the collaborative aims to use AI to analyze families’ concerns. The tool can scour a family’s answers to questions about their needs, and can quickly pick up on their priorities — such as worries about food insecurity, addiction, insufficient housing, and other problems — so that local leaders can try to address what matters most to them.

Some veteran teachers have resisted the new grading system and AI assistance. Anaheim Union High School District superintendent Michael Matsuda has faith that with systematic training, all teachers will come to embrace this transformation. He sees the country’s emphasis on standardized tests as draining teachers’ enthusiasm and effectiveness. “If you unleash teachers’ talent, they’ll come up with great ways to use it,” he says. “They will create energy.”

This article is part of a series featuring winners of Profiles in Collective Leadership, an initiative by Carnegie Corporation of New York in partnership with the nonprofit Transcend, that recognizes outstanding local partnerships that educate youth, bolster the workforce, and demonstrate the power of working together. The 10 nonpartisan collaborations in urban, suburban, and rural areas across the country draw on the strengths of local government, education, nonprofit, business, and health care professionals to catalyze socioeconomic mobility and civic engagement in their communities. The 10 recognized partnerships in eight states have been awarded $200,000 grants and will act as exemplars, sharing what they have learned with each other and more broadly.