Th LAUSD School Board voted on renewal of a charter yesterday and the name got to me: Garr Academy of Math and Entrepreneurial Studies (also called G.A.M.E.S.). Yeah, that’s a mouthful.
One of the odd trends that has occurred in the last ten years is the over-naming of schools. There are several schools that have almost comically long names: The Los Feliz Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and Medicine Magnet.
This got me thinking – Do schools with the word “math” in the name perform any better on the Math tests?
The data is fairly limited because many of the long-named schools are actually academies or magnets of a larger school, and their schools get lumped together. However, below are some stand alone schools with ‘math’ in their name and their scores.
The orange line represents the LAUSD met or exceeded average in Math for Elementary Schools, and the bars are all elementary schools with math in their names. Turns out, most of them actually underperform LAUSD on the whole.
I was curious if this was a fair analysis because we are comparing them to the district average, so I also compared them to their local school:
Still a pretty mixed bag. I guess you can’t name your way to success.
I think it would be interesting to see if there is correlation between the number of letters in a school’s name and their test scores. Maybe next time…
[…] this year, I asked a simple question: Do schools that have “math” in their name do better on math? When I evaluated that question, I was using 2014-2015 data. So, I thought I might look at it again, […]