High School CAASPP Scores are Useless

Elementary schools in California now give the state standardized tests to three of their grades. Middle Schools give tests to their three grades.

But High Schools?

They give their test to just one grade: 11th Graders. This is a major problem for data analysis.

If you test three grades, it smooths out the data. If an exceptionally high-performing class comes in, its not going to spike your data, because there are two other grades to balance it out. You can see each grade filter upwards through the grades, and see their growth. Therefore, you can see if they improved over the prior year

But if you test only one grade in a school, it is hard to tell if the growth has to do with successful teaching OR simply reflects natural fluctuations of the student body. Every year’s data reflects a different group of students, so its not showing whether those students grew, but only how they performed that one year.

Let me to show you what I mean.

Here are the ten top schools for year-over-year growth in English for schools in Los Angeles.

Did Venice High School suddenly become 42% more effective? Or did they just get a new group of 11th graders that preformed better? It is unknowable. We do not test 12th graders so we don’t know if those students who scored poorly last year have improved. We only know that their 11th graders this year did better than their 11th graders last year.

9 of the top 10 year-over-year growth schools are high schools. And on the bottom of the barrel? Just about the same:

All 10 of the largest year-over-year drops are high schools. Did these schools suddenly go from good to bad? Or did they simply get a lower performing group of 11th graders? It is unknowable, because we have no data about these kids from the year before or the year after.

This system inevitably creates wild swings in scores for high schools. One year, a school could appear to make massive gains, while the next year it has lost ground against local schools. It makes it very difficult to keep track of high school progress.

It makes the CAASPP scores pretty much completely useless for high school.