I'm confused. What else is new?

Anyway, it seemed odd to me that nearly half of California students were exceeding standards. This is not the California school system I know.

From the article:

Quote
In a recent policy brief, four colleagues addressed this question and found that very large percentages of students (between 15 percent and 45 percent) are performing above grade level—and that these percentages represent staggeringly large numbers of students. In California alone, for example, this group comprises more than 1.4 million pupils.

Hmm. They were looking at results of the Smarter Balanced test for school year 2014-15. It was easy to find the summary results for California.

The results are clear: 3.15 million students took the English test, and 16% exceeded standards (about 504,000 kids). In math, 14% of 3.17 million students exceeded the standards (444,000).

Note that 56% of students did NOT meet the standards in English, and 67% didn't meet them in math. This information sounded more typical of statistics for this state.

Meanwhile, the OP's story linked to a "detailed" breakdown of percentages of students scoring beyond grade level by grade. Those numbers don't fit the with the numbers published by the CA department of education. They aren't even close.

So where did the 1.4 million figure come from? Oh....45% of 3.15 million is ~1.4 million.

They (apparently) pulled a number out of the air, applied it to all of California, and exclaimed that nearly half of our students are performing above grade level --- when in reality, 2/3 are below grade level in math and 56% are below in English.

I call bogosity/lying on this one.