Thank you for sharing that link of summary results for California, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP). To be fair, please note there may be a bit of apples-and-oranges comparison when looking at CAASPP and data from the study:
1) CAASPP includes Smarter Balanced and other test instruments: "
CAASPP includes a number of assessments, but the most widely given are the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments, which evaluate student progress on the California standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy, often referred to as the Common Core."
2) the
article stated that Smarter Balanced was one source of data for CA, but not the only source: "
Based on the... California Smarter Balanced... and multistate MAP data"
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).
I agree these results which you cite from CAASPP do not sum to 1.4 million. That said,
1) CAASPP includes Smarter Balanced and other test instruments: "
CAASPP includes a number of assessments, but the most widely given are the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments, which evaluate student progress on the California standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy, often referred to as the Common Core. "
2) the article cites MAP tests (which are given more frequently and may show growth beyond the Smarter Balanced Assessment, yielding a different result).
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.
Agreed. I believe the
study also agrees...
1) Because this study is focused on performance
above grade level, "
at or
below grade level" is treated as one aggregated group, and is cited as 65% for ELA, 86% for Mathematics.
2) The study showed the results from Florida exceeded those from Wisconsin which exceeded those from California.
The
CAASPP which you provided a link to includes
Smarter Balanced and other measurement instruments. The
study's Table 2 shows
CA Smarter Balanced results by grade level. Here's how they compare for ELA:
ELA - Advanced, Grade 3:
CAASPP: 18% . . .
SB: 21%. . .(+3%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 4:
CAASPP: 19% . . .
SB: 27%. . .(+8%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 5:
CAASPP: 17% . . .
SB: 33%. . .(+16%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 6:
CAASPP: 13% . . .
SB: 33%. . .(+20%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 7:
CAASPP: 12% . . .
SB: 36%. . .(+24%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 8:
CAASPP: 12% . . .
SB: 37%. . .(+25%)
ELA - Advanced, Grade 11:
CAASPP: 23%. . . SB: not reported in Table 2
Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CAASPP: 16%The difference in
percentage reported as Advanced by Smarter Balanced grows each year as compared with the
percentage reported as Advanced by CAASPP. I would be curious as to what other assessments are being given for CAASPP and whether these other assessments may have a disproportionate number of students performing at level 1, 2, 3, as compared with the population of students taking Smarter Balanced. (For example, possibly the other assessments are not
aligned to the curriculum being taught.)
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
I think the 1.4million came from MAP data as the
article states "
Relying specifically on the MAP data, one out of every ten fifth-graders is performing at the high school level in reading, and nearly one child in forty at this age is performing at the high school level in mathematics
...
Converting these percentages to numbers of children provides a sobering picture of the number of students who are not well served under the current grade-based educational paradigm. In Wisconsin alone, somewhere between 278,000 and 330,000 public-school students are performing more than a full grade above where they are placed in school. And as mentioned above, in the much larger state of California, that number is between 1.4 million and 2 million students."
