DC CAPE SCORES
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Anonymous
Um why? So only the parents with the wherewithal to process spreadsheet data can know the test scores? |
Anonymous
lol ok. Kids get 5s because they are motivated and focused and get how to take tests. It is not actually about teaching to the test. At that age you can’t really teach those abilities. |
Anonymous
Right. I don't care what my kid gets on the CAPE for the sake of it, so I don't want schools that teach to the test. I want schools with a large number of kids who get 5s so that there's a cohort to teach advanced material to. |
Anonymous
| Scores for my relevant demographic group are stagnant (a bit down, but it's a small number), while overall scores for the school are up a fair bit. The scores I care about are in a fine place but certainly not one where there is not plenty of room for improvement. What is your threshold for becoming concerned about a trend like that? A drop of a particular size? Dropping or stagnating over a particular number of years? |
Anonymous
DP. That might be what the data shows but it also might not. At many of the schools with very high percentages of kids scoring 4+, it not uncommon for parents to be supplementing aggressively outside of school, especially in math. At a school like that, you might think "oh good lots of kids scoring 5, the teacher can teach above grade level." In reality, the teacher still has to focus most of their content on grade level because there will always be kids who need that, and the kids doing a lot of outside supplementing may be bored in class but still excelling in math. If your focus is on providing a challenging environment for advanced learners, I would pick a floor for scoring and then start focusing on qualitative factors. For instance, some schools offer enrichment for kids who excel in or have a strong interest in subjects at school (rather than parents having to go find it elsewhere). Look for schools with active History Day participation, math and creative writing clubs after school (not just tutoring, but clubs where kids can go beyond the curriculum), science fairs, etc. Talk to parents and kids at the school and listen to how they talk about the academics and what they enjoy most at the school. This is going to tell you way more about the metrics you value than trying to isolate the 5s for non-economically advantaged kids and using it to draw conclusions about what the classroom experience is like. To give you an example of how this looks, I'm a parent on Capitol Hill and when I was looking at schools, I looked at things like how Payne has a really great History Day program with a lot of kids participating, and they also have a dedicated science teacher for upper grades. Or how LT does a science fair every spring that all kids participate in, and their after school enrichment programming is largely taught by the school's teachers and includes a ton of academic enrichment in various subjects. Those are more interesting and meaningful metrics for me in choosing a school than which school has 5 additional 4th graders from non-economically disadvantaged backgrounds scoring a 5 on CAPE. |
Anonymous
| It's interesting how Stokes is one of the few schools that has most kids getting 4+ on both tests yet underperforms for 3+ given its at risk percentage. That indicates a significant achievement gap: mostly 4s and 5s but also more 1s and 2s than one might expect. If I were considering the school I would want to know how it works with such a range of students. |
Anonymous
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I will echo what another parent wrote - as a Cap Hill resident, the number of Brent (and other) parents at Mathnasium and private tutors is quite large. Not knocking that, each parent should do what they can to support their kid. But it inflates the scores at those schools due to factors not related to actual school instruction, which means those kids at the school who aren’t supplementing outside of school will underperform bc the quality of instruction at the school was not what led to the high scores in the first place.
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Anonymous
DCPS doesn't really do this, even with a large cohort of 5s. |
Anonymous
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Where are you guys seeing the data broken out into individual campuses? I'm curious about Latin 2nd versus Cooper but just see "Washington Latin PCS" listed on the OSSE spreadsheet here -
https://app.box.com/s/a1bx09uvrx0i066n2alof3onbfivboen |
Anonymous
I’ll correct above. DCPS doesn’t do this because there are no kids getting 5’s at many schools. |
Anonymous
This site is a bit easier to navigate https://www.empowerk12.org/data-dashboard-source/dc-parcc-dash |
Anonymous
Dropping or stagnating trend over time. If you have a high performer and as kids go up in grades, achievement gap gets wider and this likely means that content and focus is on the lower performers. |
Anonymous
I noticed this at one school -- the number of 4/5s went down, the number of 3+ went up. I guess that means more kids are brought up to an adequate level, but the kids at the top are not challenged as much. |
Anonymous
Or the kids at the top have left. |
Anonymous
| expand the school name column. its broken out Latin upper school (high school), middle school 2nd street, cooper, in that order. |