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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Has anyone done the analysis of percentages of 5s? I'm going to be honest and say that I am confident my UMC white kid with most statistical advantages you can name (parental education, married parents, etc) would get 4s anywhere, but a 5 might depend on the school/teaching. It's also a good way of judging schools that have a sizeable advanced cohort. Lots of the schools we are considering have kids peel off in 5th grade for charters, so I'd be particularly interested in how non-economically disadvantaged (white if it's the only proxy) 3rd and 4th or, if that's too complicated, just 4th graders do. But I'd also happily take any data related to 5s if anyone has pulled out the data.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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