Orange County Report Card

* UNDERSTANDING THE NUMBERS / READING THE TABLES

In California, nearly 4.5 million public school students in grades 2 through 11 took the Stanford 9 standardized tests in the spring for the fourth consecutive year. All of them were tested in reading, math and language skills such as grammar and punctuation. Students through eighth grade also took a spelling test, and students in higher grades took exams in science and history/social science. For the first time, students in fourth and seventh grades also took writing exams.

On Wednesday, the California Department of Education released scores for nearly 8,000 public schools.

To see how a school in Orange County is doing, use this cross-section of scores as a gauge. Bear in mind that these are results for individual grades, not for entire schools. Scores can vary from grade to grade and from classroom to classroom, even at the same school.

Results for all grades, schools and districts will be available on the Internet at https://star.cde.ca.gov.

To find a school’s scores:

* Look first for the grade level.

* Search down the column to find the school district. Schools are listed beneath in alphabetical order.

* The scores are to the right of the school’s name. The columns report 2001 testing data for reading and math and the change in each of those subjects from 1998, the first year of the test. Use the guide at the top of each column of numbers to determine the score’s category. (For information about how subgroups of students performed school by school or district by district, see https://star.cde.ca.gov. Data there are shown by socioeconomic status, race, sex and other categories.)

* For each test, the chart shows the percentage of students in each school who scored at or above the 50th percentile, the national average. Change indicates the gain or loss in percentage of students at that level.

* The columns at far right reflect the performance of students on test questions matching California’s standards in English and language arts. The first of those, labeled “Std. Abv.,” indicates the percentage of students deemed by the State Board of Education to be “proficient” or “advanced” in those categories. The second column gives the percentage of students considered to be “below basic” or “far below basic.” Those students are considered to be in need of intensive assistance that might go beyond what is available in the classroom. The standards exam included 90 questions.

Note: an asterisk (*) means the number of students tested was 10 or fewer. Schools for which data were unavailable were omitted.

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