These are LAUSD’s top perfomers on California’s new, harder tests
Students at Francisco Bravo Senior High Medical Magnet School take a practice test in February for the new state standardized tests.
No Los Angeles Unified schools could say today that all their students meet grade level expectations.
Canyon Charter came close to doing so in both math and English standards — 89% of students at the K-5 school in Santa Monica met or exceeded math expectations, and 93% did for English.
Across LAUSD, 33% of students met expectations for English and only 25% did so for the new math standards.
Here are the schools that had the highest percentage of students meeting or beating college readiness standards, based on the state’s new Common Core-aligned test results, in the district.
These results reflect overall school performance, regardless of grade or school level, (high school, middle, elementary). Breaking down the results that way could affect the rankings.
Canyon is an affiliated charter school whose demographics do not reflect those of the district as a whole — it's about 79% white and only 4% Latino, compared to a 10% white and 74% Latino population in the district.
Less than 10% of students are English learners, said principal Nicole Sheard. In contrast, about a fourth of the district's students are English learners, and those students performed poorly overall partially because of language issues rather than problems grasping the concepts.
Sheard credits the school's success to a number of factors. Canyon has a robust parent association that raises money for technology, classroom aides and teachers, Sheard said. The school long used a curriculum that mirrors Common Core's focus of engaging critical thinking skills and open-ended assignments. And students are constantly on computers, which is helpful because these tests were taken digitally.
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