Every year, a new class of kids enroll in high school, and every year, parents have to make the difficult decision of where to send their children to school. This is one of the most important decisions to make, as the years that make up high school can be the most defining years of a student’s life. There are several things to take into consideration during this process, like proximity to their home, ratio of students to teachers, and classes offered. The pressing question is: Are the test scores of schools an important factor that people consider when choosing a school?
Students, particularly at Calabasas, hear all the time from administrators and teachers that tests like the CAASPP are important for enrollment and the ranking of the school. Tomer Fine, a student at CHS, attests to this.
“I certainly think that my teachers really want me to do well on the CAASPP. One of them even gave the class extra credit depending on how we did. The fact that there is so much pressure on how well we do is stressful,” said Fine.
In an interview with The Courier, LVUSD Superintendent Dan Stepenosky, he refuted this idea, saying the CAASPP is an indicator of how students are learning and does affect our ranking, but it isn’t what he’s specifically worried about.
The ranking that Stepenosky referred to is determined by the CA Department of Education, which provides the most universal ranking of schools in California. The dashboard ranks schools according to the amount of students who go on to college, suspension rate, graduation rate, and student’s proficiency in math and English. The diversity of the school population also plays a role.
“Generally speaking, [Calabasas High School and Agoura High School’s] test scores have been flat, but we’d love to see your high school score go up as far as ranking. There’s a lot of factors. There’s attendance rates, there’s diversity, GPA, college admissions, all those kinds of things,” said Stepenosky.
In Stepenosky’s eyes, the most important factors are diversity and college admissions. He says that college admissions are probably the most important part, but families do consider diversity.
“[People] take a look at how ethnically diverse schools are. Calabasas is more diverse than Agoura, but [the diversity is] not like California, we know. That is probably where our ranking takes the biggest hit,” said Stepenosky.
Gavin Joshi, an 8th-grade student at A.E. Wright, said that test scores do not influence his decision to attend a specific school.
“I will be attending Calabasas High School because my brother goes there,” Joshi said.
This raises the question of whether the CAASPP and tests similar to it actually reflect student proficiency levels and whether they should be included in something as important as national rankings.
English teacher Christina Heredia explains the complexities of this dilemma.
“I think they’re fairly accurate in terms of basic proficiency. What the test scores don’t take into account is that I don’t think students take it very seriously. They don’t understand the importance of it, so many of them just kind of blow it off. The problem with that is it does impact our scores. Because I think many students don’t take it seriously, it’s not a very fair assessment,” Heredia said.
In Heredia’s personal experience of motherhood and choosing her children’s future schools, she explains that test scores play a small role in the larger picture. She argues that the most important factor in choosing a school is first choosing where to live.
She explained that her home district and LVUSD are both amazing districts, and she would have been happy to send her kids to either.
“From personal experience, realtors will tout ‘look at how great the scores are,’ and it definitely will raise home prices if your house is in a district that is ranked highly, at least in part, based on those scores. It does matter for that [reason],” said Heredia.
Higher school test scores add a new level of attractiveness to choosing a home, which confirms the fact that test scores are important to the school’s enrollment, just not in the most direct way by looking at CAASPP scores.
For CHS parent, Samara Long, sending her children to Calabasas High School was a no-brainer for a multitude of reasons.
“Calabasas High School has a really great reputation for academics, extracurricular activities. It’s a nice campus, great resources and we’re really happy about that,” said Long.
