Newsweek Releases List Of 2016 Best Public High Schools In America

Preparing students for a 4-year selective university is very different from preparing students for "College" aka "Community College". For all the STEM and STEAM talk, the reality is that many kids are not getting the Math they need to get into a 4- year selective University. Common Core was designed to get more kids into Community College not the UC or CalState system.

Here is what a student needs to do well on ACT

The content breakdown for ACT math is Pre-Algebra (20-25%), Elementary Algebra (15-20%), Intermediate Algebra (15-20%), Coordinate Geometry (15-20%), Plane Geometry (20-25%), and Trigonometry (5-10%).

So you need to complete Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II before you take your college entrance exams.

Tesoro was the highest ranked High School in CUSD at #323 with a College Ready Score of 75.9 and a college Bound score of 84.8. That sounds great! 98.2% of Tesoro students graduate and 84.8 go on to college. So lets see how many go to a 4-year selective University or Community College.

College Readiness is measured by EAP. This measures Math and English at the end of 11th grade.
Source: 2013: http://eap2013.ets.org/ViewReport.asp

Ready for College is 47%
Conditional means they are not ready - but may get ready by the end of 12th grade (to late for college entrance exams and application to 4-year university) So the data would show that

47% are ready to apply to UC/CalState.

To be accepted students must complete all of their A-G course requirements and the Math portion of that requires students to complete 3 years of math including Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II/Trig by the end of the 11th grade. So lets see what percentage of students from Tesoro are doing that.

Ready for College Level Math Algebra II - 7%

Everyone else will go to Community College. That is a very different picture than the impression that the Newsweek article paints. Now compare 2013 EAP to 2014 EAP to look for improvement year over year.


Source: 2014: http://eap2014.ets.org/ViewReport.asp

Ready for College Level Math Algebra II - 4% down from 7% the year before. Everyone else will have no choice but to go to Community College.



Unfortunately what the State of California has done is change all of the testing so that parents cannot see these declines. The State also tried to erase 15 years of test data:

https://edsource.org/2015/state-removes-15-years-of-test-results-before-releasing-new-smarter-balanced-scores-aligned-to-common-core/85561

So there is an intent for California to deceive parents about the quality of education students are receiving and I am sure that CUSD will use this Newsweek list to state how great they are when in fact CUSD is abysmal in math.

The new EAP for Tesoro will be under the following but since this is a base year- it has no meaning for comparison to past EAP.
http://asd.calstate.edu/performance/elm-ept/2015/scripts/hsrem15.asp?campus=303075

The other measure of college readiness is A-G completion rates: Tesoro 62% CUSD's District average is 54.4% So half of the students enrolled in CUSD have no option after high school except to attend Community College.

Source: http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/SchGrad.asp?cSelect=Tesoro%5EHigh--Capistrano%5EUnif--3066464-3030756&cChoice=SchGrad&cYear=2014-15&cLevel=School&cTopic=Graduates&myTimeFrame=S&submit1=Submit