Piedmont Unified School District held onto its top three ranking in English and Math, ranking third among California unified school districts, and jumped up a level to fourth for science in the state’s 2024 student assessments. Director of Instructional Technology Stephanie Griffin presented the data to the Board of Education on Oct. 24.
Smarter Balanced tests are given to students in third through eighth grades and in 11th grade. They are part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), which also includes the English Language Proficiency Assessment.
This year, PUSD highlighted the fact that 82 students in the district achieved perfect results in at least one of the exams (33 in ELA, 45 in Math, and 11 in Science).
Despite the strong showing, some proficiency gaps among student groups were notable. In particular, Black students saw significant declines in math scores relative to last year. Griffin also said that third-graders, who spent their Kindergarten year during covid, showed declines, a trend she said was true across the board in Alameda County. The third grade scores in Piedmont were uneven across the three elementary schools she said, and that the most notable drops in proficiency were at the elementary schools that had higher absentee rates.
Boardmembers said addressing these performance gaps should be a priority for the district. Griffin said the district planned to drill into the data and address this gap by tackling chronic absenteeism (a statewide problem since the pandemic), creating individual student-level instructional strategies, early literacy screening, and more. Griffin also noted that she would analyze interdistrict transfer data to try and understand how that might have affected test outcomes.