Press & media
SchoolScope is a California school performance analysis tool built from public government education data—CAASPP test results, chronic absenteeism, suspension rates, graduation rates, and more—scored with a transparent, published methodology and free public school profiles. No school pays for placement. No black box.
Findings you can use
Three pieces of original analysis, each grounded in California’s own published data. Feel free to cite any of these with attribution and a link back to the source post.
49 public schools that beat the demographic odds
We identified 49 California public schools—11 elementary, 8 middle, and 33 high schools—that reach a Scope Score of 70 or higher while enrolling student populations where 50% or more of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. That's a rare group: at the elementary level it's 0.3% of majority-low-income schools reaching our top performance band.
Does "Advanced" predict college outcomes? A 1,726-school comparison
For the class-of-2023 comparison, 1,726 California high schools were eligible and 252 formed 126 pairs with similar overall test results, meal-eligibility rates and neighborhood income. The main UC enrollment gap was 2.18 percentage points, but fell toward zero under stricter matching. These school-level comparisons cannot establish a causal effect or predict an individual child's college destination.
Why "80% met or exceeded" can mean two very different schools
Two elementary schools can both report 80% of students "meeting or exceeding" the state standard in math and look nothing alike underneath—one might have 55% at Standard Exceeded and 25% at Standard Met, the other 15% Exceeded and 65% Met. Same headline number, very different mix of students underneath it.
The dataset
As of this page's last render, SchoolScope carries a live Scope Score for 9,545 California schools — 5,721 elementary, 2,177 middle, and 1,647 high school, scored on three separate scales that are never blended into one number. Every count below is pulled from the same underlying query our AI documentation publishes—not typed by hand, so they can't drift out of date.
Full source list, with links to download the same files we do: schoolscope.co/about#data-sources-list.
Reuse policy
Our derived dataset—Scope Scores, percentiles, and the figures computed from them—is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse with attribution and a link back to schoolscope.co. That license covers our own analysis. It doesn't extend to the raw data we start from; source agencies (CDE, NCES, U.S. Census Bureau) set their own terms for that.
Individual figures and findings from our published analysis—like the three above—are reusable with attribution and a link to the source post.
Media assets
Contact
For interviews, data requests, or to verify a figure on this page, get in touch and select Press / Media as the subject. We aim to respond within 48 hours.