Dear Judah Parents: Grades 3-6

This spring, your child will take a test as part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP). Your support is essential to your child’s success. The purpose of this letter is to provide you with details about testing this year.

First, let me assure you that as former classroom teacher and school principal, I understand a single test score will not give us everything we need to know about how your student is doing. Our students are much more than a once-a-year test score.

Our goal is to ensure every student becomes an actively literate, contributing member of society. The Common Core Standards (CCSS) were created with this goal in mind. The test your student will take this over the next few weeks, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) is designed to measure how we are doing in meeting these goals. Your child’s teacher will be informing you of their scheduled testing dates.

For the 2021=22 school year, CAASPP is comprised of the following:

• Smarter Balanced assessments for English language arts and mathematics in grades three through eight, and grade eleven. The Smarter Balanced assessments utilize computer-adaptive tests and performance tasks that allow students to show what they know and are able to do in English language arts and mathematics. Based on student responses, the computer program adjusts the difficulty of questions throughout the assessment. By adapting to the student as the assessment is taking place, these assessments present an individually tailored set of questions to each student and can quickly identify which skills students have mastered.
• California Science Test (CAST) Field Test, and the California Alternate Assessment (CAA) for Science Pilot for all students in grades five, eight, and twelve. The California Science Test (CAST) is an online test based on the California Next Generation Science Standards adopted in September 2013. This year students will participate in the field test to try out test items for the future assessment. While this field test will not provide scores for students, it is an important first step in developing an assessment that will fairly and accurately measure how students are achieving on the new science standards.

If you would like more information about the CAASPP, please visit the Student & Parent tab of the California Department of Education (CDE) CAASPP Web page.

Thank you for the commitment to helping all our children succeed!

Sincerely,

Troy Holding
Principal

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