However, many educators and social scientists who study education believe that standardized tests are not necessarily an accurate measure of how much students
learn in a given school year.
For example, we compare the 3rd
graders in a given school this year with the 3rd graders in the same school last year to see whether the cohort with more students exposed to domestic violence had higher or lower student achievement.
Chronic absence is feasible for inclusion in California's accountability measurement system using the state's approach for rating school achievement based on outcome and improvement, or alternatively through an approach that simply looks at
performance in a given school year.
Parents and teachers already know quite a bit about the academic performance of their children and students, especially by the end of
April in a given school year.
The cohort consists of all students who first entered 9th
grade in a given school year (e.g., the Cohort of 2006 entered 9th grade in the 2006 - 2007 school year).
In any given school year, public districts and charter schools will have adjustments based on the enrollment counts of hundreds of thousands of students.