Contact
Questions about the Poppy Project, its data, or a particular school? Contact Derek D. Rouch, EdD, at drouch@scoe.org.
How this dashboard works
Every school's growth on each California School Dashboard measure is compared with the growth of every other eligible school in the state, one year at a time.
Measures
English Language Arts and Mathematics (distance from standard, excluding participation-rate loss), English Learner Progress (EL student group), College/Career Indicator, Graduation Rate and Chronic Absenteeism. Growth is always on a favorable-change scale: positive means better. For chronic absenteeism, a decline in the rate counts as positive growth (shown as "Attendance"). Suspension rates are not included.
Annual z-score
Z = (school's growth − statewide mean growth) ÷ statewide standard deviation of growth, across eligible schools. A school-year is eligible when the school's denominator is at least in both years and no Pair & Share method applies in either year.
School years
Years are school years: the CDE files for 2026 cover 2025–26, and so on. The From and To school years are growth years: each one's growth is measured against the school year before it. So 2023–24 to 2025–26 covers three years of growth, using data from 2022–23 through 2025–26.
Poppies
A poppy year is a year with positive growth and Z ≥ +1 on any measure. Poppies count the longest run of consecutive poppy years on a single measure within the selected school years: one-poppy school = 1 year, two-poppy school = 2 consecutive years, three-poppy school = 3 or more consecutive years. When a measure is selected, poppies count that measure only.
Superbloom
A school with positive growth and Z ≥ +3 on a measure in a single year.
Ranked Growth
Schools ranked by their average annual z-score across every year in the selected period. A school must be eligible in every year of the period to be ranked. The county filter ranks within the county.
Enrollment and school profiles
Enrollment is Census Day total enrollment from the CDE Census Day Enrollment file (censusenrollratesdownload), for the last school year of the period. School profiles show enrollment and student-group percentages from the same file.
Interpretation
This is a relative effect-size comparison across schools, not a test of statistical significance or within-school sampling error. CCI data begin in 2023, so CCI growth starts with 2023–24.