Last school year, DCPS introduced Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education (CAPE) testing, replacing the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers as the city-wide standardized test. Alongside Jackson-Reed scores improving, scores districtwide experienced some improvement, but they remain below pre-pandemic levels.

During the transition from PARCC to CAPE, core parts of the exam were retained—CAPE has the same number of questions, question format, and length.

Through the application, math, English, and science exams are administered to freshmen and sophomores. This past year, the tests displayed that Jackson-Reed’s math scores improved by 5% and English scores by 7%.

Across DC, proficiency rates, indicating the percentage of students who took the exam and met or exceeded expectations, have been gradually increasing. Since 2022, proficiency rates for both math and English have improved by 3%. However, both are still less than they were before COVID in 2019. English continues to be about 3% below pre-pandemic rates, and, despite improvements in recent years, math remains 8.2% below. 

Districtwide, math consistently produced lower scores than English. Only 22.5% of the students who took the CAPE math exam were proficient, compared with 33.7% for the English test. Among all grades, high school students had the most extreme disparity. 33.2% of the students who took the English exam met or exceeded expectations, compared to only 11.2% of the students for math, most of which only met the expectations for their grade.

According to the English department, teachers were only told the degree to which each subject’s proficiency rates improved. This means data on the exact percentage of students at Jackson-Reed who were marked as proficient is unavailable. Additionally, there is no breakdown of the data into the percent of students who received each score. However, the improvements in English and math at Jackson-Reed were above the district average.