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Test scores

Great Oaks High School and Career Center · Des Moines, IA
See how it ranks: all Iowa schools by score · Polk County schools by score

ISASP, SY 2024-25

All grades, all students. % Proficient.
English Language Arts
25.0%
State avg 73.6%
District avg 25.0%
County avg 70.0%
Mathematics
14.3%
State avg 70.9%
District avg 14.3%
County avg 66.7%
Science
N/A
State avg 67.2%
County avg 62.4%

What this means: On the ISASP, Iowa's statewide test, about 25 of every 100 students at this school read and write at grade level and about 14 of 100 do math at grade level. Across all Iowa schools, those numbers are about 74 and 71.

BeatsExpectations

Demographically-adjusted score · methodology
Tier
UNDERPERFORMING
Bottom 10% of IA schools after controlling for student poverty
Actual proficiency
19.6%
composite math + reading, all grades
Predicted
89.9%
based on IA schools with similar FRL share
Beats by
-70.2pp
below demographic expectation

What this means: About 20% of students here test proficient in math and reading, below the roughly 90% typical for Iowa schools with a similar share of low-income students. BeatsExpectations compares each school with others at the same poverty level, not by raw scores, so a school lands here when its results trail those comparable schools, which is not the same as having low scores. A higher-scoring school can still fall in this tier if similar schools score higher still.

BeatsExpectations runs a per-state regression of proficiency on free/reduced-lunch share, then scores each school by residual. How this is calculated →

By grade, SY 2024-25

School score vs state average per tested grade.
GradeEnglish Language ArtsMathematicsScience
SchoolStaten testedSchoolStaten testedSchoolStaten tested
Grade 1125.0%69.4%1214.3%65.8%14N/AN/AN/A

1-year history

All grades, all students. Great Oaks   Iowa avg

English Language Arts

74252024-25
YearSchoolDistrictCountyState
SY 2024-2525.0%25.0%70.0%73.6%

Mathematics

71142024-25
YearSchoolDistrictCountyState
SY 2024-2514.3%14.3%66.7%70.9%

How to read these scores

What is ISASP?
ISASP is the statewide standardized test administered by Iowa public schools.
What does "% Proficient" mean?
It is the share of students at the school who performed at grade level or above on the test, summed across the top two of four performance levels. A higher number is better.
What does 25.0% mean for English Language Arts at Great Oaks High School and Career Center?
It means about 25.0 percent of students tested at Great Oaks High School and Career Center performed at grade level or above on the ISASP English Language Arts test in 2024-25. The statewide average for Iowa that year was 73.6%. The other students fell into the lower performance levels.
How is the state average calculated?
It is a weighted average, not a simple average of each school's number. We multiply each public school's score by how many of its students tested, add those together for all schools in Iowa, and divide by the total students tested that year. This way a big school with 1,500 students counts more than a small school with 50 students, which is the right way to ask "how did the typical student do this year?". District and county averages on this page use the same method, just scoped to that district or county.
Where does this data come from?
Iowa Department of Education, Iowa State Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP). School-level data by grade and subject from educate.iowa.gov. Headline metric is the cumulative "Proficient" rate (Proficient + Advanced, top 2 of 3 ISASP levels).
How often is it updated?
ISASP is administered once a year (spring). Results are released by the state in the summer or early fall. We refresh this page after each annual release.

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