More than half of Illinois public schools -- including, for the first time, many of the state's academic powerhouses -- failed to meet test targets this year, raising questions not only about the schools, but also the standard by which they are judged.
In Illinois, high schools fared the worst.
Nine of 10 high schools -- 609 of 665 in the state -- missed the mark on math and reading tests and risk federal sanctions, according to information released Wednesday by the Illinois State Board of Education.
Statewide, 44 percent of elementary and middle schools fell short.
Educators say it was bound to happen. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that schools bring every student to proficiency in reading and math by 2014, a goal that most teachers have thought impossible from its inception. The standard ratchets higher every year as the deadline nears.
"Everybody knew it would get to this point. It had to," said Superintendent Linda Yonke of New Trier Township High School, which missed the test target for the first time this year.
This year, 77.5 percent of students had to read and do math at their grade level on state tests, up from 70 percent a year ago. Smaller subsets of students -- as defined by race or income, for example -- had to meet the target too.
New Trier, among the state's best schools by virtually any measure, posted some of its highest scores ever on the college-entrance ACT test, which comprises half of the Prairie State Achievement Exam given to juniors. But the performance of a small group of students, those with learning disabilities, fell short of the testing target.
The entire school failed as a result, revealing one of the troubling limits of the law: Schools that narrowly miss the mark with one group of kids get saddled with the same failing label as schools where virtually all students languish below grade level, and are subject to the same penalties.
The sweeping designation muddies the issue for parents trying to make sense of it all, and threatens to make the federal standard irrelevant.
"When we've got 98 percent of kids going to college, you can't tell me that we're a failing school," Yonke said.
What's more, she added, the very subset of learning-disabled students that failed to meet the federal standard, called "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, scored an average of 22.6 on the ACT -- two points above the state average.
The complete rundown of state and local test results will be released Friday. Several schools, however, previously disclosed scores or shared results with the Tribune.
No Child Left Behind took effect in 2002 with a pledge to hold schools accountable for the academic performance of every student, investing $6.5 billion in Illinois alone.
The law redefined how schools were judged when it tracked students by race, income, language and other factors. Under its rules, if one group of pupils fails to meet federal expectations for back-to-back years, the entire schools risks sanctions, which can ultimately include replacing its principal or closing.
A record 52.5 percent of Illinois public schools where students are tested missed the target this year, according to data released Wednesday.
High schools struggled the most, in part because students take a more difficult exam. What's more, high schools tend to have large, diverse enrollments. That means they are judged by how well they educate more subgroups of students, experts said. Illinois schools must have 45 students per grade in a classification before the subgroup's scores must meet the federal goal.
"The more diverse your school is, the more ways you can fail," said Bob Schaeffer of Fair Test, a national group that monitors standardized exams.
Schools face escalating consequences if they continue to miss federal test targets. In the first year, nothing happens. But after two consecutive years, schools that get federal funds for low-income students must offer tutoring or student transfers to other schools. They also must provide improvement plans to the state.
Schools that do not get the federal Title I money also must describe how they plan to turn around test scores and take corrective steps, but they are not required to offer student transfers.
This year, a record 367 schools must take dramatic steps to restructure after falling short of "adequate yearly progress" for at least six consecutive years.
While the future of No Child Left Behind remains uncertain, its reauthorization three years overdue, "it is still the law of the land," said Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former assistant secretary of education.
He said the Illinois results, like elsewhere in the country, show many schools are not serving all students well.
"But what we've also got here is a serious mixing of apples and oranges, where schools that are good for most of their kids are getting grouped with schools that are doing a dreadful job ... (and) that's misleading," Finn said.
More schools are expected to falter over the next four years, as states require rapid gains in the march toward 100 percent proficiency. Next year, the expectation will be that 85 percent of Illinois students meet or exceed state standards.
"Keep in mind, every year this is going to get harder. ... We expect there to be more and more schools that are not making it," Illinois school Superintendent Christopher Koch said Wednesday during a meeting of the state education agency in Springfield.
Lemont High School had not missed a federal test target until this year. Superintendent Sandy Doebert now must help parents understand how a school can earn its highest ACT score ever and still be deemed a failure. She already has gotten calls.
"They've never had to understand (AYP) very much because we always made it. They were happy. They didn't have to look at what it represented," Doebert said.
Parent Julio Padilla fired off an e-mail as soon as he read the news in his local newspaper.
As president of the school's educational foundation, Padilla wanted to understand what it meant as he expected other parents might turn to him with questions. His concerns lessened once he understood the federal system.
"It's something to look at, but it's not something to make me jump off a building about," said Padilla, whose son is a freshman and whose daughter graduated last year. But, he said, "no one wants to be on that list."
After studying the test results during recent years, Lemont officials launched a new learning initiative this fall that targets every freshman.
At Lemont High on Monday, teacher Jeana Parry coached her freshman English students through the rudiments of reading comprehension: predicting, summarizing and connecting their own lives to the material they are reading -- in this case, Elie Wiesel's "Night."
Freshman Cassy Lillwitz, 14, said the methodical steps already have helped her in school.
"It helps ingrain it in my memory to remember it in other classes and, eventually, for the SATs and stuff," Lillwitz said as she packed her books after class.
President Barack Obama proposed an overhaul of the law earlier this year that would ditch the all-or-nothing grading system for a measure that looks at student growth over time and reserves the most severe sanctions for the lowest-scoring 5 percent of schools.
Koch said the state plans to measure learning over time starting next year. For now, though, schools must answer to the current law.
When Urban Prep Academy for Young Men, Chicago's only all-male, all African-American public charter high school, opened its doors four years ago, just 4 percent of its students read at grade level. This year, 25 percent of the juniors scored proficiently on the state reading exam, officials said.
The growth was not enough. Urban Prep failed to hit the federal testing targets, even as the school, in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods, sent all 107 graduates to college, school founder and CEO Tim King said.
King said the school does not chart its success by test scores alone.
"We set up a department with two full-time staff who are devoted to support students once they leave and go to college. We don't have a department assigned to making sure we meet AYP (adequate yearly progress). That kind of shows you where the priority is here," King said.
In addition to meeting a loftier goal for test scores this year, high schools were also required to hit higher goals for attendance and graduation rates.
Downers Grove North High School hit all of the targets this year after not making it last year, school officials said.
Principal Maria Ward said there was no single solution. But she credits as one factor the push to enroll more students in challenging courses, including offering extra support to students with special needs who take a college-prep curriculum.
Since 2005, the school more than tripled the number of co-taught classes -- where a special-education teacher teams up with a subject teacher.
"You want to try to do what you can that makes sense regardless of the state test," Ward said.
On Monday, teachers Sally Heiwig and Mary Frazier welcomed students to their afternoon algebra class. Heiwig led the math lesson on function notation -- "this gives each equation a name," she said -- while Frazier, a special services teacher, roamed the room, offering feedback to students who needed it.
Amanda Coppotelli, 15, bent over her worksheet, pencil in hand. She was named algebra student of the month, a recognition that makes her laugh. She turned serious, though, when she talked about how important it is to take the right college-prep courses by her junior year, when she will take the ACT.
"I'm all about good test scores and grades," Coppotelli said. "I want to get into a decent college."
-- Tara Malone and Darnell Little
No comments:
Post a Comment