School report cards provide data, though value is debated
If it takes a village to raise a child, it may just take a school to raise a village. Desirable, high-achieving schools can drive property values through the roof. Forget location. Before families click through countless photos of kitchen counters, mustard walls and oversized master suites, they check out district Web sites.
Often, they're looking for one thing: school report cards.
The Illinois State Board of Education issues the data-filled reports annually, and state and federal laws require public schools to release them to the world. Keen parents can discover everything from how many minutes teachers spent on math a day to the low-income rate of a particular school or district.
Most, however, thumb through until they can figure out which chart tells them what percentage of students met or exceeded expectations on certain standardized tests and if the school or district made Adequate Yearly Progress, as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act. Students in third through eighth grades take the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, and high school juniors take the Prairie State Achievement Exam.
"If a school didn't make AYP, you need to know why," said Keith Pain, superintendent of the Summit Hill School District in Frankfort.
Critics of No Child Left Behind have called aspects of the law inequitable and unfair.
Across the state, the composite scores for the tests increased from 74 percent last year to 75.5 percent in 2009. ISAT scores rose slightly from 79.1 percent to 79.8 percent, and PSAE scores didn't quite see a full percentage point jump, moving up from 52.5 percent to 53 percent, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.
An upsurge in PSAE reading averages across the state (53.3 percent in 2008 to 56.9 percent in 2009) helped cushion the drop in math and science scores, which came down in math from 53 percent in 2008 to 51.6 percent, and in science, the decrease was 51.2 percent to 50.5 in 2009.
"Schools and districts are making significant improvement, even as the required testing performance benchmark increased by another 7.5 points over last year,'' state Superintendent Christopher Koch said.
"Overall, our statewide averages continue to increase incrementally for all tests. But even though we are seeing gains, the number of schools making Adequate Yearly Progress continues to decline -- another reason why No Child Left Behind needs to be re-examined.''
AYP is a four-part equation that outlines, most important, what percentage of students must meet or exceed standards in reading and math for every group. When No Child Left Behind first was put in place under the Bush administration in 2002, that percentage was 40. Steadily rising through the years, the requirement for 2009 was 70 percent.
The state places schools and districts that don't make AYP two years in a row into improvement status, then academic early warning status. Four years of AYP failure translates into academic watch status -- one of the last things incoming parents want for their possible prospective school -- and on and on each year down this thorny path until federal sanctions become a last resort .
