Highest test scores go to Chicago schools
Chicago public schools claimed eight of the top 10 spots on a new Chicago Sun-Times list of the highest-scoring middle-grade programs in Illinois, based on 2006 state test scores finally released today after months of technical problems.
The city also grabbed half of the top-10 elementary slots, based on third- through fifth-grade reading and math scores on exams taken almost a year ago, a special Sun-Times analysis shows.
Most of the Chicago winners admit kids based on tests, but one neighborhood school, Edgebrook, made the top elementary list, and another, Bell, joined Edgebrook on the top middle-grades list, based on sixth- through eighth-grade average scores.
(Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)
"The longer kids stay with us, the better they do,'' Duncan said.
In the suburbs, Community Consolidated District 181, headquartered in Hinsdale, recorded a clean sweep: all seven of its elementary schools and both middle schools made the Sun-Times top-50 lists.
District 181's results followed a new middle school effort. Gifted specialists for the first time work separately with the highest-achieving 30 percent of kids, while reading specialists helped the lowest 5 percent of regular education kids.
Supt. Mary Curley said the district's main focus is "the whole child,'' rather than ISATs, but "we're just estatic'' with the results.
Record gains raise questions
Statewide, Illinois public school students produced the biggest jumps in the percent of kids passing each test in the eight-year history of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.
Chicago's improvement was even more dramatic.
Chicago kids passed 62 percent of all ISATs taken last year, versus 81 percent among all Illinois kids outside Chicago, a Chicago Public Schools analysis showed. The story was far worse five years ago, when Chicago kids passed only 38 percent of ISATs, versus 70 percent elsewhere statewide, the analysis indicated.
"At every grade, in every test, we're up over five years dramatically more than the state,'' Duncan said. Overall, "We're improving at twice the rate of the [rest of] the state.''
Numerous changes to the 2006 ISATs -- including extra time and a livelier format -- made some question whether the new tests were truly comparable to the old ones.
Plus, in eighth-grade math, the passing bar was lowered from the 67th to the 38th national percentile, to better conform with other tests. As a result, state passing rates soared by 24 percentage points, to 78 percent meeting state muster. In Chicago, they doubled.
State Board of Education officials insisted 2006 ISAT questions were as tough as 2005 ones, but admitted the introduction of color, lots of graphics that kept kids' attention, and a new answer sheet that made it harder for kids to fill in the wrong bubbles may have helped.
"It could have improved gains, absolutely,'' said Interim State Supt. Chris Koch.
However, Koch said, the format changes didn't make the test "easier;'' it just made it "more accessible.''
"What's the difference?'' asked John Easton, director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research. "I don't think it [the record uptick] is a mirage, but on the other hand, it's probably not all real.''
Bob Schaeffer of the testing watchdog FairTest said changes raise "serious questions'' about whether 2006 scores "mean the same thing'' as 2005 ones.
"The notion of standardization is that kids are given the same questions under the same conditions from one test to the next. Clearly the testing conditions have changed,'' said Schaeffer.
Under new pressure from No Child Left Behind to improve annually, "states have played all kinds of games,'' Schaeffer said, including "making the test easier in one way or another.''
Last in the nation
Despite the changes, the state will fit the new results into the trend line comparing this year's pass rates to others because "the same [learning] standards [for what kids should know] are used as the basis for the test questions,'' Koch said.
State Assessment Director Rebecca McCabe said her "gut feeling is that kids were better prepared'' because teachers had nearly two years to use clearer state guidance on what skills might be tested.
"What we heard from teachers is that the kids knew the material. That's the most important piece of all testing,'' McCabe said.
"Kids aren't being taught dinosaurs three years in a row anymore.... The curriculum now fits the [learning] standards.''
Technical problems made Illinois is the last state in the nation to release its results. The new test contactor -- Harcourt Inc.; a new student information system; more grades tested and the huge data-keeping demands of No Child Left Behind combined to wreak havoc with the 2006 ISATs.
"It's a comedy of errors,'' said FairTest's Schaeffer. "It really shows how the testing industry is not up to the task of administering so many tests and scoring items accurately.
"There have been delays elsewhere, but there's never been a delay as long as the one in Illinois.''
High school scores on a different test -- the Prairie State Achievement Exam -- and other data are due next Tuesday, Mar. 13, a year to the day last year's ISAT testing began.
Top still the top
As in years past, the Sun-Times standings are based on average reading and math scores, not gains or percent passing. The rankings reflect how each school's average stacks up against other schools that took the same tests.
In addition, the Sun-Times created two lists this year due to the expansion of ISATs to all grades, three through eighth.
Many attributed Chicago's gains to two new diagnostic tests, also written by Harcourt, administered in October and January. They gave teachers time to not only identify ISAT weaknesses, but to see if their fixes for them were working.
And, Chicago's decision to drop another standardized test and let ISATs determine summer school gave the exam a new importance for city kids.
"If Chicago wanted to get the scores up, going to one test, the ISAT only, was the smartest thing they've done in years,'' said Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education.
The change focused kids and teachers on the more sophisticated skills demanded on ISATs, Radner said.
Chicago's standout middle school record could be due, in part, to the "college prep effect,'' Radner said. Middle grade scores include seventh-grade ISATs, which for the first time determined if kids could apply to coveted city college preps.
"This is the most meaningful test in the city,'' Radner said. "This is like your key to a good school.''
Among the top 50, Chicago claimed nine elementary spots and 15 middle-grade ones, including two city seventh- and eighth-grade programs that admit based on tests -- at Whitney Young Magnet and Taft, a neighborhood high school.
One city magnet that enrolls kids using a race-based lottery, not tests, also joined the top 10 middle-grade ranks - No. 7 Hawthorne Scholastic Academy -- after coming at 50 on the top elementary list.
Spreading rigor beyond gifted
Also reflecting that trend, Bell's third through fifth-grade scores put it at 52nd statewide, but its middle-grade average jumped it to No. 8, edging out No. 9 Edgebrook.
Designed by Alexander Graham Bell, the school at 3730 N. Oakley holds 75 deaf students, 240 gifted kids and 545 neighborhood ones.
As one bulletin board explains: "Include everyone.'' Said Principal Bob Guercio, "That's what we live by.''
At Bell, everyone learns sign language, all grades take Chinese and gifted students learn French. All kids get both music and art once a week; hallways burst with their colorful artwork.
"My daughter is studying three languages. What's not to like?'' said Maggie Randolph, president of Friends of Bell, whose $100,000 in fundraising helps pay for schoolwide sign language instruction and other extras.
Even second-grader Khalil Ryan-Jetha understands the benefits of Chinese: "It [China] has the most people. You can communicate with a lot of people.''
Guercio attributed some of Bell's higher middle-grade performance to a program called Facing History and Ourselves, in which sixth through eighth graders analyze historical situations from the view of perpetrators, victims and bystanders.
The program "makes kids think'' by using the higher-ordered skills required on ISAT, Guercio said.
Asked recently to compare a film on the discrimination of American Indians to a novel about a girl raised in Afghanistan, kids had no problem.
"A similarity is that the women in Afghanistan aren't allowed to speak, and Native American Indians were not allowed to speak their native language,'' sixth-grader Baulio Dominguez said.
Facing History is among several ideas that began in Bell's gifted classes and spread schoolwide. Others include the use of real books, not collections of stories, starting in kindergarten. Almost all Bell eighth-graders take algebra, often reserved for high schoolers.
"We've had more collaboration between the neighborhood and the gifted program than ever before. I think that's starting to pay off,'' Guercio said.
"The story you often hear is that in schools with a gifted program, the gifted program is carrying the school,'' Guercio said. "It's these [neighborhood] kids' scores that help pull it all up.''
Last year, all Bell teachers got extra training on written "extended response'' ISAT questions worth 10 percent of reading and math tests. Seventh graders said that helped, along with one-minute daily math fact sheets the week before the tests and lots of vocabulary work using roots, prefixes and suffixes.
"It helped me on the ISAT. When I had to figure out the meaning of the word, I could look at the prefix and figure it out,'' said seventh-grader Michael Reynolds.
"Exploring'' middle school
At No. 25 on the middle school list, Clarendon Hills Middle in District 181 offers an "exploratory'' middle school approach. that means it exposes kids to everything from flight simulators and video cameras to cooking classes and sewing, to band, orchestra, chorus, drama, art and sculpture. Plus, kids learn Spanish or French.
As part of a new districtwide "extended response'' push last year, even math to physical education teachers asked kids to write complete sentences explaining how they got their answers, said Principal David Bendis.
Also for the first time, Bendis said, a gifted specialist challenged higher-achievers daily, compacting the regular curriculum to free up time for gifted work.
Starting in December, a reading specialist offered new extra help to low-achievers in the regular-education population.
"We have parents who called back this year and requested it for their kids,'' Bendis said.
"It's not something that's only 'Do this for the ISAT and forget about it.' These are strategies that will help kids now and into high school,'' he said.
District 181 also benefits from kids who start school with the kind of foundation some kids in low-income homes don't have.
"We have lots of kids who enter kindergarten able to read. They know their numbers. Some of them can write,'' said Warren Shillingburg, assistant superintendent of curriculum. "We're blessed with such a talented group of students, they deserve to be constantly challenged.''