Last spring, Chicago Public Schools officials were heartened by some long-awaited good news: Average reading scores for the system’s students on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills were rising. It appeared that years of hand-wringing and curriculum reassessment over the most basic of academic skills were finally beginning to pay off.
Then came word this week that scores on the reading portion of the Illinois Goal Assessment Program exams–the state-mandated battery of tests–had dropped precipitously again, an ominous trend that seemed to suggest just the opposite: that there is a crisis in reading in the state.
Similarly, many suburban school districts posted increases on the most recent ACT and SAT scores, including reading, but IGAP reading scores plummeted.
So what is the real story?
Are the state’s schoolchildren getting better at reading, or worse? Which results are to be taken seriously? And could the test itself be part of the problem?
As State Schools Supt. Joseph Spagnolo prepares to announce Thursday that Illinois continues to face a crisis in reading, the widespread opinion among other educators and experts is that the test is flawed and is in need of radical improvement–a process in which the Illinois State Board of Education is already engaged after the recent announcement of new academic standards.
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The IGAP is a state examination used to evaluate the instructional programs of all 3,840 public schools and is taken by 1.9 million schoolchildren throughout the state.
But many say that state education officials are loath to acknowledge a problem with the test because of the current political climate in Springfield: State education officials have been criticized for accounting and management problems, such as excessive travel and use of consultants outside the United States, according to experts and local educators.
They say state education officials cannot afford admission of yet another problem.
“Spagnolo is under attack by the Republican leadership in the General Assembly and has been for several months, and it’s going to be difficult for him to say we got bad (reading) results, but we shouldn’t take them seriously. . . . He’s backed into corner,” said Fred Hess, a research professor at Northwestern University’s school of education and social policy who has conducted studies on problems in the IGAP reading test.
Spagnolo said his reaction to the scores has nothing to do with politics. He said experts have evaluated the IGAP reading tests and declared they reflect a true drop in reading competence.
“I personally don’t believe it’s the test,” Spagnolo said.
“I personally believe (a drop in reading skills) is a major problem . . . not only here but throughout the country.”
The complaints about the IGAP reading test seem as numerous as critics: multiple choice questions in which as many as three answers are correct; test questions that favor boys and penalize low-income kids; scores that show wildly varying results year to year at individual schools; and reading passages that are much longer than those in other nationally standardized tests.
In Chicago, the IGAPs are largely meaningless to students because the school board uses the nationally standardized Iowa Tests to determine student promotion and a school’s placement on the probation list, though the IGAPs are used as a secondary indicator for a school’s performance.
What makes the latest IGAP reading tests even more confusing is that scores are up in other areas that require reading, such as social studies, science and mathematics, according to experts and educators.
The State Board of Education will begin redesigning all of its IGAP tests, beginning first with the reading and math tests for 3rd and 5th graders for the 1998-99 school year, with other improvements to be phased in, officials said. How the reading test will be restructured is under study, state officials said.
A growing number of test experts are beginning to view the IGAP reading test as fundamentally flawed, according to Robert Cienkus, Loyola University Chicago professor of curriculum and instruction.
“The problem is that, in the IGAP test, you can have more than one right answer,” Cienkus said. “The test tends to be mediocre at best. From a statistical point of view, the results are not consistent.”
The Iowa Tests present pupils with passages that they must read but requires only one correct answer, according to Ed Drahozal, spokesman for Riverside Publishing, a division of the Boston-based Houghton-Mifflin Co., which publishes the Iowa Tests.
“Either all of the kids in the entire state suddenly got very deficient in their reading skills all at once, or there’s something wrong with the reading test,” said Richard Du Four, superintendent of Stevenson High School District 125 in Lincolnshire, where reading scores on the ACT test went up even as reading scores on IGAP took a nose-dive.
Chicago school officials have said that any gains in the Iowa Tests should be corroborated with similar gains in the IGAP, and if not, serious problems could exist in instructional programs.
Still, said Chicago schools chief Paul Vallas, “I acknowledge the problem with the IGAP, but I don’t want the preoccupations with the problems with the IGAP to overshadow the fact that we have a problem with reading in this state and the nation.”