With political pressure mounting to hold schools more accountable for how well students do, the state on Thursday followed Chicago’s lead and took the first step toward closing Illinois’ worst schools.
The Illinois State Board of Education issued its first “academic early warning list,” effectively putting 125 schools–including 93 in Chicago and one from the suburbs–on a status similar to Chicago’s academic probation.
Acting under authority of a state law first enacted in 1991 but never used until now, state officials will designate a support team for each of the schools on the list and, in some cases, provide additional funding. While state board members emphasized these positive measures, the list also serves notice that if things don’t improve in four years, the schools could be shut down.
All but four of the Chicago schools already are on the city’s version of probation or the less severe status of remediation. They will keep those designations. But the new list illustrates the state’s determination to crack down on all schools that have shown poor or dropping performance on the Illinois Goal Assessment Program tests.
Until now, there have been no serious consequences if a school posted poor IGAP results. Parents might complain, local school officials might be embarrassed and politicians might fret, but nothing worse would happen.
For the first time, the state’s system for assessing schools has teeth, state officials contend.
State schools Supt. Joseph Spagnolo said the list is “a very important milestone in our state in terms of educational accountability.”
Indeed, the list comes at a time when politicians, teachers and parents are calling for schools to be held more accountable.
Sen. Arthur Berman (D-Chicago) said the academic early warning list is the type of measure legislators expect from the state board.
But Berman also said he was concerned that the IGAP reading tests might not be an accurate measure of student performance. Education experts and some school officials have criticized the exam as flawed.
The debate over accountability has prompted the state board to re-evaluate nearly everything about the way it measures student performance. In July, the board adopted a new set of academic standards it will expect all students to meet. And this month board personnel began evaluating proposals to rewrite the IGAP tests completely.
The threat of school closure is not new in Chicago, where a probation system has entered its second year. In effect, the academic early warning list brings a Chicago school reform measure to the rest of the state.
More Top Picks Best Electric Heaters For 1000 Square Feet
The only suburban Chicago school to make the list was Cottage Grove Middle School in Ford Heights District 169.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed,” said Supt. Willie Davis. “But I don’t see it as being an astronomical problem that can’t be addressed.”
Davis said the school already has begun a “serious curricular realignment” and is providing tutorials and more computers to students to help raise test scores. He said he expects Cottage Grove to improve enough to avoid closure.
The threat of school closures was supposed to become a reality for the rest of the state when the General Assembly gave the state board the authority to create an academic watch list in 1991. The state board never put a school on the list, however, because of rules that required board personnel to visit the schools first.
The rules, Spagnolo said, were “time-consuming” and prompted “a ton of criticism from the education community. . . . As a result, not a single school was put on the academic watch list.”
Last January, the General Assembly amended the watch list law, eliminating the need for site visits.
Under the amended law, a school is placed on the academic early warning list first and then progresses to the watch list if things don’t improve.
“The whole thing we’re doing today is to help schools avoid” being placed on the watch list, Spagnolo said.
There are two ways for a school to earn a place on the early warning list: either when most of a school’s IGAP scores fall below state standards for two years or when a school’s IGAP scores drop significantly, as defined in state guidelines, over the course of three years.
Schools can get off the list by improving their IGAP scores, and the state has set guidelines that spell out precisely how much a school must improve those numbers to be removed from the list.
Each non-Chicago school on the early warning list will get a support team that includes a school “coach,” a state board facilitator, community and business representatives and a staff member from the regional office of education. The schools also must create a revised school-improvement plan.
The state has yet to determine exactly how much money will be funneled to schools on the early warning list, but in Chicago alone, the amount will be roughly $2 million, officials said.
State Rep. David Phelps (D-Eldorado) said he disliked the possibility that state funds under the watch list program could go to prosperous school districts that should be using their own funds to address academic problems.
“I hope more money would not be poured into those districts without looking at what is causing the poor results,” said Phelps, whose wife is a teacher and whose two brothers are school administrators. “As a Downstater–an area that does not get a fair portion (of funds) in comparison with other areas of the state and our (test) results are very good–that’s money we should not forfeit for other parts of the state.”
Schools move from the early warning list to the more severe academic watch list after they have failed to meet state standards for two years and have not made adequate progress toward improvement.
Close state scrutiny continues while a school is on the academic watch list. After two years on this list, the school is re-evaluated. If improvements have been inadequate, the state may remove the school board, withhold recognition and tax dollars from the school, or reassign pupils and administrators to a different school. With these measures, the state, in effect, is shutting down a school.
The academic early warning list is similar to earlier listings of academically troubled schools that the state began compiling in 1995. Chicago schools chief Paul Vallas said he was pleased that the number of Chicago schools listed by the state has dropped from 148 to 93.
Vallas said he anticipated no problems or conflicts with the state’s initiative to identify and assist troubled Chicago schools. The four schools not flagged for extra help under Chicago’s crackdown but included by the state on its list are Anderson Community Academy, Goodlow Magnet School, Madison Elementary School and Henderson Elementary School.
“If the state came out with a watch list and there was a 40, 50 percent deviancy (from the probation list), there would be cause for concern. There are only four schools that are on the state watch list that are not on the probation (or remediation) list,” Vallas said. “It just further reinforces what we did.
“We are in total concert with the state. The state knows what we are doing. On intervention, we are totally in alignment.”