State Board of Education officials have not decided whether they will create an official academic watch list of schools that performed poorly during the last three years, but they have identified 28 schools that are teetering on the brink.
Board officials said Wednesday that they had launched “academic audits” of these 28 schools last week and expect to complete them by Nov. 8. They would not identify the schools they are targeting but acknowledged that some are in Chicago.
Chicago Public Schools officials could not be reached for comment.
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Sheryl Poggi, who oversees the state board’s school-improvement initiative, said the 28 schools were chosen because they spent two years on the state’s academic early warning list–a precursor to the watch list–and have not demonstrated significant improvement.
“We have been working with these schools for two years and we feel, for the most part, they are making progress,” Poggi said. “But there may be some schools that are not progressing and could go on to a watch list if we do one this year.”
Under a 1996 state law, a school goes onto the state’s early warning list if more than half of the students fail to meet state standards or if test scores drop significantly over three years.
The law dictates that schools move from the early warning list to the more severe watch list if they fail to meet state standards for two years and do not make adequate progress in the third. If the school continues to perform poorly, the state may remove the school board, withhold tax dollars or even reassign students, effectively closing the school.
This year would have been the first for the official watch list, but a new state test threw a wrench into the plan. Last year, the state scrapped the 10-year-old Illinois Goals Achievement Program and instead gave students the new and tougher Illinois State Achievement Test.
Results from the new ISAT were not impressive: about 500 out of 3,700 state schools did not have even 50 percent of students performing at minimum standards. Before that, only 80 schools had failed to meet the 50 percent threshold. Seventy-eight were put on the warning list, including 58 in Chicago.
Schools Supt. Glenn “Max” McGee already has said the state will not use the first year’s ISAT results to compile an academic early warning list, arguing that schools should have a one-year grace period.
But the new test, and the poor performance on it, also makes it difficult to compile the academic watch list.
“This year, we are absent test scores that can be equated to the IGAP scores so we don’t have the three years of test results to compare,” said Kim Knauer, Board of Education spokeswoman.
“What we’ve tried to do is identify schools that we believe would have made the watch list,” Knauer said.
Poggi said that state officials “considered” ISAT scores when they identified those 28 schools, but the more important component was whether schools were meeting goals laid out in improvement plans.
“Progress isn’t always reflected in test scores,” she said.
State academic auditors will visit the 28 schools and look into a host of issues, including curriculum, school leadership, resource allocation and parental involvement.