The Illinois State Board of Education has decided not to create the annual academic warning list and watch list of poor-performing schools, saying the new Illinois Standards Achievement Test makes it difficult to assess whether students’ achievement actually slipped over the past year.
State board officials have been wringing their hands over whether to create the two lists since they tallied up how poorly Illinois state students did on the ISAT. The ISAT, given for the first time last year, replaced the 10-year-old Illinois Goals Achievement Program.
Nearly 900 of the 3,700 state schools did not have even 50 percent of students performing at minimum state standards. In more than 300 schools, 70 percent of students failed to meet the grade.
Under a 1996 state law, a school goes on the state’s early warning list if more than half of the students fail to meet state standards for two years, or if test scores drop significantly over three years.
Schools move from that 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 the new test threw a wrench into those plans.
“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.
But board officials have used the recent test scores to identify schools that might have made the watch list had it been created. Those 28 schools, which the board will not identify, will get a state coaching team that will help the school boost scores.
“The main point is we want to continue providing assistance to the schools that need it,” said Tom Hernandez, spokesman for the board.
By next year, the Board of Education hopes to overhaul its method of monitoring academic progress. Under a proposal presented during a board meeting Thursday, the state would move from a two-tiered system to one with four designations.
Additionally, the new designations do not rely totally on ISAT scores. State officials would consider poverty rates, limited English skills and student attendance as contributing factors.
“The ISAT, while important, is not the only measure of accountability and school quality,” said state Supt. Glenn “Max” McGee.
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