State education officials said Wednesday that they will allow more than 300 schools to make last-minute corrections to data they had submitted for Illinois’ school report card, potentially keeping the campuses off the roster of failing schools.
Illinois State Board of Education officials believe they may have erroneously tagged the schools as troubled after districts submitted faulty data.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said board spokeswoman Karen Craven. “It would be difficult for us to maintain a message of accuracy and then not make an effort to fix data we know is inaccurate.”
The state has not set a deadline for schools to make corrections, Craven said. She acknowledged that the state would not be able to remedy all the errors by Dec. 19, the date schools must make the data public.
Marleis Trover, president of the Illinois Association of School Administrators, said school leaders across the state were pleased with the state’s decision.
“I think public education suffers when inaccurate data is presented,” said Trover, superintendent of Downstate Vienna High School District 13-3. “It is hard enough for public education to get respect; knowingly sending out bad data isn’t going to help that situation.”
State officials acknowledged earlier this week that thousands of data errors likely caused more than 300 schools to be labeled mistakenly as failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Students in about 3,800 schools take state exams.
Most of the data errors stem from the erroneous identification of students’ ethnic background, special education status, income level or English-language skills.
Craven said the 300-plus schools identified by the state apparently met standards for student achievement but failed on test participation. The federal law requires schools to test at least 95 percent of the student body as well as 95 percent of various subgroups.
Further analysis by the state showed these schools had met the federal testing standards but were tagged as failing because of mistakes in filling out test booklets.
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For example, if a school says it has 100 Asian students, but only 40 identify themselves as Asian during testing, it will appear that 60 Asian students were not tested–even if all of the school’s students participated.
Schools that fail to meet the federal standards can face sanctions as serious as closure.