Mundelein Consolidated High School District 120 has joined Lake Zurich Community Unit School District 95 and a majority of districts in using an online reporting system for the state to monitor federally-mandated improvement plans.
The Rising Star program has been in place for two years,but District 120 officials just submitted plans for how it will implement the process. A team of seven administrators led by Superintendent Jody Warestudied the more than 150 indicators in the program and focused on about 33.
“We have to prioritize what is going to make the most difference,” Ware said, adding that the team meets every other week and updates Rising Star during those meetings.”It’s managing our vision for improving the school.”
Reporting on improvement has become more pressing with annual requirements for education changing, resulting in an increasing number of schools failing to meet annual yearly benchmarks. The No Child Left Behind Act, a federal education measure passed during George W. Bush’s administration, set the benchmarks and what happens to schools that fail to meet them.
Schools that take state funding and fail to meet adequate yearly progress for two years in a row are required to form a team of teachers and administrators to work toward implementing improvement strategies through the system. It’s akin to an online report card.
Made up of more than 150 indicators — which Amy Jo Clemens, assistant superintendent of innovation and improvement for the Illinois State Board of Education said are “research-based strategies” that have been proven to boost student performance — the reporting system is now used by more than 66 percent of schools and 95 percent of districts in the state.
“We’ve seen the fact that this has simplified reporting in a variety of ways,” Clemens said of the Rising Star system, which recently replaced a more deadline-based system.
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This new platform allows the teams of teachers and administrators implementing the strategies to regularly update their goals.
“The old [reporting system] had deadlines,” said Terry Mootz, director of data and assessment in District 95. “The new platform, because it’s ongoing and continuous…it’s a more fluent process.”
An indicator that District 120 recently implemented was adding programs for students with limited English proficiency. That’s because there are more students who aren’t native speakers, Ware said.
In District 95, officials have been collecting student data — test scores, grades, survey results and attendance numbers — and now have teams regularly review this information. Each school’s continuous improvement plan is available on the district’s website, Mootz said.
“In any endeavor in order to get better, you can’t focus on a large number of items, or you can’t do any of them well,” he said. “You need to focus on high-leverage indicators that will create the greatest level of learning improvement for students in that school.”
Adequate yearly progress are markers of academic performance in reading and math that districts must meet. Illinois standards say 92.5 percent of students must meet or exceed expectations, or the school is labeled as failing.
And with the scores that dictate whether a school passes or fails rising, District 95 is preparing to implement the program at Seth Paine Elementary, which isn’t yet mandated to participate in Rising Star, according to Mootz.
“Unless they change the legislation, most schools are not going to make adequate yearly progress,” he said.
District 95 already has four schools — May Whitney Elementary, Sarah Adams Elementary, Lake Zurich High School and Middle School North — using the program..
As a one-school district, District 120 failed to meet adequate yearly progress for the eighth time in a row, despite seeing high scores in many areas of state standardized testing this year.
While Clemens said she doesn’t know what the future holds for the way districts report their improvement plans, the state has almost 3,000 responses from a survey it sent to Rising Star users, and plans to take a look at those results to figure out ways to make the system better.