Park Ridge-Niles District 64 students’ performance on statewide reading and math exams in 2017 was largely flat compared to the year before, prompting district officials to launch an audit to determine how to boost students’ scores.
The percentage of District 64 students who met or exceeded expectations on the standardized exam, which is used by state officials to assess school performance, dropped 1 percent from 2016 on both the math and the English language arts exams, according to results presented to the board of education by Lori Lopez, the district’s assistant superintendent for student learning.
District 64 remains a “high-performing district,” Lopez told the members of the District 64 board on Nov. 13. Nearly half of all District 64 students perform at the 70th percentile or above when compared to national averages on MAP test scores, and more than 20 percent perform at the 90th percentile or better.
PARCC is an acronym for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
On the math PARCC exam, 57 percent of District 64 students met or exceeded expectations, according to results now available as part of District 64’s annual school report card. In 2016, 58 percent of the district’s students met or exceeded the math expectations. On the PARCC English Language Arts exam, 58 percent of students met or exceeded expectations, results showed. In 2016, 59 percent of students in the district met or exceeded in that category.
District 64 students continue to score far above the average statewide PARCC scores, where 37 percent of students met or exceeded expectations on the reading assessment, while 31 percent of students met or exceeded expectations on the math assessment.
As part of a district-wide audit that examined two years of PARCC test results, Lopez said district officials as well as school administrators were working to “identify small changes in instruction” to increase students’ performance on the tests.
“There is very low-hanging fruit available,” Lopez said, adding that administrators were working to align the district’s curriculum with the material assessed by the PARCC exam. “We have solid plans in place to address this issue.”
Rigorous activities designed to help students practice for the PARCC exam have been “embedded” in the curriculum, District 64 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said.
Teams at each school will dissect the test data in order to determine what changes are appropriate to address areas where students’ performance lagged, Lopez said. Those changes include new math instructional groups for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, Lopez said.
Board President Anthony Borrelli urged Lopez and Heinz to consider increasing the amount of time students spend in the classroom to boost scores. In addition, Borrelli said District 64 should consider separating reading, writing and language arts instruction.
Board member Tom Sotos said the data appeared to suggest to him that the district “fixed a problem” with student test performance in 2016 and “plateaued” naturally in 2017 after a large jump — like a growing child who grows exponentially one year only to not grow much the next year.
District 64 officials are also working to improve performance by student subgroups, Lopez said.
On the PARCC exam, 45 percent of black students met or exceeded expectations on the English Language Arts exam and 36 percent met or exceeded expectations on the math exam, the lowest percentages of any ethnic group in the district, according to the results.
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Low-income students, those with limited English proficiency and those with disabilities also scored much lower on the PARCC math and reading assessments than the District 64 average.
In addition, District 64 failed to meet self-imposed goals to improve its MAP test scores, a standardized test that uses assessment data from more than 10.2 million students across the U.S. to create national norms.
District officials had hoped to outperform suburban schools with similar demographics and resources by 0.2 points in both math and reading, Lopez said.
“That is the apples-to-apples comparison for us,” Lopez said.
However, District 64 schools had the same growth as similar schools in reading and outperformed comparable schools by just 0.1 points in math, Lopez said.
The district’s report cards are available online at d64.org/learning/state-report-cards.
Heather Cherone is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.