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Illinois Test Scores: Cal City School Beats the Odds
Produced by Linda Lutton on Friday, October 30, 2009
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Grades are out for Illinois schools today. The State Board of Education has posted test score data—as well as graduation rates and attendance rates— for every school in the state. This year, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the bar for schools’ academic achievement is raised once again. And more Illinois schools than ever have missed it. We report from a Calumet City school that beat the odds.
Related: Check out your local school's score
Related: 2009 Illinois State Report Card
ambi: child spelling
Ask Lincoln Elementary District 156 principal Doug Higgins why the kids in his school made the grade on state tests, and he’ll probably mention his teachers…
ambi: teacher
Music classes…
ambi: trombone lesson
And all the things federal grants have paid for here, from smaller class sizes to smart boards.
ambi: kids reading
HIGGINS: There’s no silver bullet—there’s no one thing that makes the difference. It’s a lot of different things coming together.
Higgins acknowledges that scores weren’t up in every grade and subject at Lincoln this year. But for the second year in a row, they were high enough to make what the federal government calls “adequate yearly progress,” or AYP.
It’s a big deal for this school—which is nestled among modest homes in working-class Calumet City. Bulletin boards in the hallways and the school’s marquee outside announce the accomplishment.
Schools that don’t make AYP face consequences: they might have to offer tutoring, they might have to re-assign teachers or switch curricula.
HIGGINS: Of course you want that success. So it’s great for the school to get out from the negative punishments of not making it.
WALKER: And when the results come back, it’s like “Whew. We made it.”
Bonnie Walker is assistant principal at Lincoln.
Walker says that in prior years, after the school failed to make enough progress with its special education students, it revamped teaching for those kids. It’s something No Child Left Behind forced them to address.
WALKER: The special ed classes, what we’ve done is to make them look like everyone else in the building. They have the same materials, so they are exposed to the same curriculum as all of the others. They go from class to class like everyone else whereas in the past, that one teacher taught all subjects—now they have content-area teachers. So that is a total change in what we used to do.
Scores have gone up for Lincoln’s special ed students, as they have for the school overall. And that’s despite the fact that more kids here now come from low-income and minority families. That’s a trend. Today’s state report card data shows an increase in low-income and minority students in Illinois schools.
Anther trend: fewer schools are making adequate yearly progress. More than 1500 schools missed that mark this year—a 30 percent increase over last year.
State superintendent Christopher Koch says that’s likely to continue as the law pushes schools to get 100 percent of students to meet standards by the year 2014.
KOCH: The standards keep going up. As we come up here on the final years of the No Child Left Behind Act, the proficiency level going to 100 percent. These are the crunch years, where your gains have to be very substantial. So I do expect us to see more schools not making AYP under the current law.
At Lincoln school, principal Higgins is happy the school made AYP this year, but he wishes the government would look at how much Lincoln students learn in a year, rather than just the percentage of them who can meet standards.
HIGGINS: We had an eighth grader last year who was reading like on the first grade level. Well how does a student like that take an eighth-grade test? The kids should improve—they should be held to an improvement every year, but not to a certain standard.
The No Child Left Behind Act is slated to be rewritten in the coming months. And Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he agrees with educators like Higgins—and wants more emphasis on student growth, rather than raw test scores.
Duncan may start with a name change for the law—he says “No Child Left Behind” has become a toxic label. But he won’t get rid of the law entirely—or its consequences. He says No Child Left Behind has forced schools like Lincoln to focus on their neediest students—and figure out how to help them achieve.
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