How does your school score?
The Chicago Sun-Times has an article reporting on how schools performed on mandatory testing and other measures mandated by the "No Child Left Behind" program.
Reading and math scores tumbled at dozens of the state's top-scoring elementary schools this year, puzzling both state experts and local school leaders.
In reading, the drop made some state officials wonder if scores reflected a decline in skills among the state's best students.
Others questioned scoring of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, especially in sections involving written responses scored by human beings, not machines.
But statewide on the elementary level, roughly three dozen of last year's top 50 elementary schools slid in rank.
Test results also showed:
*Schools felt increased pressure under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. More met federal targets this year -- but apparently because some standards were relaxed.
*Though the percent of high-achieving students shrank in many top-tier schools, statewide averages were mixed to slightly up.
*In reading, two-thirds of third-graders passed state standards; 60 percent in fifth passed; nearly 73 percent passed in eighth, and 59.5 percent passed in 11th.
*In math, 79 percent passed the third-grade test; 73 percent passed fifth; 54 percent passed eighth, and almost 53 percent passed 11th.
Did your school get a passing grade? You can find a wealth of information on a particular school by browsing by county on this page. When you pick a county, the various school districts within the county appear, and from the resulting list you can further search individual schools.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 2/10/2006
11 comments
11 Comments:
I'm surprised that private shools aren't bursting at the seams!
Good post by the dope ... it's about time we get back to issues that matter to hard-working families.
Glad to make you happy, Mr. PR guy. haha.
I know how much you hate it when things aren't all about policy.
Yet, as you know, there's hundreds of posts about policy, yet you rarely contribute.
I find that curious that you often comment to tell me what the blog should be about and how I should stick to policy wonk stuff only, yet in all the policy posts, you never comment ABOUT policy.
Many comments telling me what to do, yet not much actually doing it yourself. Odd.
You should have like one key on your keyboard programed to insert that phrase "issues that matter to hard-working families."
You could program others with other standard boilerplate too.
Maybesomeday... excellent points.
Glad you at least were able to get into the info available and use it to find results.
There truly is a lot there for anyone who is interested and willing to do the work. They also make it easy to compare individual schools with the district as a whole and statewide, which is interesting as well.
Lots of interesting info there. If anyone else spots something, please let us know.
I don't believe that the schools are falling apart. As a matter of fact I think the kids today are more educated than they ever have been. Older Americans want to believe that things were better then than now. They also believe that older basketball players could compete today. They would get blown away in sports as well as in school.
Anon above. I share your belief that the schools, with certain exceptions, are doing very well with what little they are provided to work with, and considering the fossilized and entrenched bureacracy that sops up much of the funding.
But no one suggested that the school system was falling apart, though you hear that often enough from right wing fundementalists in particular who are angling to get public tax dollars for their indocrination efforts.
I didn't mean you or your blog. I did mean the right wing and their never ending voucher hounds. The Argus hit on the high cost of tenure.
It's probably worthy of mention that, being about a decade removed from public schools in Illinois, myself and almost everyone else I knew blew off these state achievement tests. It was one of those things where you knew you weren't being graded on it so you treated it accordingly.
I don't know if it's a problem that could be fixed but it does lower the numbers at least at the high school level.
Oh and anon 23:46, I'd take a team of Chamberlain, Russell, Robertson, West and Cousy over any five Olympic bronze-medalists you could find today.
See what I'm talking about! Kobe Shack Nowitski James and Duncan forget about it.
MabyeSomeday
- Butterworth in Moline is home of the PATS (Program for Academically Talented Students)
That is a large reason for the score discrepancy.
My son has been in the PATS program for 5 years now and is currently attending Butterworth. While they're a bunch of bright kids, I'm not sure that such a relative few students could seriously skew scores upward that much.
As a percentage of the total student population, I'm not sure PATS students represent that much.
The fact is that there's variences between all elementary schools and it's due to a variety of factors, many of them measured and reported in these reports, such as chronic truancy, students moving in and out of the school, second language students, etc.
Overall, it seems that the Moline schools are generally low average when compared to schools statewide, and school scores statewide are probably lowered slightly due to Chicago schools, though many show up as top performing schools, and the affluent suburban schools also balance the scores by scoring much above average.
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