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Schools

Dist. 202 Not Meeting No Child Left Behind but Scores Show Improvement

Administrators are pleased students have made great strides in the last eight years and still do better than most of their peers across the state.

is not making “adequate yearly progress” as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind act, but district students consistently outperform students from across the state and have made significant improvements in the past eight years.

Overall, 82.4 percent of all students met state learning standards in the spring, as reported in the 2011 State Report Cards, which districts must, by law, release to the communities by Oct. 31.

While this number is down slightly from 83.8 percent of students who met standards in 2010, the score is 16.8 percentage points higher than eight years ago when the national No Child Left Behind act was implemented.

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District students also fared much better on the standardized tests than the state average. Statewide, 76.5 students met or exceeded Illinois learning standards.

On the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, the district saw a slight increase from last year. Results show that 88.1 percent of elementary and middle school students met or exceeded state standards, up from 86.9 percent the prior year. District results for elementary and middle school students are also better than the state average of 82 percent who met or exceeded state standards.

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“There is always work to do, improvement to be made, but we have a lot to be proud of and to celebrate,” district spokesman Tom Hernandez said. “The state testing is just one measure -- a one-day snapshot that, frankly, does not give an accurate picture of the progress our students and teachers make every day.”

District scores on the Prairie State Achievement Examination, taken by high school juniors, show that 54 percent of those students met or exceeded state standards, down from 63 percent in 2010. State results show only 50.5 percent of juniors met or exceeded state standards, down from 53 percent the prior year.

The decline from last year to this is attributed to a new way the state administered the Prairie State exam, resulting in an increased number of students who must take it. Every third-year high school student must take the exam under the new system and may not have been exposed to everything that was asked on the test.

While the district has not made “adequate yearly progress” as defined by the No Child Left Behind act, it is not alone.

About 98.5 percent of Illinois public high schools and 58.6 percent of public elementary and middle schools do not meet the act’s parameters. Only 10 of the state’s 666 public high schools met No Child Left Behind standards.

Under guidelines set forth in the No Child Left Behind act, 85 percent of students must be proficient in reading and math by 2011, and 100 percent of students must be proficient by 2014.

As a district, 80.9 percent met those standards in reading, and 86.6 percent met those standards in math.

The black, Hispanic, limited English proficiencies, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged subgroups did not make adequate yearly progress in reading and math.

Hernandez said the federal act, as predicted by educators long ago, is reaching the point where it has lost its usefulness in gauging how students are performing and has become “misleading at best.”

Officials have said that when schools are deemed to have not made “adequate yearly progress,” it is often contradictory because test scores and other measures of academic success are improving yearly.

District officials said several academic initiatives and performances have helped improve student achievement in recent years.

The district has increased the rigor of its curriculum, increased access to more challenging courses, improved intervention programs, aligned the curriculum with state and national learning standards and increased professional development opportunities for teachers, among others.

Report cards for individual schools and the district as a whole can be found on the district’s Web site at http://www.psd202.org/Schools/reportcards.php.

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