New ISAT standards reveal poor performance for Chicago Public Schools

Illinois parents have been hoodwinked once again. Two years ago, the Chicago Tribune revealed that Illinois’ graduation rates weren’t as impressive as once reported. Now comes news that the state has been inflating district test scores for more than a decade. New Illinois Standard Achievement Test, or ISAT, scores released Tuesday by Chicago Public Schools officials, prove as much....

Illinois parents have been hoodwinked once again.

Two years ago, the Chicago Tribune revealed that Illinois’ graduation rates weren’t as impressive as once reported. Now comes news that the state has been inflating district test scores for more than a decade.

New Illinois Standard Achievement Test, or ISAT, scores released Tuesday by Chicago Public Schools officials, prove as much.

In 2012, only 52.5 percent of the district’s elementary students were on track to succeed in high school – an almost 22 percentage point fall from the previous year.

This dramatic decrease is not due to a collective drop in intelligence. It’s due, instead, to the state’s adoption of tougher standards for measuring student achievement.

Why did the state decide to institute higher standards this year? Because doing so was the only way it could receive a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government.

Previously, under the No Child Left Behind Act, Illinois was allowed to set its own standards for student success. A year after the passage of the act and the reporting of substandard results, the state decided to lower its standards so that more students would pass the ISAT and districts would appear more successful, even though they hadn’t done a better job educating students.

Despite the drop in scores, CPS did actually improve its performance from last year. Applying the new methodology to 2011 shows that CPS’s scores went up about 1.8 percentage points. But this slight boost is nothing to cheer about.

Re-examining past scores using the new methodology quickly shows the extent to which CPS has failed to educate its students. Recalculated ISAT scores from 2001, under the new methodology, show that only 23.4 percent of students met or exceeded state standards, according to the Chicago Tribune.

This means that only two of every 10 students in CPS were on track to graduate from high school.

The Illinois State Board of Education plans to release scores statewide in the fall. But don’t expect any good news – most districts anticipate that their scores will drop dramatically.

This will surely come as a shock to most parents, many of whom have been told that the schools their children attend are doing better than they actually are.

Parents should be able to trust the data the state communicates to them about their local schools.

This lack of transparency and the state’s poor test scores show why it is more important than ever to switch to a system that relies less on bureaucrats and more on parents to make the important decisions affecting students’ lives.