Dive Brief:
- With permission from the U.S. Department of Education, Illinois will unveil a new system for measuring student success next year that holds minority and low-income students to a different standard than their white counterparts.
- All students will transition to the new Common Core aligned PARCC exam, but their targets will be different. Minority and low-income students are expected to make larger gains over the six-year plan; however, their starting and ending points are lower than those of their white peers.
- Additionally, the new plan does not just place all weight on the PARCC scores. High School graduation, school context, and year-to-year growth will all be folded into the evaluation.
Dive Insight:
These changes to how student achievement is assessed follow Illinois' receipt last month of a waiver from No Child Left Behind. The new goals are calculated by adding the percentage of a demographic that passed a previous exam and half the percentage that failed. The total becomes the goal for low-income students to meet over the next several years, through 2019.
The example the Chicago Tribune gives is this: 43.7% of low-income third-through-eighth-graders passed the 2013 ISAT reading exam and 56.3% failed the exam. The new target is calculated in this manner: 43.7% + 28.2% = 71.9%. So, by 2019, 71.9% of low-income third-through-eighth-graders are expected to be proficient in reading.
This new target plan also follows last week's release of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam scores, which highlighted a growing gap between white and minority students.
