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"We are encouraged by Illinois' results
this year and know that the hard work of educators and students is
paying off," Dunn said. "We praise Illinois teachers and schools for
their commitment, and we pledge to help them continue this growth
and improvement." But while
the hard work of Illinois educators paid off, Dunn said that changes
are needed to the No Child Left Behind law to ensure that it is
truly measuring the progress of all students. In 2003-2004, 235
school districts, or 69 percent, of Illinois districts that were
labeled as not meeting standards failed to meet the yearly progress
requirements solely because of how the federal law requires states
to measure outcomes for students with Individual Education Plans and
limited English proficiency. Dunn said that there are significant
problems with the way the law measures the performances of those
students.
"Special education and bilingual
students have unique needs," Dunn said. "Labeling them as a subgroup
and setting an arbitrary target ignores those needs and flies in the
face of common sense. It is unfair to these kids, their teachers and
their communities." He further noted that bilingual students who
perform at a high enough level are removed from their bilingual
student subgroup, creating a ceiling on the amount of progress the
subgroup can ever show under the No Child Left Behind law.
Dunn also challenged districts to
address the concern that more needs to be done for special education
and bilingual students and to ensure that improper assumptions about
students with disabilities are not being made. Dunn noted that
although the measurement tools used by the law are imperfect,
districts must still ensure that special education students are
making progress.
He encouraged federal lawmakers to
consider measuring academic progress for special education and
bilingual students, instead of looking solely at their performance
on statewide tests; and he argued that districts should be allowed
broader latitude to offer accommodated tests as part of the
Individual Education Plans required for all special education
students according to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education
Act.
"Districts must be held accountable
for the services they provide to special education students, but No
Child Left Behind is not accurately measuring what they're
accomplishing," Dunn said.
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this article] |
"As we looked at this
year's results, it really highlighted a problem with NCLB," he said.
"NCLB has created a situation where some good schools are
inappropriately labeled as failing. To truly measure how well our
schools are serving IEP and LEP students, we should be measuring the
progress those students are making on an individual basis. Educators
are working hard, students are working hard, and it's discouraging
for them to be labeled as failing when they're achieving good
progress."
This year's State Report Cards were
released with accurate data six months earlier than in the previous
testing cycle. The Illinois State Board of Education worked closely
with local districts to correct data errors affecting more than half
the state's schools in preparation for distribution of the 2003-2004
reports.
The data correction process began in
September, less than one week after Dunn was appointed by the new
State Board of Education. After appointing seven new members to the
board, Gov. Blagojevich charged the board and Dunn with improving
the way the agency works with local districts. Days later Dunn
launched an aggressive effort to finalize School Report Card data,
reopening the data correction period so that schools and agency
staff could work together to correct errors.
These efforts prevented many schools
from being incorrectly labeled as not meeting the yearly progress
requirements. The new state board provided correct data to schools
in mid-November of the testing year. In comparison, four schools did
not receive 2002-2003 corrected No Child Left Behind data until June
of 2004, a full 16 months after the testing.
Responding to a call from the
governor to improve next year's State Report Card process, the state
board has already begun work on plans to improve responsiveness to
schools and increase agency accountability for data accuracy
throughout the process. The agency will also make changes to the
timeline so that schools have their final data much sooner and can
distribute their reports much earlier in the year. In addition, the
state board has begun efforts to work with the Illinois Parent
Teacher Association and other groups to redesign the reports so they
are more "parent-friendly."
The 2004 Illinois State Report Card
is available at www.isbe.net.
[Illinois
State Board of Education news release] |
