It’s still not a scientific trend but the second year of Illinois PARCC scores were released today giving some idea of student improvement in the state and the local area.
The 2016 Illinois Report Card from the Illinois State Board of Education shows increased participation as well rising scores in over half of Illinois school districts.
Out of 14 area districts from Knox, Warren, Henry, Henderson and Fulton counties, nine saw composite scores go up.
Galesburg Superintendent Ralph Grimm says a district can’t judge success or failure based on a one year “snapshot.”
He’s more interested in data that shows long term trends.
He tells WGIL there’s one basic way to understand progress with this new set of data.
“Did we increase the number of students who are meeting or exceeding standards and/or did we decrease the number of students who are not meeting standards,” Grimm says. “In other words are we moving the line forward?”
Galesburg did move the line forward, registering a four percent improvement in English Language Arts, two percent improvement in math and an overall two percent increase.
Spoon River Valley and Cambridge districts met or exceeded above the state level for ELA, math and the composite of the two.
Also notable is of the 14 local districts WGIL examined, the five with the highest percentage of low income students are also the lowest five in terms of meeting or exceeding on the PARCC.
Those schools include Monmouth-Roseville, Galesburg, West Central, Bushnell-Prairie City and Abindgdon-Avon.
But a problem for districts looking to use the data is students took their last session of PARCC last April and districts are just getting data now.
Grimm calls it “autopsy data”, meaning once district’s get the scores it’s too late to make adjustments in teaching a particular skill.
That’s why starting this year 205 schools are introducing a locally designed scantron test to be given three times a year.
Like PARCC, the test adheres to Common Core standards as well as 205’s essential skills.
Grimm tells WGIL an advantage of the scantron test over PARCC is that it’s adaptive.
“It gets progressively harder while the student takes the test so that we get a true picture of what they may not know or more importantly what they do know,” Grimm says.
And knowing what students do know will allow teachers and administrators to focus in on areas that need improvement.
“So we can get pretty focused if we know what specific areas we need to look at and that’s what we’ll be doing as we look at scantrons as well as with our PARCC data,” Grimm says.
The scantron tests were given to grades three through 11 at the beginning of the year, with two more scheduled for early January and late April.
For this story, WGIL examined PARCC scores and related data for the following area school districts; Galesburg District 205, Knoxville District 202, R O W V A District 208, United District 304, Monmouth Roseville District 238, Williamsfield District 210, Abingdon-Avon District 238, West Central District 235, Mercer County District 404, Spoon River Valley CUSD 4, Annawan CUSD 22, Cambridge District 227, Galva School District 224 and Bushnell-Prairie City CUSD 170.
