Test Scores Sink to New Low: Juniors Pass Only 52.6% of State Math, Science and Reading Exams

By Stephanie Banchero, Chicago Tribune

Sep. 20–Statewide passing scores on the Illinois high school achievement exams dropped to a new low this year, according to data released Wednesday.

High school juniors passed only 52.6 percent of the state math, science and reading exams they took in April. It’s the lowest pass rate since the state began giving the Prairie State Achievement Exam in 2001. The passing rate last year was 54.3 percent.

The biggest drop came in reading, where only 54 percent of students met standards, compared with 58 percent last year.

The decline comes as national, state and local education leaders continue to struggle with how to fix American high schools.

The issue has become a national obsession among educators since software magnate Bill Gates launched an attack on secondary schools in 2005, calling them “obsolete.”

President Bush has called for more rigorous testing of high school students. Gates has committed to pumping $1.3 billion into improving high schools. And more than 20 states, including Illinois, are analyzing their high school academic standards to see if they need to be ratcheted up.

Two years ago, Illinois raised its graduation course requirements for the first time in two decades, boosting the number of math, English and science credits students need to get a diploma.

“Of course we are disappointed,” Chris Koch, state superintendent of education, said of the high school scores. “We are going to have to look at what we are doing as a state and figure out why this is happening.”

By comparison, the state’s elementary school pupils showed improvement in reading and math at every grade level on this year’s state tests, the data show. Scores on the elementary science exam remained unchanged in 4th grade and dipped a bit at the 7th-grade level.

Statewide passing scores on the grade school exams increased to 78.7 percent, up from 77 percent last year.

This year’s state achievement exams were given to public school pupils in March and April. Pupils in 3rd through 8th grade took the Illinois Standards Achievement Test in reading and math. Fourth and 7th graders also took the science exam.

Illinois juniors took the Prairie State exam, a battery of tests that include math, reading and science exams, as well as the ACT college entrance exam.

The Illinois State Board of Education released the statewide averages Wednesday. Individual school results will be released to the public Oct. 31.

Illinois has some of the nation’s top high schools. Teenagers in some high schools post impressive — even perfect — scores on national and college entrance exams every year.

But many schools, especially urban high schools, continue to post abysmal results on the state tests, and no one knows for certain why reforms have been unable to generate improvement.

Illinois high school principals have long contended that students do not take the state portion of the exam seriously because they suffer no consequences if they fail it. So students give short shrift to the state part of the test and focus their attention instead on the high-stakes ACT portion, taken during the first day of testing.

The state’s ACT composite score has shown steady, albeit slight, improvement over the last few years.

Other factors further complicate the picture.

“High schools are more complex because you have so many teachers teaching their own courses and, in many cases, not collaborating within or across disciplines,” said Matt Gandal, executive vice president of Achieve Inc., a Washington company that has studied standards across the country. “In many cases the curriculum is not very coherent and not very rigorous. History has shown that it’s very difficult to change an institution as big and complex as a high school.”

Achieve, created by the nation’s governors and business leaders to help raise academic standards, is working with Illinois officials to analyze the state’s high school standards.

Koch said state education officials want to ensure that the state high school standards, which lay out what students should know at each grade level, are in line with what students are expected to know when they enroll in college.

“We need to look at the rigor and the relevance of our standards and we need to make sure that they stack up to a national comparison,” he said.

“We also need to look at targeting our money and efforts to specific schools that need help.”

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sbanchero@tribune.com

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