For the third year in a row, Evanston Township High School failed to meet standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act for the academic school year. Educators and administrators at ETHS say they are working on programs to avoid a repeat on this year’s report card.
District 202, as well as every other school district in Illinois, has been required to submit a school “report card” showing its students’ performance on standardized tests to the Illinois State Board of Education since 2002, as part of 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act.
To meet the act’s standards, a certain percentage of students in each of several demographic groups – white, black, Hispanics, as well as students with disabilities – must pass the reading and math tests. If too many students in one group fail, then the whole school fails.
Standards will continue to rise over the next 12 years, ensuring that schools have 100 percent of students passing the tests by the end of that period.
“There are a million different ways to fail,” Judith Levinson, director of research evaluation assessment for ETHS, said.
Several categories of ETHS students fell short of meeting the required standards in reading and math. Of the 1,142 black students who took the tests, about 36 percent had to pass the reading portion of the exam. Only 34.8 percent did. On the math portion, about 33 percent had to pass. Only 28.7 percent did.
Of the 275 Hispanics who took the exam, 41.1 percent had to pass the math portion but the district fell short of that number by about 4 percent. Hispanic students passed the requirements for the reading portion.
The school also failed to have enough students with disabilities take the tests.
Compared with the standards for the previous two school years, the 2004-05 standards in groups that have failed to meet them hardly changed. But a more detailed plan for improvement was included at the end of the 2004-05 report card, and several new programs were proposed for the this school year.
Project Excel, a newly implemented Title I program that has a curriculum focused on promoting good study habits, test-taking skills, and literacy and math achievement, is one of many programs mentioned in ETHS’s new school improvement plan. The project, approved at the March 28, 2005 school board meeting, has parents and children working together in meetings with academic coaches.
School Board President Mary Wilkerson said the school board has not received a report on Project Excel since the Nov. 7, 2005 meeting, but Excel courses are currently listed as part of the curriculum for the upcoming summer school session.
At the Nov. 7 meeting, Wilkerson said concerns were expressed about Project Excel’s partnership with the First Church of God Christian Life Center, which helps with field trips for the program. She said that no funds from the program would be given to the church.
At the meeting, Wilkerson outlined an idea about having workshops to teach parents different ways to motivate their children.
“It was just a suggestion, something to work in with the children,” Wilkerson said.
Along with Project Excel, ETHS’s report card mentioned a variety of programs to help improve student’s standardized test scores.
Measures of Academic Progress is one new program for Project Excel students, as well as transfer and incoming students who did not take the EXPLORE standardized test that evaluates reading and math levels.
Educators and administrators at ETHS will have to wait until next year to know if their plans for improvement succeed. For now, there is hope for improvement.
“We would like our kids to do better, even before there was a law,” Levinson said. “We would like to do better, we would like to see it happen quicker.”
Reach Anna Prior at [email protected].
