Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 2, 2006 THE LATEST ON LATE TEST SCORES

Look...it's 1:45 a.m. and I'm too busy engaging in the latest scientific research to give a rat's butt (oh...that was a fat, happy, healthy and vigorous mouse's butt) about late test scores.

But...as a public service announcement to you scrawny, sad, sickly and lethargic CATs, here is the latest on the late!

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch...

Schools still don't have spring test results from state

By Georgina Gustin
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Frustrated school administrators throughout Illinois are waiting for test results from the state so they can tell parents and their communities if students met performance targets on state tests taken in the spring.

The state deadline for districts to issue their results, by way of School Report Cards, passed on Tuesday. But districts throughout the state were unable to provide the results because the Illinois State Board of Education had yet to finalize the data.

"It's a joke," said David Elson, superintendent of the Alton School District, "and we were told last week they don't know when we're going to get the results."

Administrators blamed the delays on Harcourt Assessment, the Texas-based testing company hired by the state to run the tests. The company was widely criticized for botching the testing process during the last school year, and the state later pulled part of its contract with the company.

The Illinois Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT, is given annually to students in the third through eighth grades. The Prairie State Achievement Examination is given to high school juniors. The test results, issued publicly in the School Report Cards, are used to determine whether districts are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law. If a certain number of students fail the test, the school can face sanctions.

A spokesman for Harcourt, which administers both the ISAT and the Prairie State, said the company had to manually verify thousands of tests and sets of results because of missing or incorrect data on the testing forms.

"ISAT was experiencing delays from the beginning. It was a difficult spring," said Russell Schweiss, of Harcourt. "There was a tremendous amount of verification that had to take place."

A spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Education said it has posted the preliminary Prairie State data, and the districts are reviewing that before the state finalizes it. The state is still waiting for the final ISAT data in order to produce the actual report cards.

For school districts, the delays are putting a dent in their school year.

"Next week we have our parent-teacher conferences, and typically we've given them the report cards, but we don't have them," said Lynn Clapp, assistant superintendent for curriculum at the Belleville Elementary District. "Everything that could go wrong last year seemed to go wrong."

Under the law, districts are required to develop and use school improvement plans, but the glitches are postponing that process, too.

"Without the data, we don't know how we stack up," said Elson. "It's difficult to answer the question: How are we doing?"

The U.S. Department of Education has, in the past, withheld money from states if they didn't get test results on time. But, in this case, the department is giving Illinois a pass.

"They've given us a valid excuse — they had problems with their contractor," said Chad Colby, a department spokesman. He added, "We've known about the problems in Illinois for a while."