It’s comforting to learn that the feds (i.e. The U.S. Department of Education run by Secretary Betsy DeVos) has some serious concerns about Illinois accountability plans.

When I first saw Illinois’ plan, I concluded that it fell far short of its goals around equity and transparency, and wrote about those failings here and here.

Illinois was among the first states to submit its plan for Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal legislation passed in 2015 to replace No Child Left Behind.

Illinois succeeded on a couple fronts: It shifted the accountability focus to student “growth”–how much a student improves from year to year– from “proficiency,” a rather arbitrary cut-point for what represents grade-level learning. And I appreciate that it looks beyond standardized test scores to give insight into important school quality factors–chronic absenteeism, a freshman-on-track metric for high schoolers and school climate surveys.

But it failed on two fronts: It won’t protect our most vulnerable students, and it won’t actually hold our schools accountable, at least not on any kind of reasonable timetable. I pointed this out in my March 2017 piece:

Schools have until the year 2032 to meet these goals–15 long years to get up to snuff. It’s literally a lifetime in the schooling of an Illinois student–so the kindergartener who enrolls next fall will be three years out of high school before any school is answerable for these goals.

And … nothing much happens if schools don’t hit these goals, or even make reasonable progress toward these goals.

I also pointed out how vulnerable “subgroups” of students will once again disappear from accountability, presuming they attend schools that are not the worst of the worst but merely mediocre or even average…and how the state punted when it came to setting a meaningful standard for teacher quality.

The Education Department recently shared some of these very same concerns with our state. From a summary published this month by Education Week:

The state’s proposed timeline for developing and implementing its measures of progress for students towards English-language proficiency doesn’t match what ESSA requires.

For school improvement, the department’s feedback states that Illinois’ plan to identify schools with struggling student subgroups (or schools needing “targeted” support and intervention) does not sufficiently cover all required subgroups.

Illinois also gets dinged for not providing more information as to how it will identify the extent to which low-income and minority students are taught by ineffective, out-of-field, and inexperienced teachers. 

Illinois showed some initiative and got its plan in early. Now it’s time to dig back in and make it better. This plan doesn’t work for Illinois children, as the feds wisely pointed out.

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Tracy Dell'Angela

Tracy loves to ask questions and write stories. She roots for the underdog, wants our nation to reimagine schools and the teaching profession, and seethes about how much school inequity she sees. She spent most of her career as a journalist covering schools and crime. She and her husband raised two daughters in a diverse suburb of Chicago. She currently runs an education foundation in her community and formerly served as managing editor of Education Post. After leaving journalism she explored her wonkier side communicating school research at the University of Chicago and the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. She is Californian by birth and a Chicagoan in spirit. She loves the outdoors and all animals, especially her spoiled "dingo" dog.

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