Superintendents Toolkit 2013

Sample letter: Advance Illinois report card

Illinois public schools achieve despite challenges

As the leaders of organizations representing public school administrators, principals, teachers and school board members in Illinois – the education professionals and the people working on the front lines in our public schools – we feel it is important to respond to the recent “report card” issued by the private group Advance Illinois. While we agree with Advance Illinois that we need to continue to strive to improve public education, we do not agree that an arbitrary “grade” of C-minus is an accurate depiction of what is going on in our public schools and, as such, it inappropriately erodes public support for education. More than half of Illinois schools serve concentrations of at least 40 percent disadvantaged students, up from 35 percent 10 years ago, and the report notes “in the face of this demographic shift, Illinois’ academic performance improved modestly in the core subjects of reading and math” across all demographic and economic groups. The report states that Illinois has improved its national ranking as other states facing similar demographic change declined. Included in the data but never mentioned publicly is this fact: When it comes to the percentage of students demonstrating college readiness on all four benchmarks on the ACT test, Illinois was No. 1 among the nine states in the nation that administered the ACT to all of its graduating class of 2012. It’s apples to oranges to compare us with states where the test is mostly taken only by college-bound students, but even compared to that group Illinois ranked 12 th in the nation. The U.S. Department of Education released its graduation report just last week for the 2010-11 school year and Illinois ranked 10 th nationally with a graduation rate of 84 percent, just 4 percent from the top spot. We would be the first to say that we must improve on closing the achievement gaps in Illinois. Having said that, the new federal report showed that, with regard to graduation rate, Illinois ranked 8 th for Black or African American students (74 percent), 7 th for Hispanic/Latino students (77 percent), 7 th for White students (89 percent), 11 th for Limited English Proficient students (68 percent) and 9 th for Economically Disadvantaged students (75 percent). This has been achieved despite the fact that Illinois ranks at or near the bottom in the nation in state funding for education, and has suffered an 11 percent cut in General State Aid and a 42 percent cut in transportation funding in the past three years.

We agree with Advance Illinois on many of the issues facing public education, such as the value of a

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