3
State Superintendent steps up for kids,
schools with 5Essentials decision
The Illinois State Board of
Education (ISBE) and State
Superintendent Dr. Chris Koch
often come under fire for
decisions and mandates that
we as superintendents view as
not being in the best interests
of public education or the
children we are charged with educating.
But when Dr. Koch and ISBE make difficult but
fair and correct decisions despite predictable
backlash from certain reform groups and the media, I
think those stances are cause for us to stand up and
show our support. Recent examples include:
Changing the Certified School Nurse mandate
rules;
Proposing rule changes to allow local school
boards to determine class size and ratios for
special education and all students. We still have
work to do to get this issue approved by the ISBE
Board, but Dr. Koch has been supportive; and
Holding off publishing the flawed comparative
ratings from the first statewide 5Essentials
Survey
To no one’s surprise, reform groups and some
editorial boards took Dr. Koch and ISBE to task
regarding the 5Essentials Survey despite all of the
problems that had been identified with the survey
itself. The editorials’ main point seemed to be that the
state spent some $600,000 to administer the survey
(money that probably could have been better used in
the classroom), so they need to report the summative
rating regardless of the quality of the data.
In reality, ISBE is making all of the raw data
available to anyone who wishes to access it by the
simple act of clicking on a link. Citizens would be well
served to read that data and form their own opinions
as opposed to accepting some statistical ranking that
compares the climate of downstate schools to
Chicago Public System schools, rural schools to
urban schools and poorer schools to richer schools.
To be perfectly clear, we are not at all fearful of
the results of the survey, but we do have serious
concerns regarding the reliability and validity of
comparative ratings given issues regarding the
security of the survey, the applicability statewide of
certain questions on the survey, administering the
survey at the same time pink slips were being given
to teachers in districts that had to implement
reductions in force -- and then attempting to use
some statistical norm to compare one district to
another or one school to another.
I want to thank Dr. Koch for listening to our
concerns as superintendents and principals on the
front lines of public education, and for making a
courageous -- though not politically popular --
decision that clearly was in the best interest of using
the information from the survey to improve schools
rather than to rate them.
In this first year, there were instances of districts
receiving more surveys than they had teachers or
students. The first comparative ratings that were sent
to districts showed instances of more than 85 percent
of respondents answering “Agree” or “Strongly
Agree” to a question only for the statisticians’ rating
to come back “Neutral” or “Weak,” apparently
because not enough people chose “Strongly Agree” -
- meaning “Agree” ended up being counted as a
negative response.
The purpose of the survey is to give school
administrators information to use internally for
improvement and that is exactly how we intend to
utilize the data. Dr. Koch and his staff at ISBE have
pledged to work with us to improve the next survey
that will be administered in an attempt to make the
information more valid and reliable and give us a
better tool with which to work.
For people who really care about improving
education instead of some artificial ranking, those are
the types of decisions of integrity that should be
applauded, not criticized.
Message from the
Executive Director
Dr. Brent Clark
“I want to thank Dr. Koch for
listening to our concerns as
superintendents and
principals on the front lines
of public education, and for
making a courageous --
though not politically popular
-- decision that clearly was
in the best interest of using
the information from the survey to improve
schools rather than to rate them.”
—Dr. Brent Clark, IASA Executive Director
State Superintendent
Dr. Christopher Koch
