PPT Slide
B. How Illinois defined the “transitional measure of progress”
Instead of requiring “substantial, annual progress toward the goal of all students meeting the standards,” as required by law, Illinois’ traditional definition of progress required very little, if any, progress for most schools receiving Title I funds.
Ignored at least half of the students. As opposed to requiring schools to make substantial annual progress toward the goal of all students meeting the standards, as required by law, Illinois’ transitional definition of progress set the goal for schools at enabling 50% of students to meet the standards. Once schools reached the 50% goal, there was no further requirement of any annual progress. The only requirement was that a school’s test scores not decline significantly. In other words, at a minimum, Illinois ignored half of its school children.
Masked student proficiency rates in the grades and subjects tested. To compound this problem, instead of requiring schools to enable students to meet the standards in all subjects assessed by the Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP), Illinois used a composite, or compensatory, model of determining whether schools were making progress. This meant that a school could use progress in some grades and subjects to offset lack of progress (or negative progress) in other grades and subjects. For example, a high score in 6th grade math, such as 80% of students proficient, could offset low scores in 3rd grade reading, such as only 20% of students proficient.
In practice this means that a number of Illinois schools were not placed in school improvement even though they made negative progress on third grade reading achievement from 1996 to 1997, and the vast majority of third-graders in those schools failed to meet state reading standards (as assessed by the IGAP). In other words, these schools escaped Title I accountability altogether. We chose to examine third grade reading scores because there is a general consensus that by the end of third grade, students should be able to read.
* School scores are a matter of public record. For information on how to get individual school scores in Illinois, contact the Illinois State Board of Education, at