PASSING GRADES: SOUTHERN ILLINOIS DISTRICTS SAY RECENT SURVEY MISREPRESENTS STUDENT TEST SCORES

A recent survey placing two nearby Illinois school districts among the state's worst is imprecise and misleading, according to local and state education officials.

A story which ran in the Nov. 24 St. Louis Post-Dispatch placed Cairo School District 1 and Meridian School District 101 on a list of the 10 worst Illinois' public school districts serving students in kindergarten through 12th grades. The districts were the only two on the list that are not in the metropolitan area of a major city.

The Post-Dispatch created the rankings by analyzing last year's test results from all 902 school districts in the state. Staff members used computer-assisted reporting to rank the 393 districts which had taken all 18 tests for the Illinois Goal Assessment Program.

The assessment exams are similar to the Missouri Mastery Achievement Program tests taken by Missouri students each year.

Meridian superintendent Dr. Daniel James and Illinois State Board of Education representative Tom Hernandez said the newspaper ranked the schools on the basis of one year's data -- hardly enough information to rank a district among the worst in the state. In addition, they said, the rankings were misleading because they implied that the schools are academically unsound, which "is just not true."

"It's a much better school district than they implied," said James, whose district ranked eighth on the list. "We did not meet the mean on any of the tests, but we certainly aren't one of the worst in the state. We have never been contacted by the state."

Cairo superintendent Dr. Elaine Bonifield did not return messages left at her office Tuesday or Wednesday. The Post-Dispatch ranked the school district fourth worst in the state.

Post-Dispatch reporter Michael Sorkin and computer-assisted reporting director David Heath said their survey is accurate. The data analysis was thorough, they said, including three separate rankings to see how districts performed at the elementary, high school and K-12 district levels.

They said they conducted the K-12 rankings, as well as separate rankings for eight tests taken in the third, fourth and sixth grades and another ranking for five tests taken in the 10th and 11th grade.

Seventh and eighth grades were not ranked individually, and fifth and ninth grades don't take the test.

"These guys did it separately for elementary schools, high schools and all district for K-12," Sorkin said. "They're (James and Hernandez) just wrong."

Heath said there was no margin of error for the survey although it is possible that a school ranked among the worst might not have been far from other districts that fared better in the standings.

"In doing that (the various surveys), almost all districts were included in the ranking," he said. "The schools that ranked the lowest, almost all of them were on the watch list."

Although at least four school districts named to the Post-Dispatch's list are included on the state's Early Academic Warning List, Cairo and Meridian are not. For James and Hernandez, that is the most telling indicator of inaccuracy in the rankings.

If the districts performed as poorly on state assessments as the story implied, they said, ISBE would have placed them on their list, which was created by legislators earlier this year to monitor schools whose test scores did not meet state performance expectations. Those standards require at least 50 percent of students being tested in a district to meet or exceed scoring standards on the assessments.

Hernandez said districts are placed on the Early Academic Warning List after failing to meet state expectations for two consecutive years or if their performance on the tests drops 20 or more percentage points in any given year.

"As far as we are concerned, they're not on the academic early warning list, and that's our official record," he said. "This is the only list we have, and those schools are not on it."

If placed on the list, districts are given an additional two years to improve test scores before being moved to the state's Academic Watch List. Once placed on this list, ISBE can cut state funding and take control of the district.

Hernandez said the Post-Dispatch survey is a good example of why his agency "emphatically does not rank schools for political and philosophical reasons." It's impossible to fairly compare schools -- even on the basis of test scores -- because every district faces a different set of challenges and has a distinctive makeup, he said.

He said better comparisons would have been to measure districts' test scores against a state average or even against schools in the same district. Most importantly, he said, comparisons need to include data from more than one year.

"You can not fairly or accurately compare schools that are in different districts as they did," he said. "You can compare to a state average, but to compare district A to district B is misleading to the public."