The puzzling statewide decline of reading scores has prompted superintendents of all six DuPage County school districts with both elementary and high schools to call for a study of the test to determine whether it is flawed.
The school chiefs issued an unprecedented joint statement Thursday urging the Illinois State Board of Education to review the reading test. Scores statewide continue to slip downward in what is now a five-year trend.
Supt. Joan Raymond of Elmhurst Unit School District 205 said the educators are not trying to scrap the statewide reading tests.
“Accountability is necessary and valuable, and student learning should be measured against standards,” the six superintendents said in the statement. “More information about the test is needed.”
Raymond and the other superintendents are troubled by the “contradictory evidence” that surfaced earlier this month with the disclosure of reading test averages in the Illinois Goals Assessment Program. Statewide tests are given to children at various grades in reading, mathematics, writing, science and social studies.
Though reading scores are dropping in the state-mandated reading test given to 3rd, 6th, 8th and 10th graders, they are rising in some districts in other reading tests purchased from commercial testmakers, such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the California Achievement Test.
Also, scores on statewide writing and social studies tests continue on the upswing.
“These are reading-based subjects,” Raymond said, suggesting that trends should be the same for all three academic areas.
Besides Raymond, the other DuPage superintendents are E. James Travis of Wheaton-Warrenville Unit School District 200, Donald Wold of Westmont Unit School District 201, Peter Lueck of Lisle Unit School District 202, Donald Weber of Naperville Unit School District 203, and Gail McKinzie of Indian Prairie Unit School District 204.
The six districts are the only school DuPage systems with both elementary and high schools in which educators can gauge student performance through all 12 grades.
“We don’t seem to have an answer for the declining reading scores,” Raymond said.
“Reading tests have become very important to everybody,” Travis said. “They are an important ingredient in accountability. We cannot afford to have doubt about the validity of the tests. Whenever there is a big swing like this, it raises questions about the validity.”
The six school chiefs want “a review of the test to determine exactly what the test is measuring and if what the test is measuring and if what it measures aligns with the state reading goals as the schools understand and implement them through curriculum and classroom instruction.”
Raymond said: “If something is wrong with the test, fix the test. If something is wrong with the curriculum, fix the curriculum.”
In Elmhurst, reading scores for all four tested grades declined in the last year.
The test at all four grade levels consists of two reading passages. Students then answer multiple-choice questions designed to test their comprehension.
But of five choices, one, two or three may be correct. If, for example, a child has one right answer when there is two, the item is marked wrong. Test instructions direct the teacher to explain that one, two or three answers may be right, but educators said that puzzles some younger children who expect that only one answer can be correct.
“Some of the reading samples were very long,” Raymond said.
The Elmhurst school chief said one 8th-grade teacher whom she declined to identify said she knew in the first few minutes after test-taking started that her pupils would not do well because “they looked so confused.”
The test is scored on a scale of 0 to 500. In the first round of reading tests given in 1988, 250 was established as the benchmark state average score for future comparison. In 1997, the average reading scores are: 3rd grade, 246; 6th grade, 229; 8th grade, 227; and 10th grade, 208.
Scores for all grades on the 13 other tests for mathematics, writing, social studies and science in 1997 are above the benchmark state average. Only one, 11th grade social studies with 245, has slipped below 250.
Wold, Lueck, Weber and McKinzie could not be reached for comment.
