One of my favorite desserts is a piece of good chocolate cake.
Plenty of ingredients go into making a cake. And plenty of ingredients go into grading schools. As a new parent, it’s important to me that those ingredients make our schools better.
But for too long, Illinois schools have basically been graded on a single ingredient: how many students meet a specific standard. All the other ingredients that go into making a strong school were ignored.
Now, a law called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allows Illinois to create a better recipe for school quality. And our state did just that.
Learn more about Illinois’ improved recipe for grading schools through our fun (and delicious!) ESSA recipe video. It will only take two minutes!
No more ignoring important ingredients like school culture, graduation rates, and English learner progress. Many parent suggestions were included in the approved plan, so it is good to see this positive policy development.
As parents, educators, and community members, we deserve to know how our schools are doing. Just like using a full recipe gives you a delicious cake, this new and improved recipe gives us a more complete picture of how our schools are doing and where they need improvement.
But we can’t let this recipe for school quality just sit on the shelf. It must be used for the best results! And I know you will help us in this next phase of the ESSA campaign.
Join us to help Illinois make the most of this new recipe. Visit our ESSA resource page to learn more and sign up to stay in the loop on important education initiatives in our state.
