Family & Educator Partnerships Archives

A Better Recipe

Quality Schools | 09/28/2017

Scott McDonald Marketing & Communications Manager

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.

State ESSA Plan Heads to Washington

Legislation | 04/6/2017

Scott McDonald Marketing & Communications Manager

Illinois’ plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was submitted to the federal government for review. The plan, which was adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) a few weeks ago, includes plans to close opportunity and achievement gaps.

Importantly, it ensures the state’s accountability plan will be inclusive, transparent, and informative to parents. Some of the changes included:

Weighting growth more than proficiency so we can reward schools for how much students are learning, not what they knew before starting.
Counting students from historically underserved subgroups, demonstrating our state’s commitment to educating all students.
New school ratings that are simple and easy to understand for parents so they know how their children’s schools are doing.

The U.S. Department of Education now has 120 days to review the state’s ESSA plan for approval or to provide feedback.

We Need to Move Forward, Not Backwards

Quality Schools | 02/28/2017

Aimee Galvin Policy Manager

We usually write about developments in the legislature, but there is critical activity involving the State Board of Education with profound implications. Frankly, we’re worried about the direction they are headed.

We are worried the Board is about to take major steps backward for Illinois kids by undermining the system that lets parents and educators track school performance, instead of improving it.

You’ve probably heard about the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal law that requires States to create plans for their accountability systems. ESSA replaced the well intended but poorly executed No Child Left Behind Act. In Illinois, responsibility for the accountability plan falls most heavily on the State Board of Ed and State Superintendent.

We were so alarmed when we saw the latest draft plan that four Stand members spoke up at the Board meeting last week. The Governor voiced similar concerns.

We need your voice to join ours so that Illinois continues to move toward a smarter, informative accountability system, not one that lets schools hide poor performance under the rug. We believe that:

Growth matters more than proficiency. We should measure how much our children learn in school, not how much they knew before they started.
Students from historically underserved subgroups should count. Overall ratings need to take into account that all students matter. With one of the largest academic achievement gaps in the country, Illinois cannot afford a system that turns a blind eye to this.
School rating labels should make sense to parents. Families deserve user-friendly information about how their children’s schools are doing.
Getting it right is more important than getting it done fast. ESSA plans are very complicated, and the state’s draft has a long way to go. We aren’t sure what the rush is to submit a flawed plan by April, when all states have until September.

Tell ISBE that we need to improve this plan for all of our students!

Stand Submits ESSA Comments to ISBE

Quality Schools | 01/9/2017

Jessica Handy Government Affairs Director

As the Illinois State Board of Education gets closer to finalizing regulations implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Stand for Children Illinois submitted comments offering feedback to strengthen the next draft of the plan. Stand’s suggestions include:

More clearly incorporating subgroup scores in school ratings. This should be an integral part of school ratings: the new system should never allow a school to get the highest rating if it is failing any of its student populations.
Weighting student growth more than proficiency or any other indicator.
Prioritizing the diversity of Illinois teachers, including racial, gender, and linguistic diversity.
Expediting the timeline so that we can get a jumpstart on identifying schools more quickly and working to support their students immediately.
Improving the supports and interventions process for struggling districts.
Supporting summative ratings alongside an easy-to-understand dashboard of information that clearly shows families how their schools are doing overall and in key areas.

Stand and its ESSA Fellows remain committed to continuing to work with ISBE as the ESSA implementation process continues.

Leaving Behind No Child Left Behind

Quality Schools | 10/18/2016

Jessica Handy Government Affairs Director

Last December, Congress replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The shift gives states significantly more flexibility about how to identify schools that are succeeding and support for schools that are struggling.

Remember how NCLB labelled virtually every school as failing? That’s right, in the last few years, schools had to have 100% of students meeting or exceeding standards, regardless of where students started or how much they learned in that school. The flexibility to design a more meaningful and achievable system could be a great thing for Illinois schools…. But it also means that it is up to parents and community members to be vigilant and speak up for a fair system that provides clear and transparent information to families, appropriate attention to closing achievement gaps, and individualized supports for struggling schools.

The Illinois State Board of Education has been engaging communities about ESSA early and often. They came out with their draft plan and are making revisions in response to stakeholder feedback. (Our feedback letter is here.) Next month, we anticipate a new version coming out with more concrete details, followed by another listening tour.