What do Highland Park, Naperville, Barrington, Clarendon Hills, Oak Brook, Glenview, St. Charles, Hinsdale, Northfield, Wheaton, Burr Ridge, Evanston, Schaumburg, River Forest, Palatine, Northbrook, Western Springs, Buffalo Grove, Long Grove, Lincolnshire, Elmhurst, Glen Ellyn, Kenilworth, Arlington Heights, Hoffman Estates, Bannockburn, Deerfield, Wilmette, Libertyville, Vernon Hills, Elk Grove Village, Lake Bluff, La Grange, Lake Zurich, Glencoe, Rolling Meadows, Lake Forest, Winnetka, Mt. Prospect, Lindenhurst, Highland Park, Plainfield, Darien, Aurora and Bartlett have that Park Ridge doesn’t?
They each have at least one school on the Chicago Sun-Times’ lists of the “Top 100” Illinois elementary schools or middle schools. And many of those suburbs – using that term a little loosely, admittedly – have more than one school on one or both of those lists.
What’s going on with Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64? Where’s that top-shelf education the bureaucrats and teachers brag about to justify what the taxpayers have been paying for?
From past experience, we expect D-64 will trot out its customary alibi about how it doesn’t teach to the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISATs), yet its students still have a 93.7 “meeting or exceeding” percentage on those tests. We will be reminded that D-64 students score at least 10 percentage points higher than the “state average,” as if such an average is a suitable benchmark for our semi-affluent community. This year, the District can even blame students with disabilities for bringing down the scores, as is reported in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Despite ISAT success, Dist. 64 fails to hit mark for first time,” Oct. 26).
According to that H-A article, the District’s assistant superintendent for student learning, Diane Betts, and Supt. Philip Bender “downplayed” missing the district’s No Child Left Behind Act goals this year, and they did identify the performance of students with disabilities as a culprit.
But that 93.7% meet-or-exceed standard the District touts may be deceptive, according to an article in today’s Chicago Tribune about test scores (“Schools fail to push students on state tests,” Oct. 29). That article cites a 2008 study by the Consortium of Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago as showing that students who simply “meet” rather than “exceed” 8th-grade math standards will “have little chance of scoring even a 20 on the ACT college entrance exam as [high school] juniors.” And 20 isn’t all that impressive, especially for semi-affluent communities.
Is this kind of academic performance good enough for the parents of District 64 elementary students? Is it good enough for the taxpayers who keep pouring approximately one-third of their property tax dollars into the District each year?
We don’t think so.
And, frankly, we’re tired of hearing D-64 bureaucrats and teachers union apologists trot out the same excuses to protect their jobs by convincing us that things are just swell. It’s time the parents, the students and the taxpayers started hearing about academic performance from the seven people who have been entrusted to oversee the bureaucrats – the D-64 School Board members: Pres. John Heyde, Genie Taddeo, Ted Smart, Eric Uhlig, Pat Fioretto, Sharon Lawson and Scott Zimmerman.
Four of their seats will be on the April 2011 ballot, so it sure would be interesting to hear what they – and anybody else who intends to run for one of those seats – have to say about that aspect of the Board’s stewardship of the District.
They might start by explaining what improvements in student performance (if any) have been identified since that multi-million dollar tax increase referendum passed in 2007.
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