Using benchmark scores identified by the Northwest Evaluation Association for the Measures of Academic Progress test, the percentage of District 65 students who are on track to ACT college readiness has significantly declined in math since 2017, and the percentage has been generally flat in reading.
Some of the decline in math is likely due to learning loss during the COVID pandemic and the closing of schools to in-person learning during much of the pandemic. But according to a national study published in January, District 65’s decline in math is above both the national and state averages.
District 65 administrators do not dispute the trends in the percentage of students who are on track to ACT college readiness, which is one measure of student achievement. But they say high percentages of students are meeting their growth targets, and they point to other test data they say indicates progress in student achievement. District administrators also summarize some of their efforts to support students and improve student achievement.
Trends toward college readiness
More than a decade ago, in 2011, the District 65 School Board adopted a goal to prepare students so they would be on track to college readiness when they finished eighth grade. This was a much higher goal than “meeting standards” on the Illinois Standard Achievement Test, or ISAT. At that time the “meet standards” benchmark on the ISATs corresponded to about the 22nd national percentile in reading and math.
For many years after that, the district measured whether students were on track to college readiness using scores on the ISAT that were linked to the ACT’s college readiness benchmark scores: 22 in both reading and math. The scores corresponded to the 60th percentile in reading and the 65th percentile in math.*
ACT’s college readiness benchmark scores of 22 in reading and math predict that a student has a 50% chance of obtaining a B in a related course in freshman year of college.**
In August 2016, the District 65 School Board decided to also measure whether students are likely on track to college readiness using scores on the Measures of Academic Progress test that were linked to the ACT’s college readiness benchmark scores of 22. The Northwest Evaluation Association, the owner of the MAP test, identified those MAP scores in a 2015 research brief. The scores for fifth- through eighth-graders on average corresponded to the 63rd percentile in reading and the 68th percentile in math. Those scores are referred to in this article as the MAP-ACT scores.
The charts below show the percentages of District 65 students who met the MAP-ACT scores in math and reading on the 2017-2024 MAP tests given in the spring of those years. Scores were not available for 2020 and 2021 due to disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic.***
The first chart shows that the percentages of Black, Hispanic and white students who met the MAP-ACT scores in math dropped significantly between the spring of 2017 and the spring of 2024:
- For white students the percentage dropped from 81% in 2017 to 69.6% in 2024.
- For Hispanic students, the percentage dropped from 35% in 2017 to 28.5% in 2024.
- For Black students, the percentage dropped from 22% in 2017 to 15.1% in 2024.
The chart below shows that the percentages of Black and white students who met the MAP-ACT scores in reading were generally flat during the period 2017-2024. Hispanic students, though, showed gains. In 2017, 36% of Hispanic students met the MAP-ACT scores; that percentage grew to 41.7% in 2024.
The charts also show that significant achievement gaps between racial/ethnic groups remain in both math and reading.
On a nationwide basis, there were significant declines in student learning in math due to the COVID pandemic, and lesser declines in reading. District 65 schools were closed to in-person learning beginning in March 2020. The district’s schools were closed to in-person learning during the 2020-2021 school year until Feb. 16, 2021, when a limited number of students were permitted to return to in-person learning for a partial or full day. All students returned to in-person learning in the 2021-2022 school year.
Although schools across the country saw sharp declines in academic achievement during the pandemic, the struggle to recover from these losses has been uneven. A special report published by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and the Education Opportunity Project at Stanford University in January 2024 found that in 2019, District 65 students on average scored 1.851 grade levels above the national average in math. Four years later in 2023, District 65 students on average scored only 0.903 grade levels above the national average, a drop of almost a full grade level. During the same period, the average decline of students in Illinois school districts was 0.2 grade levels, and on a national basis it was 0.36 grade levels, according to the study.
The same study found that in reading, District 65 students improved by 0.08 grade levels between 2019 and 2023, which was below the average increase of all students in Illinois but above the national average.
A RoundTable article published in March provides more details on the findings of the special report.
D65 administrators see progress
On July 17, the RoundTable provided Dr. Angel Turner, superintendent; Dr. Stacy Beardsley, assistant superintendent of performance, management and accountability; Shyla Kinhal, director of literacy; and David Wartowski, director of mathematics, with copies of the above two charts and asked if they would like to comment on the data for the 2024 MAP test or the trends.
On July 24, Hannah Dillow, communications manager for the district, provided a coordinated response:
“In the last year, District 65 has seen the largest growth patterns in its history, with as many as 84% of students making expected gains in some grade levels. We are meeting or exceeding our growth targets in literacy and math in almost every grade level. Middle school in particular, where we created more expansive means of acceleration for mathematics, has seen unprecedented growth patterns. When viewed by average percentile on MAP, we saw a return to pre-pandemic levels (see slides 15 and 19 of this year’s joint board presentation for public data to this claim regarding mathematics).
“Everything we do in District 65 centers around helping our students grow academically and socially so they are prepared for success in high school and beyond. This work is ongoing and we are continuously supporting efforts for school leaders and educators to grow in their capacity to implement high quality teaching and learning practices.
“A deeper dive into the data suggests that our rising fourth and fifth grade students, who learned remotely during kindergarten and first grade, tend to be the most affected by the pandemic. We continue to double down with our support of these particular cohorts and anticipate increasingly strong growth rates for them in the coming years.
“In regards to literacy, our team this year prioritized the use of curriculum-specific and evidence-based assessments (in addition to MAP) that provide educators and leaders with data on each student in foundational skills, fluency, reading comprehension and writing. We have identified a need to better support phonics in grades K-2 and fluency in our upper elementary grades and are building this into our professional learning for next year.
“District 65’s K-5 monolingual classrooms also just completed their first year of implementation for new curricular resources in literacy. Research shows that it takes time for the impact of newly learned skills to show up on standardized tests. By focusing on explicit and systematic foundational skills instruction (paired with teaching reading comprehension and writing through meaningful texts and topics), we believe we will see positive growth in years to come on standardized tests, specifically for historically marginalized students.
“For further analysis on trends we are seeing in assessment data, please reference our academic growth report here or view the February 2024 presentation at the D65/D202 Joint Board Meeting for charts showing the trend in growth rates.”
In their response, administrators say that high percentages of students are meeting the Northwest Evaluation Association’s growth targets. The charts they refer to show that about 55% of Black students, 55% of Latino students and 60% of white student met expected gains on the 2023 spring MAP test. Meeting growth targets is a different measure than meeting a college readiness benchmark.
NWEA has identified expected gains – or growth targets – for students in its norm studies, most recently in its 2020 norm study. Under NWEA’s model, an individual student’s growth target is the average growth of students who are in the same grade and who started out the school year at the same achievement level.
Under this model, students who stay even with their academic peers meet their growth targets. In that sense, the model may reinforce the status quo. Students who are behind at the end of third grade will still be behind at the end of eighth grade if they just meet their “expected gains” or growth targets each year.
NWEA’s 2020 norm study expressly acknowledges that its growth targets are not designed to provide targets that will accelerate students’ growth to a point where they will meet any particular proficiency level, such as being on track to college readiness. The RoundTable has reported on this issue on numerous occasions. For one recent article, click here.
While it is a positive development that higher percentages of students are meeting their growth targets, the data does not show how many students are accelerating their growth to a point where they will be on track to college readiness.
The above charts illustrate this point. Many students may be meeting growth targets, but that has not translated into an increase in the percentage of students meeting MAP-ACT college readiness scores.
Nor has it translated into an increase in the percentage of students meeting standards on the Illinois Assessment of Learning, the state’s mandated test. Meeting standards on the IAR is a more demanding proficiency level than meeting MAP-ACT college readiness scores. ****
A RoundTable article reporting the results on the 2023 IAR and prior years is available here. Results on the 2024 IAR will not be available until the end of October.
The administrators also said, “When viewed by average percentile on MAP, we saw a return to pre-pandemic levels.” Calculating an average percentile across math and reading and across many grade levels is subject to several important caveats. But showing that the average percentile of Black students was 42 both pre- and post-pandemic, begs the question. For example, what percentage of Black students are on track to college readiness? The above charts show that percentage and the trends.
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Footnotes:
* The ISAT scores indicating ACT college readiness were identified by Paul Zavitkovsky, then a leadership coach at the doctoral program at the Urban Education Leadership Program at the University of Illinois/Chicago and a data analyst specialist.
** The ACT says it chose to align its benchmarks to B level work in freshman year college, rather than C level work, because grades of A and B are viewed as successes, while a C grade is viewed as “unsatisfactory or just getting by.” Updating the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (2013), in a subsequent issue brief in 2017, the ACT further explained:
- “Students who earn first-year grades of B or higher, on average, are much more likely to complete a post secondary degree. Among students who began at a four-year institution and earned a first-year grade point average (FYGPA) of 3.00 or higher (i.e., B or higher grades, on average), 64% earned a bachelor’s degree within six years as compared to only 27% for those who earned a FYGPA less than 3.00.
- “Similarly, among students who began at a two-year institution and earned a FYGPA of 3.00 or higher, 51% earned an associate or bachelor’s degree within six years as compared to only 19% for those who earned a FYGPA less than 3.00 (Radunzel and Noble 2012a).”
Due to grade inflation, a grade of B in college is commonplace. An extensive study of grading practices in 2009 at more than 135 four-year colleges with more than 1.5 million students found that 43% of the grades given were As, and 33.8% were Bs. An update to that study in 2013, found that 79% of the grades were As and Bs.
*** The RoundTable prepared the charts in the above article. The data reported for the spring of 2022, 2023, and 2024 was obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to District 65. The data for the earlier years was obtained from achievement reports previously published by the district. The spring MAP test was not given in 2020 due to COVID, and the district told the RoundTable that MAP-ACT college readiness data was not available for the spring of 2021.
**** The Illinois State Board of Education says that students who meet or exceed standards on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness “have demonstrated readiness for the next grade level/course, and, ultimately, are likely on track for college and careers.”
A comparison of 1) the percentage of students who met MAP-ACT college readiness scores on the spring 2023 MAP test, and 2) the percentage of students who met standards on the spring 2023 IAR, shows that fewer students met standards on the IAR than met the MAP-ACT scores for college readiness.
This suggests that ISBE’s benchmark for college readiness is more demanding than the MAP-ACT college readiness scores. The chart below, prepared by the RoundTable, presents the data.
A comparison cannot yet be made using 2024 data because student results on the 2024 IAR have not yet been reported.
School District 65 trends on college readiness: Decline in math, flat in reading is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.