Remote learning skews annual report card
96% attendance reported during pandemic year
The Illinois State Board of Education released its annual school report card Friday as students across the state adjust to remote and hybrid learning this school year.
Typically, the card is a comprehensive analysis of academic and test performance, demographics and a financial summary of every school and district in the state. However, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect in-person teaching, many metrics in this year’s analysis are not comparable to previous years.
“This year, COVID-19 had a significant impact on the datawe normally collect for the report card,” Carmen Ayala, state superintendent of education, told news media Tuesday.
One example is an increase in the attendance rate. Schools reported higher attendance, even as they closed their doors completely.
Of the state’s 865 school entities that receive report cards, the median attendance rate for the 2019-20 school year was more than 96%. Only 100 districts didn’t post higher attendance rates this year than last, a Tribune analysis shows. Last year’s attendance rate was just under 95%.
For some metrics, such as surveys on school culture and climate, ISBE collected no data for the 2019-20 school year. For other metrics like attendance, the suspension of in-person instruction likely affected the results, according to the school board.
“A standardized method of reporting attendance was not possible in the spring during the suspension of in-person instruction, some schools had access to technology while other schools had paper packets,” Ayala said.
With districts deciding on their own when a student should be considered absent, the vast majority logged high attendance rates — even with the disruption of the pandemic.
Districts that previously indicated struggles with chronic truancy reported that it wasn’t as significant a problem last year. For example, Chicago Public Schools reported more than 20,000 fewer chronically truant students.
Ayala said there will have to be higher-quality attendance data going forward, regardless of whether a school is hybrid, in person or online.
Another metric impacted by the pandemic is graduation rate data, according to the school board. Graduation rates cannot be compared to previous years because the state changed requirements for students expecting to graduate in spring 2020.
However, some data points were included in the 2020 report card.
More than 2,000 teachers were added to the workforce, and the teacher retention rate is at 86%, according to the school board. The 2019 teacher retention rate statewide was about the same.
Ayala said the state has prioritized teacher recruitment through grants, teacher leadership programs and recruitment plans for educators of color.
“While we have increased the number of teachers, the profession remains overwhelmingly white and female … we still have much more work to do,” Ayala said.
Eighty-two percent of teachers in the state are white, while nearly 77% identify as female.
In order to diversify the teaching force across the state, Roxanne F. Owens, chair of the teacher education department at DePaul University’s College of Education, said universities must support students studying to be educators.
“We have to help high school students and career changers see the benefits of becoming teachers. Right now, teaching is a tough sell for anyone,” she said. “We need to help people see all of the upsides to it.”
Owens said programs like the Golden Apple Scholars of Illinois alleviate the financial burden of getting a college degree, for example. Connecting students to community schools early also increases their likelihood of continuing to pursue teaching, Owens said.
“Wewant our students to go into communities and see how they can help people that look just like them; that’s a very powerful thing in this profession.”
In another category, the report card shows more students excelling in advanced placement tests with students achieving a 70% pass rate, 2 points higher than the class of 2019. More than 8,000 more high school students took career and technical education, dual credit, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses in the 2019-20 school year, compared with the prior year, according to the report.
Illinois schools are usually given designations that rank how well a school educates all demographic groups of students, taking into account student improvement in standardized testing.
Because of inconsistencies in the analysis, this year the state did not issue new rankings and carried over school rankings from the last school year.
The rankings rate schools as: exemplary, commendable, underperforming and lowest performing. For 2020, the lowest performing designation was changed to “comprehensive” and underperforming was changed to “targeted,” according to the school board.
But there was one addition.
For the first time, the 2020 Illinois Report Card includes Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS) data, a tool used to track student developmental readiness in the first 40 days of kindergarten.