Charter School Arguments

The News-Gazette highlighted a personal story along with local arguments surrounding the achievement gap along racial lines in Champaign. Excerpts from the News-Gazette today:

Proponents ready to argue case for new Champaign charter school
...
At 5:30 p.m. Monday at Unit 4's Administrative Center, founders of the North Champaign Academy will make their formal case for why Unit 4 should support a new charter school, to be housed in a 15,000-square-foot facility at 1400 W. Anthony Drive. The request seeks a $14,845-per-student-per-year investment by the district.

School board President Chris Kloeppel has said a decision is expected within two weeks of Monday's hearing...

Central to local charter school supporters' proposal is six years' worth of standardized testing data, taken straight from the "report cards" compiled by the Illinois State Board of Education from data provided by each district.

NCA founders focused on data from 2011 through 2017, hoping to illustrate a point about the achievement gap in Unit 4:

In 2011, test results showed that black third-graders within Unit 4 comprised 15.2 percent of the lowest-achieving members of their demographic.

By 2017 — following several statewide shifts in assessment standards, types of tests administered and scoring changes — the number of black third-graders within the lowest-achieving category had reached 52.1 percent...

Some community members say the numbers show what was already common knowledge: that the district achievement gap is a significant one, necessitating a bold, new approach.

But Unit 4 officials argue that the issue is more complex than two numbers reveal. They attribute the widening of the gap to a number of factors — including a shift in testing, from the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT), which was used in 2011, to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career Readiness (PARCC) test in 2015. That, they say, caused a downward spiral in test scores and negated the ability for the numbers to be compared at all...

The effect those changes had on students across the district, however, wasn't uniform.

After PARCC was implemented in 2015, 9 percent of white third-graders fell into the Level 1 — or "did not meet expectations" category. For black third-graders, that number was 39.1 percent.

By 2017, 11.8 percent of white third-graders were in Level 1 compared to 52.1 percent of black third-graders.

"The 'apples-to-oranges' argument because the test changed is bogus," said NCA steering committee member Craig Walker. "The percent drop by black students is way larger than the percent drop by white students in the same time period."

Full article here.