By Lisa Kernek
Donna Triyonis begins a day of
teaching third-graders the way
a coach prepares for a race.
Her 16 students at Pleasant Hill
Elementary School in Springfield are
still finding their seats when she
directs them to open their notebooks. Then, once the Pledge of
Allegiance and other morning
business is behind her, she calls
her students' attention to two
unpunctuated sentences and six
math problems. "You have until 9:30
to do what's written on the board,"
she says, and the children quietly
begin writing.
Although it's early in the term,
Triyonis is training her students to
work under time pressure so they'll be
ready for their first state achievement
tests next February. "We make it like
the Super Bowl," she says. "This is the
year we show our stuff. It's like a
team. We keep pumping them."
Third grade is a crucial year, an
age when children should be able
to write and read well, and tests
have become a constant source of
pressure for Triyonis, who has been
teaching that grade at Pleasant Hill
since 1969.
"Things were just a little more
relaxed," she recalls of her early
teaching days. "Now we know we're
going to be accountable for it. You're
going to be tested."
The pressure will be even greater
in the coming school year, for Triyonis as well as her students. This fall,
the results came in on the new state
test she and other Illinois teachers
gave students in the third, fifth, eighth
and 10th grades last school year. The
scores were dismal, and State Board of
Education Superintendent Glenn W.
"Max" McGee marked them down as
a "wake-up call to the entire school
community."
Still, many educators consider the
new Illinois Standards Achievement
Test a step forward in the effort to
accomplish statewide learning goals.
In fact, in the early years of Triyonis'
career, there was little continuity in
what was taught from school to school
or from district to district. But today
there is more pressure from parents
and politicians to hold schools
accountable — through test scores — for what children are learning.
That pressure has been building
since the early 1970s, when questions
about school performance prompted
some states to try competency tests.
In Illinois, where the Chicago public
schools were considered by some to
be among the worst in the nation,
the state required districts to set
broad learning objectives. A 1983
34 / November 1999 Illinois Issues
report by the National Commission
on Excellence in Education called
"A Nation at Risk" even declared
that "a rising tide of mediocrity" in
schools threatened the nation's
future.
"All of a sudden, everybody's
panic-stricken," says Lynne
Haeffele, deputy superintendent
for educational programs at the
Illinois State Board of Education.
"Practically every state passed
reform legislation."
In fact, Illinois was among the
first states to require report cards to
assess how well individual schools
were doing. And during the 1987-88
school year, Illinois gave the first
state achievement tests to see how
well students were meeting broad
new curriculum goals.
As it happens, Triyonis' students
scored poorly on those first
Illinois Goal Assessment Program
tests. So she and other teachers at
Pleasant Hill School, which has one
of the highest student body poverty
rates in Springfield, pulled together
and changed the way they prepared
their students, putting as many as
three teachers into Triyonis' classroom at once. As a result. Pleasant
Hill students have boasted some of
the top scores in that school district
in recent years. Then Illinois,
following the lead of other states,
raised expectations even higher and
introduced this new test.
The latest change has been a long
time coming, though. As far back as
1989, the National Council of Math
Teachers published guidelines for
what students should learn. That
document spurred other states to set
academic standards. And today
every state except Iowa has or will
have English, math and science
standards. And all except Iowa have
or will have state tests to gauge
whether students are meeting those
standards.
But Illinois was among the last
states to adopt a standardized
statewide curriculum, which was
implemented in 1997. "We were a
leader," Haeffele says of the 1985
reforms in Illinois, but "I would
say we sort of stagnated for a while
in the 1990s."
Now, a 144-page document spells
out specific skills in English, math,
science, social science, health, fine
arts and foreign languages that
Illinois students are expected to
learn. In English, for example,
children must be able to "describe
differences between prose and
poetry" by the early elementary
grades. In math, early elementary
grade students must be able to
"identify and describe the relative
values and relationships among
coins and solve addition and subtraction problems using currency."
The Illinois Standards Achievement Test debuted last February,
when students were tested in reading, writing and math. Next year,
the students also will be tested in
science and social science.
Already there are concerns.
McGee found "especially troubling"
the scores in third-grade reading.
More than a third of third-graders in
the first round of reading tests fell
below the "meets standards" level.
Parents are just now getting their children's scores, and state leaders, bracing for angry reactions, are acknowledging the test is difficult. But they
point to other states with new tests,
including Virginia, where first-year
results were low but scores improved
with time.
"I know it's inevitable that our tests
will be blamed. 'They were too tough,
they were too long,'" McGee said as
he unveiled the scores in September.
"The tests were tough and the tests
were long, but that is what it takes to
have a valid and reliable measure of
how well we're doing."
But if parents, teachers and officials
are upset by these early results, learning standards, and the tests that
measure them, are but one response
to increasing public pressure over the
past quarter century to improve the
state's schools. There have been others.
The General Assembly and the
governor began setting a course for
improvement in Chicago's public
schools in 1988, first giving parents
more say through elected local
school councils, then in 1995 handing overall responsibility for long-term progress to the mayor. Illinois
also authorized charter schools,
launching a limited statewide
program in 1996, five years after
TIMELINE
Key moments in Illinois school reform
|
1983
|
1985
|
1988
|
1995
|
1996
|
1997
|
1999
|
|
"A Nation at Risk," by the National Commission of Excellence in Education declared "a rising tide of mediocrity" in schools threatened the nation's future.
|
Illinois was among the first to reequire report cards for schools. The state also created tests to measure student achievement in broad curriculum
|
The state agreed to reforms for Chicago's public schools, giving parents more say through elected local councils on what was happening in their childrens' schools.
|
The state handed overall responsibility for Chicago's public schools to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his hand-picked team of education administrators.
|
The state allowed a limited statewide chaarter school program. Seventeen such schools are now up and running throughout Illinois.
|
Illinois adopted state curriculum standards for English, math, science, social science, physical development and health, fine arts and foreign languages.
|
The first round of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was given. And the state approved stiffer requirements for teaachers to be recertified.
|
Illinois Issues November 1999 / 35
Minnesota opened the nation's first
charter schools. Seventeen charter
schools, run by private groups with
public funds, now operate in this
state. Free from some rules, they
control their own spending, direct
their curriculums and hire their own
staffs, usually while offering innovations such as extended school years
or Spanish for kindergartners.
Meanwhile, the charter school
movement, which promotes choice
for parents, has given rise to private
for-profit charter companies such as
Edison Schools Inc. of New York.
Edison opened a charter school this
fall in Chicago and two "partnership
schools" in Peoria, where the schools
remain under school district control
but are operated by Edison. Edison
plans to open more schools in Decatur
and Springfield next year.
Such "free-market" pressures on
education have been compared to
deregulation of the telephone and utility industries. Parents are shopping
for schools in a way they didn't — or
couldn't — 25 years ago. And what
they look for when they're making a
choice is a school's test scores, which
are published in newspapers every
year.
"A child's just expected to know
more," says Triyonis, the third-grade
teacher.
On the morning her students are
correcting sentences and completing
math problems, Triyonis is grading the
work as the students hand it in. She
enters the grades in a ledger where, she
says, she keeps more thorough records
than ever. On this assignment, she
gives more C's than As and sends
students back to make corrections.
The detailed grade book helps her
pinpoint which skills students need to
work on. When the chalkboard
exercise is over, Triyonis treats each
student to a cream sandwich cookie.
The children are still chewing when she
asks them to get their spelling books
out for a lesson on long vowel sounds.
She's always aware of the clock
above the classroom door. "You have
no down time," she says. Despite the
pressure the tests create, Triyonis
believes they're necessary. "Tests are
all we've got to measure what you
know. Most of those things on those
tests are things you need to know."
Still, she looks back fondly on the
days when she had more time for some
of her favorite projects, like making
leaves out of construction paper. "A
lot of the fun," she says, "has gone out
of school. "ž
Lisa Kernek is the education reporter for
The State Journal-Register in Springfield.
36 / November 1999 Illinois Issues