New on the education beat

Long time, no post, but it’s been a busy couple of weeks with the new school year starting.

Monday was the first day for the largest school district around here. Not a whole lot happened, so that’s a plus compared to some districts in the country.

Earlier this week, the Illinois Auditor General released the audit for the Knox County Regional Office of Education. Not a whole lot was wrong with their financial reporting, which is a plus. The Henderson-Mercer-Warren Regional Office, however, had quite a few more issues, some dating back to 2003.

It’s troubling to me that the offices which are responsible for overseeing the education of children can go relatively under the radar, whereas local districts are constantly held up to severe scrutiny.

Here’s a piece I wrote on those two audits.

The full audits can be found (for Illinois only) at www.auditor.illinois.gov.

Illinois screws up the ISATs … again

Well, leave it to Illinois. Somehow, those scoring the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) this spring royally messed up the scoring.

Some schools showed massive increases toward Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), others showed significant decreases. Many of these changes were in the double digits.

Schools were even notified of their AYP status — whether the school passed AYP or failed — based on these flawed test scores.

This is just another example, as one area administrator told me, of the federal government forcing standards on states but not giving them the guidance or adequate funding in order to put those standards into action.

There’s no official word yet as to whether schools will be given new AYP designations once the new scores are calculated — which will take several weeks and is meanwhile handicapping districts trying to get ready for the school year — but I was told they will be.

For a more full description of the problem, click here.

Addition: Two years ago, report cards were released incredibly late by the state. Koch promises this won’t happen, but if it’s going to take several weeks just to re-score more than 1 million exams, it stands to reason that report cards aren’t going to be ready to release on Oct. 31.