District 308 Readying For New State Learning Standards

Officials in do not anticipate their staff will have trouble adjusting to the new assessment standards adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education that are expected to be implemented by school districts for the 2014-15 school year.

Marsha Hollis, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, told School Board members last month that District 308 officials have been educating staff on the new math and English-language arts standards for students in all grades.

“We’re a district that’s very well prepared,” Hollis said. “We’ve done a lot of professional development with our teachers and we’ve had many, many, many teams go through lesson studies. Our staff has been very open to these changes.”

The goal of the new Common Core State Standards, according to the ISBE website, is to better prepare Illinois students for success in college and the workforce in a competitive global economy. The state’s previous standards were adopted in 1997.

Illinois is part of a 26 state consortium on assessment called the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. PARCC assessments will be computer-based and include performance tasks to measure the new Illinois standards more thoroughly.

Through the new Common Core State Standards, students will be tested differently beginning in 2014. Instead of the ISAT, which is given to students in third through eighth grade, and the PSAE given to high school juniors, a test will be given to students in third grade through junior year of high school four times a year.

“The first phase (of testing) will be after 25 percent of instruction,” Hollis said. “Then after 50 percent. Then at 75 percent and then in the spring there will be a summative assessment. Over the course of the year, we’ll be able to measure the amount of growth for each particular student.”

The new assessments also means freshmen and sophomores will no longer be left out.

“Nothing is given for students in ninth and 10th grade at this point so we’re excited about that change,” Hollis said.

Once the English-language arts and math standards are developed, common core standards may be developed in additional subject areas. Officials said English-language arts and math were the first subjects chosen for the Common Core State Standards because they teach skills upon which students build skill sets in other subject areas.

ISBE officials said the assessment system will allow teachers and administrators to gather data on student learning more frequently, and help districts and schools determine which students are meeting benchmarks and which students are either above or below standards.

Assessments for students in sixth grade through junior year of high school will be administered via computer while students in third through fifth grade will be administered via paper and pencil in the short term.