Making sense of school report cards

For someone with obsessive tendencies, looking at the annual school report card data can be frightening, certainly more frightening than my Halloween costume - Ed Norton from "The Honeymooners."

There are numerous ways to look at the mountain of information we receive from the state. This year, I decided to look at the data a bit differently.

Typically, we focus on which schools failed to meet state standards and which ones met or exceeded those standards.

But under No Child Left Behind, that information isn't all that helpful to readers. That's because the bar that schools have to meet gets substantially higher each year.

As a result, it's the same story year after year: more schools fail to meet those rising standards, giving the impression to some that Illinois schools are on a hopeless, downward trajectory.

But in reality, the growing list of "failing" schools reflects the fact that standards are rising faster than schools can keep up - not that the schools are actually doing a worse job of educating their kids year after year.

To counter that impression, we tried to focus on the progress - or lack of progress - schools made on an individual level.

For example, Carpentersville's Dundee-Crown High School last year raised the percentage of its juniors meeting reading and math standards by 6 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

Of course, it is certainly notable that those percentages are well below what the school needs to earn a passing grade. But if they are part of an upward trend, they reflect progress nonetheless.

In our school report card series, we still noted the schools that ended up failing this year, even if their percentages increased - and you might ask why.

First of all, including that information demonstrates how No Child Left Behind works - and what its inherent flaws are.

But it also matters for the schools and school districts in question. Once a school fails to meet standards for two years in a row, the state requires the school to show how it is tackling student achievement.

After a few more years of failure, schools are required to enter restructuring - which requires broad changes to curriculum, programs and staff, as well as money that is in limited supply right now.

On top of that, the annual "grade" schools receive influences the public's perception of how well a school is doing - whether or not that grade is fair.

To that end, we tried to include data and responses from school officials showing that some schools labeled failing are in fact doing a respectable job of educating their students - relative to other schools in the state.

I don't mean to demonize No Child Left Behind. In our series, we also tried to show that the law allows schools and districts to identify groups - from students with disabilities to English language learners - that need special attention.

But until federal and state officials change the way they grade schools, we will continue to report the annual results - with plenty of caveats.