District 54 students moving up in state rankings

Recent internal and statewide test results show Schaumburg Township Elementary District 54 students are seeing great improvement in reading and math both as individuals and in their ranking among all Illinois pupils.

District 54 Assistant Superintendent Paul Goldberg shared the results at Thursday night's school board meeting.

Although 2015 was the first year the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career test replaced the the Illinois Standards Achievement Test as a statewide measure of progress, it continued an ongoing basis of comparison among all students in the state, Goldberg said.

District 54 students nearly consistently improved their state rankings over the past seven years, progressing from the 70th percentile to 91st in reading and from the 75th percentile to the 93rd in math.

Board member Mary Kay Prusnick said many school districts would have been happy to be where District 54 was in 2009, but she commended staff members for not being content.

"District 54 is never happy with where we are today," Prusnick said. "I think that's a really impressive trend."

The combined results for the PARCC test and the Dynamic Learning Maps assessment for students with cognitive disabilities show 67 percent of District 54 students are proficient in reading compared to 36 percent in Illinois, while 59 percent of District 54 students are proficient in reading compared to 29 percent statewide.

Furthermore, the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, which measures improvement within a single school year, showed 63 percent of District 54 students meeting target growth in reading last year and 72 percent doing so in math.

This puts District 54 in the 96th percentile in the state for improvement in reading and the 94th percentile for math.

"We've had great success helping our most struggling students become more successful," Goldberg said.