What the scores mean

A stark reminder of our divided society

11/04/2009 10:00 PM

Editorial

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When the Illinois State Board of Education releases the results of the annual tests administered to elementary students starting in the third grade and to juniors in high school, there is a tendency to rush to the numbers, to calculate the increases and declines, to determine the best and the worst.

Of course, the data is entirely predictable. Students at Chicago Public Schools selective-enrollment institutions, who come from wealthier backgrounds and have access to time and resources, do well, even spectacular. Neighborhood institutions, whose student body is majority low-income, score poorly. The trend is especially pronounced at the high school level on the Near West and Near South sides.

More than 96 percent of juniors at West Loop-based Whitney Young, the famous magnet school, met or exceeded Prairie State Achievement Exam standards, the new data tells us.

A mile west, at Crane Tech, just 8 percent of the 11th-graders did so. And for 2008-09 there wasn’t a single student enrolled in the Crane Achievement Academy, located within the Crane building at Jackson and Leavitt, who met or exceed the test’s standards.

So what should we take from this stark divergence?

Not much, really.

High-stakes testing is little more than a cipher for race and class inequalities. A blunt instrument, the tests flatten individuals — young people at the very cusp of adulthood, who have dreams and hopes like all of us — into a mass of numbers. In most narratives, the tests label schools as failed, students as failures, teachers as failures.

That’s a mistake. When we look at the numbers at Young and at Crane, we should be only reminded of our collective failure — all of us in positions of privilege and might — to create a more just society, to develop an economy where wealth is broadly shared and opportunities for self-improvement, for jobs, for taking chances and realizing aspirations feels tangible for young people from poor neighborhoods.

Their “failure” on a single standardized test is actually our own.


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