(bright music) (bright music continues) - Report cards.

It doesn't matter how good of a student you are, it's stressful waiting to get those results.

But did you know, Illinois schools, districts, and the state itself get report cards every year?

The Illinois State Board of Education Reports show how schools are performing on a wide range of educational goals.

And tonight we're going to focus on Peoria's three high schools and if our kids are meeting expectations.

My colleague Phil Luciano joins me now with a look at the 2022 report card for Peoria District 150 high schools.

All right, Phil, how are we looking?

- Well, there's so many points of data in these report cards, and it is really a good idea, experts say, to look at the high school stuff because do they graduate?

What are they gonna do with their lives?

And so at the state level, the graduation rate is about every four out of five kids are getting their diploma, for whatever reason they might not be, but four out of five.

And then there are these breakdowns for proficiency in three subjects: English, math, and science.

And the percentages mean simply that for each one of those tests in each one of these groupings, that that's the level at which they're performing according to how old they are, what grade they're in.

- Okay.

- So for example, in Illinois, the graduation rate: 81%.

For English, 30% are hitting the level they should, 26 are hitting it at math and 50% at science.

Whether those numbers can be improved, I guess we could say they could, but that is what the state average is.

So of the three Peoria high schools, Richwoods is just about at state average.

It's higher for graduation, it's at 89%, English, and math and science, just about the same.

A couple points here and there, okay?

After that though, that's where things go south.

And so if you look over at Central, their graduation rate isn't bad, 76%.

But again, the state average for English, 30%, Central, 3.

- Wow.

- That's not a mispronunciation, 3.

- [Phil] The state average for math: 26.

Central, 1%.

1% of Central kids are proficient to the level they should be in high school.

And for science it's 18.

That's better than the other two, but still not great.

- And by proficient we're talking about not trigonometry, but basic skills.

- Right.

- Okay.

- This is like, if you're a junior, if you're a whatever, this is where you should be.

And for these first two subjects, English and math, only 3% and 1%.

And remarkably at Manual, it's even worse.

Their graduation rate is 72%, but they're 1% are proficient in English.

1% is proficient at math, 2% is proficient at science.

And it brings up two questions.

One is, if that's a proficiency, how is the graduation rate that high?

It's kind of curious.

And the other question is, well, what does this mean?

Well, there certainly are a lot of factors that go into this.

But in the end, it's these numbers, they're the numbers.

I mean, these are not good numbers to a large degree out of two out of three Peoria high schools.

And it's worrisome.

- It is, well, Phil, thanks for that information.

And we are gonna talk to Paul Vallas.

He's a former school superintendent.

He is best known as the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and Philadelphia Public Schools.

And he's gonna tell us a little bit about these issues that we're having here in Peoria and across the state.

And he's gonna give his opinion on why our public schools are failing.

Paul, we're looking at the 2022 Illinois State Education report card for public schools and the numbers are not good.

And that's a nice way of saying it.

Looking here in Peoria, we have a lot of students that are not doing grade-level math, science, reading.

What's happening in our schools, not just in Peoria, but statewide?

- Well, look, clearly schools nationwide have taken a hit because of COVID.

I mean, in Chicago, they shut down the schools for 77 consecutive weeks.

And the summer after COVID, after initially COVID ended, by the time that initial school year was concluded, it was clearer that keeping schools closed was not required.

Schools didn't become infection zones.

Children were minimally impacted by COVID.

So keeping the schools closed for literally another year and a half had devastating consequences.

And not only did students return to school further behind, but larger numbers of students left school never to return.

And, look, I think it's pretty well documented that that's significant spike in crime the past couple years, particularly in cities like Chicago, has been in large part the direct result from the shutting down of schools for that long a period of time.

So clearly COVID did have an impact, but these schools were struggling before COVID.

I mean, even before COVID, I can't speak to Peoria itself, but in Chicago, only one in four students were meeting national norms in reading, one in six students were meeting national norms in math.

So even before COVID hit, these schools were struggling.

And I think in large part is, and people will say it's a funding issue, but in Illinois, and Wirepoints has reported on this, and Wirepoints always draws from federal, state, and local data.

So they're data driven.

Everything they put out.

You may not agree with all of their solutions, but the point is they're always gonna give you the numbers, the raw numbers.

They've done reports that point to Illinois spending between 20 to 50% more per pupil than is spent in our neighboring states and surrounding other midwestern states, despite the fact that we're not exactly leading the pack when it comes to academic performance among those states.

And I think Chicago spends almost $30,000 per pupil.

In fact, since 2019, there's been an increase of 40% in funding per pupil in Chicago, in a district that has lost 11% of its population.

So at some point you have to say, "How much money is enough?

Does the school district have the flexibility to use that money in ways that are most effective or because of state mandates, or for that matter, collective bargaining mandates, is that impeding the school's ability to use the money in the most effective way?"

And I submit to you that a large part of the problem is that these schools really lack the flexibility to spend their money that improve in ways that can improve student performance.

- If they did have this flexibility, what do you think they would or could spend this money on that would help our kids get a better education?

- Well, I think the most important thing, when I took responsibility for schools in Philadelphia, test scores over a seven, eight year period with no testing controversies.

Reading scores doubled more than doubled.

And math scores tripled and went from like 17% proficiency in math in an entire district to like 53, 54%.

And why did that happen, magic?

There were some core things that happened.

The union embraced real curriculum and instructional reforms.

So there was a real introduction of a high quality curriculum.

Standardized curriculum was made available in all the schools so the schools could all be aligned.

A lot of mobility in schools' unique consistency in what's taught across the school levels.

And the schools were given the option of using those things or not.

But the whole idea was to equip the teachers with state-of-art curriculum instructional materials.

A second thing is all the schools were literally on an extended day, extended year.

So there was more instructional time.

So like in New Orleans, for example, New Orleans after Katrina, the second war school district in the country, led the state in academic performance for seven consecutive years by double digits, I might add.

And why did that happen?

Well, the kids received almost a third more instructional time than what was mandated at the state level.

So, the kids had a longer school day, they had a longer school year.

Campuses were kept open through the dinner hour.

At the end of the normal school day, there was another hour of instruction and academic support targeted to the needs of the children.

You would assess and evaluate student performance and you would provide that additional support.

And then there was afterschool enrichment and acceleration and mentoring and counseling and recreational opportunities.

So the kids were constantly engaged.

At the high school level, we introduced work study.

So kids were at a very young high school age, were introduced to the work world where they could be mentored by working men and women.

There are things that were done that can be transformational.

Unfortunately, doing a lot of those things are blocked sometimes by all the mandates, particularly the collective marketing mandates that are being imposed on schools.

There's a limit on your school data.

There's a limit on your school year.

It's almost impossible to remove teachers that are ineffective.

And I'm not beating up on teachers but the bottom line is schools have very little flexibility when it comes to making staffing decisions.

Principals' hands are tied when it comes to the school calendar, when it comes to structuring that school day, you know what I mean?

You're restricting your ability to keep your campuses open longer or for that matter, turning your schools into community centers and inviting community-based organizations to bring their programs into the schools, programs that the kids need that you can't afford to give them.

And programs that these community based organizations would readily offer if they had the space and if they had the student body to work with.

Illinois clearly spends more money than any of our regional states.

I think Chicago spends more per pupil than any school district, any major district in the country, with the exception of New York.

But again, it's the inability to use that money in ways that directly benefit the kids.

Too much of the money is diverted through mandates and through kind of the district standardized programs.

In Chicago, only about 55% of the money actually finds its way into the local classroom, into local classroom instruction.

I believe the more funding for public schools, the better.

But I believe that funding is not the core of the problem.

I think the lack of flexibility to design schools that benefit children, that's the great challenge.

And that's an issue that has to be addressed.

- Here in Peoria, we have a lot of kids living in poverty.

A lot of kids who are minorities, maybe they're not getting those three meals a day.

They're not getting eight hours of sleep.

Maybe come from a single parent household.

Those are things that are at home.

Teachers, superintendents can't do much about that.

What can they do to help these kids, some of who are disadvantaged, get a proper education?

- Well, my approach was always to really transform schools into community schools.

In Chicago, the union talks about community schools.

I think they designated 20 of the 600+ schools as community schools and they wanna spread the community school model.

And it just baffles me.

It boggles my mind, every school should be a community school.

What does that mean?

The schools are the largest institutions in most communities.

I mean, maybe next to the local church, they're the biggest.

They're the institution embedded in the community.

In many communities, they're the only real kind of independent autonomous economic institution.

Those campuses, community schools or schools that are open through the dinner hall on weekends and the holidays over the summer, community schools have a longer school day and a longer school year.

Community schools offer their facilities to community-based organizations, even faith-based organizations inviting them to bring their programs that benefit children and even their families to the school campuses.

Community schools forge relationships with community partners.

Community schools have the flexibility to redesign their school and to seek out and to maybe adopt or to bring into their schools better models.

In cities like Indianapolis and Denver, even Camden, which for decades had just, oh my god, abysmally performing schools.

They have these renaissance schools or innovation schools and these are schools where the community is allowed to go out and to seek out and to secure a better model for their failing school, which is what they've done.

And you look at the data, you look at the work that the Progressive Policy Institute has done on innovation schools.

So schools are in Indianapolis, I don't know, 20, 30% of of the kids now go to these innovation schools.

Test scores are skyrocketing.

So, the bottom line, but what's unique about those schools is the fact that the overwhelming vast majority of the money flows to that local school.

It flows into that classroom.

And those principles in that local school leadership team has maximum flexibility to design the school.

Whether it's the day, whether it's the year, whether it's the staff remodel in ways that best serve the kids.

And all of those schools are really open to the community.

They are in effect, community centers.

- Looking at these Peoria numbers, again, for the high schools, 13% of Peoria high school students are reading at grade level.

And when you look at math, it's only 10%, yet 80% of the students are graduating.

Are we doing the students a disservice by letting them graduate with a poor education?

Some teachers would argue, "Hey, it's better to have that piece of paper saying, I graduated from high school, and go off into the real world."

What do you say?

- Well, look, clearly there's a move away from accountability at all levels.

It's a return to social promotion.

And it was interesting, there's some people who are criticizing, like retention and high standards, they called it the racist relic of the fat past.

I submit to you social promotion as the racist relic of the past, just simply graduating kids from grade to grade, moving them from grade to grade when they have not only mastered the grade level skills, but when you do this in a compounded way, you have this phenomena where students will graduate from high school, be given their diploma, and they're not one year behind or two years behind or three years behind, but they're five or six years behind.

I remember when we took over the Chicago public schools and America controlled Chicago public schools in '95, something like 20% of the students who had graduated high school were reading at the sixth grade reading level or below.

And 80% were at least two or three, four years behind grade level.

That's a disaster.

How many are gonna survive out there?

And it's why you have basically maybe single digit graduation rates from college and university students who ultimately went to that school district because they graduated into college and university.

They might've gotten student loans, they might've dropped out.

They then get stuck with their student loans.

I mean, it's just a vicious cycle.

So what you're seeing is a push in Illinois and elsewhere to three things.

Number one, the complaint is the tests are racist.

The tests are discriminatory, the tests are at fault.

Not the performance, not the failure to keep these kids at grade level beginning in first and second and third grade.

In other words, because social promotion has a compounded negative effect, particularly when you're social promoting grade after grade, the kids are falling further and further behind.

So clearly there's a move away from holding students accountable, mandating extended day, extended year, more instructional time on tasks when the kids are struggling.

Just not retaining them, but mandating interventions at a very young age.

So you can prevent the damage from accumulating and being compounded.

Secondly, there clearly is a move away from school accountability.

How many schools have been closed or shut down or reconstituted because they've been failing?

I think Wirepoint's pointed out that there are 50 schools in the state of Illinois, including the number in Chicago where not a single child, is handling that grade level.

They continue to do the same thing over and over again.

That same approach, that's insanity.

And of course, at the state level, you see a push away from teacher accountability.

And I'm not beating up on teachers, but in Chicago, I think the last year 100% of the teachers were deemed proficient or adequate in terms of their teacher evaluation.

And a district where only 6% of the kids, the Black students were computing at national norms.

And where you had high schools, or you had schools, individual schools that didn't have a single student at grade level.

So, I mean, what's wrong with that?

So, there's really a move away from keeping score and we're just gonna socially promote kids and we don't wanna know whether or not they're failing.

We don't care if they're at grade level or not at grade level.

They'll be gone.

They'll be out of our air.

We'll no longer be responsible for 'em.

We don't wanna rank schools.

We don't want the schools to get this black eye.

There's other factors that we're gonna consider when evaluating schools.

The test scores are our secondary, the test scores are not that relevant.

Of course, we don't wanna hold anybody in the school accountable if the schools are constantly failing.

- And the fact is, we have to hold everyone accountable, the teachers, the students, the superintendents, and the parents.

So where do we start from here?

Let's say we have a blank slate.

We know we can't buy our way out of this issue.

In your opinion, how do we start holding people accountable and how do we start helping these kids get an education?

- Well, I think superintendents may have more latitude than they realized to design schools.

I believe a number of things.

The first step is to recognize that all schools need to be community schools.

And what does that mean?

That means those campuses need to be open through the dinner, on weekends, over the summer.

My attitude was always that, "Yes, I can't control what happens at home.

So you know what?

I'm gonna keep the kids on the campus as long as I possibly can."

And if that means getting money, and there are programs that provide for three meals a day, getting the kids coats, checking, giving the kids eye exams, just not doing the vision testing, providing all the services that the students need.

That needs to be provided.

But those campuses need to be open.

And when the regular school day ends, you need to afford additional time to work with students who are struggling to give them, because nothing closes the achievement gap faster than more instructional time on task.

Nothing closes the achievement gap faster than providing more instructional time.

In New Orleans, the reason the schools led to state and academic improvement for seven years after Katrina, we had kids returning to school who had been outta school for two years or more.

It wasn't because any genius on my part.

The kids just had 34% more instructional time than was mandated by the state.

Just that instructional time helped close the gap.

So you've got open community schools so you can provide more instructional support and so that kids can be in safe, secure places.

You also have to open the schools to the community so you can bring community-based organizations to the schools, faith-based organizations to the schools with their programs, with their mentoring, with their tutoring.

And I think those things are critical.

You've gotta radically decentralize the school.

So as much as money as possible is actually flowing to the local school and finding its way into local instruction.

In New Orleans for example, 97% of all the money except for the capital money, the facility money actually flowed directly into those local schools.

So that meant the classrooms were getting more financial support.

That means they had more money to provide more academic support.

Community schools opening the campuses, more instructional time on task, inviting community-based organizations into the schools to bring their programs, radically restructuring the schools and decentralizing them.

So the money is really flowing down to the local school level and principals and the teachers have brought autonomy on how to use the money.

And obviously prioritizing the importance of increasing, lengthening the school day and lengthening the school year, so you have time to take the corrective action as early as first, second, third grade.

You're spending more instructional time, you're targeting the kids who have academic deficiencies early on, and you have the time to help them get caught up and you have more time to work with children after school who have behavioral issues at a young age.

So you're getting them on track.

Those are things you can do.

And those are things that I believe are in the purview and that superintendent should be by their boards empowered to do.

And I think those are things you can do in Peoria and elsewhere.

- All right, Phil, well those numbers say a lot, but I'm sure that as we follow up on this and we talk to educators, they're gonna say, those numbers don't show the complete story.

- There certainly are a lot of factors, a lot of them are social type factors that affect how kids learn, how they behave, how they are, just how they are every day and what they get through every day.

And we have some experts who are gonna say, "This is a problem."

There are others who are gonna say, "Maybe, well, numbers are numbers.

You gotta make those numbers better."

- All right, well let's talk a little bit about, "You Gotta See This," our show coming up in just a few minutes.

What do we have in store this week?

- Oh, it's very spooky.

"You Gotta See This," it's Halloween extravaganza and we're gonna take a little bit of a tidbit, little taste of the haunted history tour that Peoria Historical Society does every year.

And this is a very PG rated on.

I mean, there are some really honestly scary stories 'cause of the stuff, the backstory for a lot of these reasons people become ghosts.

- Sure.

- That's when you go, "If you're really into it, you can get that."

- This one's more of the PG version.

It's kind of fun.

We're also gonna go to your neck of the woods in McLean County for, I don't know if you've ever been down Dead Man's Curve?

- Dun, dun, dun.

Every curve I'm on is Dead Man's Curve.

- It's real, it was part of Route 66 where there were a lot of problems way back when.

And it's still there.

You can still travel Dead Man's Curve, if you dare.

- All right, I can't wait to find out where that is.

Maybe I've been on it and I haven't even known it.

- We'll show you.

We're also going to tell you about a movie.

It's a camp classic, cult classic.

People love this movie and it's from the 80s and it's a horror movie and I'd never heard of it, but legions of people love it.

And it was set in central Illinois, never knew.

And people who live in the town where it was set, they don't know about it.

Will tell you where.

- Really?

- Oh, yeah.

- Now is this so obscure that we're not gonna be able to find it and wanna watch it after this?

Or can we find it somewhere?

- It's kind of obscure, but there are stars like Louise Fletcher from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

- Oh.

- She's in it.

- Yeah.

- Her scratch it?

- Yeah.

- She's scary.

- She's scary just there.

But in this movie she's scary too.

In meantime, you might want to check out Eight Track Time Machine.

We're gonna do the spookiest songs of the classic Rock era.

- If you guys haven't been to Phil's garage before, I hope most of you haven't 'cause that would be weird.

- Come on over.

- He hosts it from his garage, it's crazy.

Well, we're looking forward to all that.

Thank you very much Phil, and we appreciate you joining us tonight.

You can join us every Thursday night at eight o'clock for "At Issue" followed by, "You Gotta See This" at 8:30.

If you ever miss an episode, just go to our website, wtvp.org.

You can catch up on things there.

And of course our Facebook page is WTVP.

Thanks for joining us.

Have a good night.

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