(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - On the last "At Issue," we discussed the Illinois State Board of Education report cards showing how schools are performing on a wide range of educational goals.

We talked to former Chicago Public School CEO Paul Vallas to get his take on why many of our kids aren't making the grade.

Tonight we're joined by Peoria County Regional Superintendent Beth Crider, to talk about the data from the states and some of the factors behind the numbers, specifically as it pertains to our high schools.

Beth, thanks for being here.

We appreciate it.

- Well, thank you for having me for such an important topic.

- It really is.

And we look at these numbers from the states and they're numbers, they tell a story, but we know there's more to the story behind these numbers.

But before we get into the story behind the numbers, let's look at the numbers a little bit.

This pertains to our high schools and when it comes to proficiency, we look at Illinois, I'm sorry, the states, Richwood, Central, and Manual and our English, our math, and our science scores don't seem to be great.

Can you tell us a little bit about how these numbers are reached and the story from an educator's point of view behind those numbers?

- Sure.

And that's part of the challenge we face here is where do these numbers come from?

So juniors in the state of Illinois are required to take the SAT.

They're also required to take benchmarking for that, the PSAT, prior to taking that their junior year.

And so the state of Illinois is moving away from a one number snapshot.

They're moving to what's called a balanced accountability measure.

So they're looking at all different kinds of things to decide if a school or a student is proficient.

But there's no doubt these numbers are concerning.

- Why are these numbers, in your opinion, low?

Like, let's look at Central and Manual, for example, the English math and science scores.

We've got ones on some of them, two, three, 18.

Why do you think those numbers are so low?

- Well, where do we start?

I mean, the challenges are immense.

And so first of all, when you enter into high school, you have to take a look backwards, don't you?

So the first indicator we look at at schools is what was your third grade reading proficiency?

That is a big indicator, believe it or not, of high school graduation.

Then you gotta look at ninth graders on track.

If you get off track in ninth grade, things don't go well.

And by then it's hard to catch you up to get you prepared to graduate with your cohort.

So when you add in the academic piece, then you come in with the social and emotional pieces, you have the support at home that you need?

I like to say that if a child has a quality bedtime, they're getting to bed, getting the sleep that they need.

They were fed dinner the night before, breakfast before they come to school, someone read to them with the child on their lap.

All of those kinds of things, when they come to school, I have the tools as the teacher, the administrator, all the support staff in a school to teach that child.

So when you swirl all of those things together and you put that child in a challenging neighborhood where some of those things aren't happening, you're gonna have, it shows up in some of these numbers.

- Sure.

And I guess I'm curious, you mentioned third grade, if a child is not proficient in reading math and science in the third grade, how are they advancing on?

- That's the question, isn't it?

And I was hoping we would get to that today because we need to revolutionize the way we're looking at that.

It needs to start as we're coming into kindergarten.

Did you know a child needs to be read to for 6,000 hours before they can learn how to read?

So if that's not happening and they're showing up cold at kindergarten, having not been read to, they don't understand print, they've never experienced pencils or paper, we're starting way behind the eight ball and to have them ready by third grade, if it were up to me, we would be changing how we do early childhood, how we do those early grades.

We need extremely low class sizes with lots of interventions.

But everything that I just said costs money.

And so if you want a low class size in some of these neighborhoods that need it the most and support those kids with social workers and counselors and all the things you need to make them successful, it's gonna require resources.

So we're doing the best with what we have, but we could be doing more.

- Speaking of those outside factors, we know that poverty has played a big role in a lot of these students' lives.

Our Phil Luciano has more on these numbers and how poverty may play a role in all these numbers.

- [Phil] An earlier "At Issue" shared some stats from the Illinois State Board of Education's report card for Peoria Public Schools.

We honed in on the three high school's performance on proficiency tests for English, math, and science.

The numbers you see are the percentages of students learning at their grade level.

Though Richwoods' numbers exceed or match state averages, Central and Manual lag far behind.

Certainly there are non-academic factors that affect Scholastic performance, factors like food scarcity, inadequate healthcare, and neighborhood violence.

We discussed these factors with Paul Vallas, an education reformer who served as superintendent of schools in Chicago and Philadelphia.

- The test scores are accurate.

They are what they are.

Now you can talk about the reasons why the test scores are so low, but these test scores do not lie.

I mean, it just tells you that the academic performance of these schools is abysmal.

- [Phil] Vallas said that many of those non-academic factors are related to poverty.

So "At Issue" took a look at the report cards for the main high school districts in the poorest cities in the state.

In the state's poorest city, the Carbondale community high school district scored above the state average in each subject.

As for the next poorest towns, their high schools didn't fare nearly as well.

In fact, they scored way behind state averages.

However, in all but two of those 12 scores, they did better than Manual or Central.

Vallas found the comparisons illuminating and troubling.

But he says that poverty or no, educators have to find a way to reach children.

- But at the end of the day, either the kids are mastering, either they're mastering the standards or they're not mastering the standards.

- [Phil] Vallas urges all stakeholders, schools, teachers, parents, taxpayers to not dwell on the numbers, but to push forward.

The fundamental question is, what are you gonna do about it?

What are the obstacles to making those schools better?

- Beth, that's one educator's opinion on what's going on.

What are your thoughts on that?

- Again, it's so multi-factored when you look at student success, a word about Manual.

So when No Child Left Behind came online with President Bush, so that's been what, more than 25, almost 30 years, Manual has always struggled and been challenged in the bottom 5% of performing in the state of Illinois.

That is multiple superintendents, that is multiple teachers, administrations that have flowed through that building.

But what has impacted that school?

It's the community.

And so you have to start looking at things like, what's the crime rate?

What's the employability rate?

Are there grocery stores in the 61605 zip code?

You look at all of those things and you think, traditional high school, we've got to be doing something differently here.

These kids are impacted by trauma and violence in their community.

And so to reduce them to a test score, I start to ask myself, what are we doing as a community and the test score will take care of itself.

So those are the kinds of questions that I ask myself.

And so we're trying to come up with some creative solutions.

- The graduation rates for our high schools, they're up there, but are we doing our kids a disservice if we're allowing them to move on without the right tools?

You know, back when I was a kid, it was like, well, if you're not doing so well, we'll hold you back.

Tell us between holding someone back and maybe letting them advance unprepared.

- I would say that absolutely retention is a tool in the toolbox.

But one thing we never discuss is prior to IDEA, special education students were never counted in any of these numbers.

So you're looking pre-1970, these numbers are not affected by special education.

Back in the '50s, '60s, you could go to work right out of at a certain age, those numbers aren't in there.

Those kids dropped out, they went to work, they had successful lives.

We educate everyone that walks through the school door.

And so we have to have some interventions in place to support these kids.

So that's why these numbers in context is very important that we look at all the factors that are impacting what's happening with that number.

- You mentioned some of the ideas you have would take more money.

Are there things that we could be doing now, I'll start with, when I say we, I mean the whole community, but we'll start with educators first.

Are there things that individuals could be doing now to help improve the situation?

- Research is showing that high quality tutoring is one way to impact student achievement.

And we're putting some of those things in place.

Peoria Public Schools just advertised this week and last for tutors for middle schools and elementary schools.

If we can get at it early, we can make a difference.

Apply for those jobs.

We need people doing that tutoring.

Mentoring, we need high quality mentors that are supporting our students.

But on the school side, what are the options that we could put in place?

When we saw that ninth graders were not on track at Central, I was working with Peoria High School on some of the, what are some things that we could do?

We had an actual committee talking about this.

We came up with the OPTIONS program.

The OPTIONS program says, there is no way you're going to graduate.

These are kids that are going to drop out.

We put in a solution that at 17 years of age, they can go into an alternative program, they can earn academic credentials.

They work 15 hours a week and they get wraparound support services.

We need more of those kinds of options for those kids.

At their capstone projects, I saw five of them this year, every single one of those kids had someone in their family die by gun violence.

One of them was caring for a three-year-old child that was his sibling.

One of them had never had a new pair of shoes.

You start looking at those kinds of things.

One cared for their sick mother.

So we need options for those kids.

Do you need to go to school at night?

Do you need to go at school on the weekend?

I think part of the conversation here is why school?

If life is hard, your community is a struggle.

Why school?

Why is school a solution?

It didn't work for my family, doesn't work for my neighbor, because school is the answer for anything you wanna do in this life.

It is how you are productive.

It is how you can give back to your community.

It's how to live the good life.

And so school can be that ticket and we have to bring back that dream of what school can lead you to.

- Do you think kids understand that?

- No, sometimes I don't think that they do.

Sometimes I don't think their family does.

If school didn't work for mom, if school didn't work for dad or grandma, then why is that gonna be passed on to the kid?

So as schools, we gotta start taking a look at why are we the answer?

Why should you be here every day?

What makes you wanna come and be a part of this community so that we can get you ready for whatever it is you wanna do in life?

- For those of us in the community and the parents of these kids in the schools, the parents often, they've got their own problems.

They're trying to make ends meet.

They're trying to find a job, keep a roof over the kid's head.

How do you get to them and say, "Hey, I know you have all these other problems, but we gotta focus on your child too."

- Isn't that the truth?

Because I'll tell you one thing that impacts these numbers is attendance and our attendance rates now, I've just read an article yesterday, nationwide plummeted post-COVID, and they're starting to slowly come back.

I can't teach you if you're not in the seat.

So let's start there.

When my office is responsible for truancy, we're knocking on the door.

How can we support you to get your child back to school?

Do you need uniforms?

Do you need help with your Ameren bill?

Do you need doctor's appointments?

How can we support you as a family so you have the basics and can get your kid back in school?

'Cause if you put the butt in the seat, then I can do my job as the teacher.

- It helps when there's a butt in that seat, that's for sure.

- Exactly.

- What can we do as a society?

You mentioned more funding, but short of that, what can Joe Blow do to help make sure that the kids coming up in his or her school district are ready to be a productive member of society?

- Well, I'm a school administrator.

I'm always gonna ask for more funding, right?

So part of it's just understanding the issues of what we're facing.

It seems so simple that if the child comes to school, they should be able to learn.

It's all the other factors that are at play here.

So part of it is just understanding the issue, being aware of the issue, and be a team player with your local school.

Are you supporting the sporting events?

I'm going to a football game tonight.

Watch kids doing what they're good at.

Come see their music performances.

When they're doing great things in the community, celebrate them.

A lot of the times we're focusing on the negative.

There was this fight, there was that and, but what about all the great things that are happening?

Look for those things as well as the negative.

And at the end of the day, please know this, your schools are filled with passionate teachers, caring administrators that are showing up every day under some challenging circumstances to do the very best they can and they need our support.

- I'm married to a teacher, so I hear about these challenges all the time.

You mentioned being able to be flexible, maybe having classes at night, things like that.

What's preventing that from happening?

- Well, state law.

If I were queen of the universe, we would be looking at things very differently about how we structure the school day, the school hour.

I don't understand why high school students need to be sitting in a seat for eight hours a day for their junior and senior year.

We need them in the community.

How do we expect them to function and tell them they gotta get ready for the real world if we never take them into the real world?

So how do we get them into internships, apprenticeships, job shadows?

Young children, exposing them to our community?

We need to think differently about the structure of the way we've done school, because we've done it this way for a really long time.

And with technology, we just don't need to be doing it that way anymore.

- With the contract that the teacher's union has, does that prevent you from doing anything that you'd like to do?

- The teacher's union is more of what does their day look like, but their day has to follow what state law is.

And state law is a child has to be in a seat for five hours a day and a half hour lunch.

So those are the things that lock in what a teacher day looks like.

So the teacher contract could morph and change if we can get some flexibility around those kinds of things.

- And let's say, I mean, you did get more money from the states.

Are you obligated to use it usually in a specific way or could you do what you want?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

But with some new funding streams we're getting within our office, we're trying some different things, different ways of doing career fairs, different ways of doing tutoring and supporting literacy in the early grades.

We gotta get at it early or we're going to end up with the numbers that we have now.

- When you have a student, let's say they graduate from any of the high schools, but their proficiency on math and science and English isn't good, what kind of opportunities or jobs are those kids able to get even with that high school degree that they've got the piece of paper, but maybe not everything up here that they need.

- In a meeting yesterday with some representatives of Illinois Central College, they're sharing that they have found a way to reduce the amount of the classes you have to take if you're not proficient enough to take college level classes by 60%.

So they're doing some very creative and novel things about how they're getting kids ready to go into some of these college courses.

But it's not just about college, right?

So what other experiences are we giving kids?

Are they ready for the trades?

Can they get a credential or a certificate?

Making sure we're exposing them to all those kinds of things.

Not all kids are ready for the rigorous academics.

So what other things can we put in place?

- And I would imagine with these kids, especially from the poorer communities, even if they get that high school diploma, the thought of paying for college has gotta blow their minds and their parents' minds too.

So I guess you'd have to have an alternative for them to do something when they had- - Oh, absolutely.

My dad's a first generation college student and when I hear his stories and what it took him to get to Southern Illinois University versus myself and my brother now having a parent that went to college, it was just assumed I would go to college and now my children have gone to college.

You can turn a family's trajectory around in one generation.

And so helping putting things in place, I know in Peoria Public Schools, they have the AVID program, they have success in career counselors in all the high schools from ICC, they're doing everything that they can think of to support some of these kids that might be the first one to go to college.

- What do you say out there to lawmakers who say, "Ah, they got enough money.

There's money flowing there."

- I'm not so much concerned about the money that's flowing from the lawmakers as the mandates.

So every year there's a new rule, a new suggestion, a new thing we have to do.

And so the plate never changes from being this big.

We just keep adding more on top of it.

If you let teachers teach in our classrooms, you'll see great things happen.

Let's try pulling a few of those things off the plate or at least streamlining them.

- And those are mostly unfunded mandates, I take it?

- Oh yes, almost all of them.

- Just to wrap things up, the new number, these are numbers from 2022, which reflect the 2021 year.

We're gonna have these new numbers coming out soon.

When these numbers come out, what does that mean for a school district or a particular school besides the report card aspect?

Are there any, I don't know if the word consequence is the right term to use, but does anything come out of this?

- Yes.

So your balanced accountability measure causes your school to get a summative designation.

If you were driving around town last year, you saw some billboards that Peoria Public Schools put out, those were their summative designations.

So there have been four summative of those.

We're gonna add a fifth category for schools that are really struggling and with each ranking level is the amount of support that you get.

So those designations will come out here at the end of October, actually quite quickly next week.

One of the challenges though, for schools is the measurement algorithm changes every year.

It is very difficult to understand.

You get on a webinar to try to listen how these numbers are achieved, and it's very confusing.

And if that's hard for me to understand with a master's degree in education, I can't imagine trying to explain that to the public.

So we know that we wanna move from one score to another and show growth, but when you keep changing the numbers, a new contract comes in with a new test and now all of a sudden there's new questions and new testing and it doesn't match the year before.

And we went two years of COVID with no testing numbers, it gets very confusing to just have a score land on the page.

- It is a lot.

Looking at those numbers online, I had to do some number crunching and I'm not sure my math proficiency is what it should be either.

But Beth, we wish you the best of luck and thanks for coming on.

We appreciate all the info.

- Thank you.

Important topic.

- All right.

Back here now with my colleague, Phil Luciano.

Phil, we looked at these numbers and we're pretty surprised by them.

But as Beth said, there's a lot that goes into this.

It's not just the student and the teacher.

There's so many outside factors that influence the whole process.

- And one of the numbers speaks to something she brought up that is a huge issue that I don't think a lot of us really think about.

And that's chronic absenteeism.

And the state defines that you're chronically absent if you're missing 10% or more of your school days.

Now it's not necessarily just one out of every 10 days, it could be a lot more, right?

The state average is 30%.

30% of kids in the state are chronically absent.

Peoria Public Schools, it's 40%.

That's not great.

Richwoods is right around that area.

But then you get to Central and Manual where we have the lower scores, Central is at just over 50%.

So half the kids are chronically absent, and Manual it's 74%, almost three out of four kids are chronically absent.

And meantime, that's about the graduation rate.

And so I'm not saying they shouldn't be graduating, I'm just saying you look at that, it's how does this all come together?

But think about this as a teacher, and like you said, your wife is a teacher.

Think about that you have all these kids, you're trying to do all these things and there are so many chronically absent kids.

What do you do that day?

Do you teach to the kids who have been there and help push them along?

Do you focus on the kids who are a little bit behind and try to bring them up?

You can't do both.

You can't do both.

And I've taught college long enough where that situation has happened sometime and you just end up pulling your hair out and boy, that's quite the challenge.

- Yeah.

And that's one thing the teachers cannot control is truancy.

That's something that the parents, I think have a big part to play in.

But again, some of these parents are ill, maybe not well mentally, maybe unemployed, so.

- [Phil] A lot of stuff.

- Yeah.

- And the one thing, and I have no idea if this would play into that whole situation, who knows why they're chronically absent.

I'm guessing some of 'em just don't wanna be there.

And one of the things that she mentioned is, as she put it, as queen of the universe when I was changing the rules, the school day is pretty darn long, especially for high school kids.

I mean, you gotta be there at least five hours.

You think about that.

That's a long time.

Do high schoolers have to be in school that long?

Would it be better if they had just maybe three hours and doing work programs?

And a lot of them do, but by and large, man, that's a long time to expect a 16, 17 year old to just sit there day after day after day, at least I think, maybe I was just an inpatient student though.

I don't know.

- No, I was too.

But you know, we were focusing on high school, but like Beth said, by third grade, you've gotta get these kids into it.

And if we're not doing it at that level, well high school's just gonna get worse.

- And there are studies that show an amazing correlation.

I don't have the numbers right now, but between people who don't, especially men who don't hit that solid reading level at third grade and prison, and prison, and it is a connection.

You can't read, you don't do well, you get in trouble, ba ba ba ba, and off you go.

Bad stuff.

- Yep, and with these big class sizes we have, that just makes it even more challenging for those teachers.

- [Phil] True.

- Well, we are gonna follow up on this subject.

It's an important one.

It's the future of not only of our kids, but you could look at society and the growth of Peoria and it just, it spreads out.

- We all have a stake in it.

Either it's our kids, our grandkids, or our tax money.

It's important to all of us.

- Yeah, it is.

Well, let's transition something a little bit lighter coming up in just a few minutes, "You Gotta See This."

- There's a couple of parts of this I think you wanna pay attention to especially, the whole show's pretty good.

You're in there.

I'm in there.

- Am I?

- Yep.

We both are in there.

Two stories really quick there, there's a professor and you think about professors and I've taught college a long time.

I'm not exactly like Indiana Jones, okay?

And you think about your professors in college, you thought, nah, maybe they're okay, but you didn't think of 'em like swashbuckling.

We're gonna talk to a professor, a local professor who he spends his off time, like during the summers jumping into with a helicopter, jumping into South America to find new species of animals, especially snakes.

He goes down there to find new snakes.

I know if I had to find new species of creatures, it'd be like ants or something.

But snakes, you know, to me it freaks, well, you know, they bite, they squeeze, they do all that snaky stuff.

But that's what he does.

And he's an interesting fella.

- That's pretty cool.

- That's a good story.

The other one, and I don't know what the leaves are, the tree situation are where you live.

I know by me they're only now kind of starting to fall.

It seems to be a late sort of autumn.

So there's still time to get out there and look at the fall foliage.

We've got some places around Central Illinois and outside of Central Illinois that if you're still, "Man, I wanna see those leaves, the turning of colors."

That's something we get here in the Midwest that's really awesome.

We'll show you where to go.

- Yeah.

And it all depends on the weather and fun stuff like that.

I did notice driving into work today, coming up Parkside and Normal, that there's some very cool red trees.

So I think it's starting to happen.

We need to get out there and see what they're doing.

Am I doing anything else on the show?

Am I?

(Phil laughs) I don't even remember.

- You're looking good.

You're looking swirly, you're looking all those good things.

No, you're you're gonna be talking about an ecological approach to golfing.

- That's right.

- There's a good point to golfing.

I've found very few when I golf, but I'm a terrible golfer, so.

- Slice.

That's about me golfing too.

Alright, well "You Gotta See This" coming up in just a few minutes.

Thank you, Phil.

And thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

We are here every Thursday night at eight o'clock followed by "You Gotta See This" at 8:30.

Check us out on the web if you missed any of our previous episodes, especially if you missed our part one on school report cards, you can watch that again for free at wtvp.org.

Check us out on the Facebook and we appreciate you joining us.

We'll see you back here next week.

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