Districts Navigate Loss of Spring Assessment Data on School Report Cards
December 31, 2020
District leaders in Illinois say that annual school report cards are unfortunately missing important data typically used to plan resource investments and improve instructional systems due to the cancellation of student assessments at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring. Jeff Dufour, a principal in the Joppa-Maple Grove School District, said that in the absence of current data, schools are digging deeper into what they had learned from last year’s data. “With us not having those assessments last spring, we came into this school year looking at the same things we were looking at the year before,” said Dufour. Dufour said he’s hopeful Illinois education officials will move forward with administration of standardized assessments this school year. “I think the data will be valuable because you’re looking at a year void of not having exams and not making truly data-driven decisions,” he said The discussions in Illinois echo those in other states, where education leaders are taking disparate views on the feasibility of school report cards and student assessment more broadly.