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News Release

Contact: Harvey Smith, Northern Illinois University
(312) 305-1326 (cell phone)

Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

December 18, 2003

NIU’s Interactive Illinois Report Card brings
public school performance, analysis to computer desktops

Web-based report card tool allows
head-to-head, side-by-side school comparisons

DeKalb — Parents, teachers, school administrators and anyone interested in the state of public education in Illinois can begin to better understand school performance through the Interactive Illinois Report Card, a Web-based tool created and maintained by Northern Illinois University.

The IIRC – http://iirc.niu.edu – is a richly dynamic, interactive and comparative resource that presents a vast array of information on schools and their academic performance in an easily navigated site. The site goes online Friday.

The online instrument compiles data received from the annual Illinois State Board of Education school report cards with numbers from previous years to provide longitudinal tracking and, for the first year, provides a picture of how Illinois schools are progressing toward compliance with the federal “No Child Left Behind” legislation.

A key feature of the IIRC is its ability to compare schools head-to-head and side-by-side in any of a variety of categories, including student test performance, per-pupil spending, ethnic and racial diversity, enrollment, teacher qualifications, average salaries and levels of tax support.

The site allows users to choose their own schools for comparison and, eventually, it will offer a list of “similar schools” based on a more extensive analysis of their characteristics.

“School-to-school comparisons are a very powerful way to permit teachers and parents to identify exemplary schools and see what they’re doing right. Schools not doing so well also can benefit by identifying particular weaknesses they need to address,” said Harvey Smith, who leads the IIRC project.

“There are a number of school assessment Web resources, but what makes the IIRC unique is collaboration with the schools and educators to design a very clear and useful data base that helps teachers and school administrators improve their classroom instruction,” Smith added. “The time lag in posting results prevented teachers from doing much for the students they are teaching this year, but they can certainly get a clear picture of overall strengths and weaknesses in curriculum and instruction.”

The IIRC also provides schools with confidential, password-protected, individual student performance records and analysis.

“We’re able to provide very detailed, one-on-one, individual-level student information. As has been said, improving education is done one student at a time,” he said. “At the same time, ‘No Child Left Behind’ mandates improving the performance of subgroups, such as African-American, Hispanic and low-income students. The student data provides a rich database for information to target instructional changes for both individuals and groups.”

Parents who use the IIRC can gain “a sense of the culture and of the quality of the schools,” Smith said. Those whose children are entering the particular grades tested for the report card data can see how well children of the recent past met the learning standards, he said, and will have a better understanding of questions to ask during parent-teacher conferences.

Assessment issues aside, however, Smith said the IIRC offers parents “reassurance.”

“This is an increasingly information-driven age. There can be information overload and, certainly, the amount of information out there is daunting. Here’s a way you can get to the nitty-gritty very quickly, and I think there’s a certain reassurance in that.”

The IIRC paints a clear picture of what “No Child Left Behind” means and how Illinois is faring. The federal mandate went into effect in 2002, making the 2003 numbers unveiled Friday the first chance to compare the state’s progress with results from the benchmark year.

“ ‘No Child Left Behind’ has a very ambitious goal of improving student performance so that all students meet 100 percent of state learning standards in reading and math by 2014,” Smith said. “In the meantime, schools are expected to make ‘adequate yearly progress’ toward that goal in 2014 – an annual step-by-step increase in performance – beginning at 40 percent this year and moving in 5 percent increments annually.”

The IIRC adequate yearly progress graphs show where students as a whole and in subgroups are performing currently and where they need to be each year until 2014.

“Conventional wisdom suggests that the larger the percentage of low-income students in a school, the lower the level of academic performance. Using the comparison features of the IIRC, you can quickly see that low-income does not necessarily mean low performance,” Smith said. “Whatever its faults, ‘No Child Left Behind’ is forcing us to think about how to raise performance of all students, regardless of their environments.”

NIU works in partnership with the State Board of Education, which has funded the IIRC through a $180,000 grant.

The state is mandated to produce the annual the report card, based on tests given in the spring, and typically issues by November a 6- to 8-page, school district-specific report to every parent in the state. However, these report cards are not interactive, do not allow comparisons and do not provide more detailed information about instructional issues.

“The Interactive Illinois Report Card is a great tool for parents and interested parties in the community, and it’s an indication of the many ways that universities can play a role in public school issues,” said Anne Kaplan, vice president for administration and outreach at NIU. “Since both the state and the federal government seem to be relying on these numbers to assess schools, and there are funding ramifications for that, it’s important people know what the numbers are.”

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