Only five high schools in the WNIJ listening area have more than half of their students ready for college.
The top school among them is Geneva Community High School, where 66 percent of its students met or exceeded expectations during the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, according totest results released Friday.
The other four area schools where more than half of the students were deemed ready for college are Hinckley-Big Rock High School, Somonauk High School, Scales Mound High School andGardner-South Wilmington Township High School.
DeKalb County had the highest average of students in a county that met or exceeded expectations.
Only four percent of students in Putnam Countymet that criteria, making it the county and high school with the lowest number of students deemed ready for college.
State superintendent Tony Smith says the results are telling, and he urges educators to learn from the low scores this time around.
“We are wasting an extraordinary amount of human capacity and talent if we don’t figure out how to serve, include and care for all of our children,” Smith said.
Illinois education officials said from the beginning to expect low test scores. Some districts were still surprised with their results, but Smith said on a conference call that he is not at all surprised.
“I've, again, been really clear with districts, really clear in public; there’s no part of where we’re coming from to punish or shame districts,” Smith said. “This is a baseline, and we have a choice: How and what ways do we prepare kids, and how do we use the assets we’ve got to do that better?”
For example, the highest level of mathematics evaluated on the PARCC test was sophomore year of college. Smith says about 500 students in the state met that specific criteria.
Smith says about 43,000 students in the state didn’t take the test, whether they opted out or were absent. He says about one million kids in Illinois did, which is about 95 percent of all students in the state.
