Income-based Achievement Gap – Illinois

Illinois school test scores: Income-based gap proves hard to close, By Tara Malone and Darnell Little, October 30, 2009, Chicago Tribune: “Surrounded by sports fields and suburban lawns, Hadley Junior High School could be the envy of the state. Nine of every 10 students at the Glen Ellyn school passed state exams in reading and math, according to the 2009 Illinois School Report Card made public Friday. But average scores belie a widespread problem the federal government has spent billions trying to fix nationwide: While at least 95 percent of Hadley’s well-off students passed the eighth-grade reading and math tests, about half of their low-income classmates met the same goals, revealing an achievement gap that is as persistent as it is pernicious. Seven years after the federal No Child Left Behind Law ambitiously pledged to eliminate such disparities and invested nearly $6.2 billion in Illinois schools alone, the progress has been modest and isolated. While the performance gap between advantaged and disadvantaged grade school children narrowed in Illinois since 2002 — in math, the margin shrunk by at least 13 percentage points in third, fifth and eighth grades — the divide among high school juniors actually widened slightly in math and reading…”