News
The number of District 189 male high school students who are proficient in reading dropped 67 percent after the first year of a federally paid for education improvement project.
That’s even though the project has a director who is paid $100,000 a year as a consultant and whose work is evaluated by yet another $100,000-a-year consultant. The current director is former District 189 interim Superintendent Stan Mims, who took over the program 10 months after it began.
The reading proficiency rate, which went from 18 percent to 6 percent among male students, is among the worst in Illinois, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education.
Increasing scores on state reading and math tests among ninth- to 11th-grade students is the primary goal of the ongoing project — known as the Smaller Learning Communities program. Class size is greatly reduced to allow teachers more time to focus on individual students.
But the district’s reliance on the two consultants did not prevent the all-important reading proficiency rate from dropping drastically among males and at a much lower rate among females at East St. Louis Senior High School.
“During the program’s first year, the district actually regressed on the program’s primary objective, (increasing) the percentage of students achieving proficiency on the PSAE,” wrote consultant Sheila Mayberry in a 22-page report obtained by the News-Democrat. Mayberry, the owner of Mayberry Consulting & Evaluation Services LLC, in Belleville, could not be reached.
Her report stated that before the program was launched in September 2007, 18 percent of male students in the three grades at the high school scored well enough on the Prairie State Achievement Exam to meet minimum state reading standards. When the test scores came in for 2008, a year after the launch of the program, that number fell to 6 percent.
Mayberry cautioned in her report that it “would be imprudent to make sweeping conclusions about a project as ambitious as the SLC program based solely upon the launch year.”
Her top recommendation for improvement was to “do more to motivate males. … The steep decline in their reading and math skills over the last three years must be reversed if the project is to have any hope of improving the district’s overall PSAE results.”
Mims, the program’s current director, said the decline isn’t his fault because he took over the project in July 2008, about 10 months after it was started.
“You can’t blame me. I wasn’t there,” said Mims, who was fired and then allowed to resign in 2007 as superintendent of the Birmingham, Ala., school district. School board members there accused Mims of using liquid eraser to alter a report that criticized the management of the school district. He returned to the East St. Louis district as a consultant.
Mims said that while he found the decrease in reading scores “alarming,” they occurred under the previous project director, whose name Mims said he could not remember.
Mims also wrote about the project in a 10-page report in which he is listed as “project director.” But this report made no mention of drops in reading and math proficiency.
The math proficiency rate also dropped for male high school students but rose for female students although specific percentages weren’t given in project reports.
In his report, Mims took credit for increasing the graduation rate at the high school to more than 80 percent, and for running a project where 90 percent of the high school teachers volunteered to participate. He also lauded the school board’s decision to use taxpayer money to pay for full-page ads in The Monitor newspaper in East St. Louis, listing students who made the honor roll.
“This mass celebration sent a clear signal throughout the community that we are truly focused on the academic success of our learners,” he wrote.
The PSAE reading and math proficiency tests are considered a reliable indicator of whether students who graduate are likely to meet overall minimum state education standards critical to getting into and staying in college. Currently, East St. Louis Senior High School has one of the lowest percentages among schools in Illinois of students who meet overall state education standards — 9 percent.
About 1,400 students are in the program. Mims said the results of the program in relation to the PSAE test for the second year of the program have not been received. In her 22-page report, Mayberry praised Mims and, presumably the first director, for meeting some goals other than improving students’ test scores, but concluded, “a look at early outcomes must be worrisome for project organizers.”
Mayberry stated that while the district chose to focus only on the “core subjects” of reading and math, excluding science and writing, “district students lag far behind their peers statewide.”
That’s even though the project has a director who is paid $100,000 a year as a consultant and whose work is evaluated by yet another $100,000-a-year consultant. The current director is former District 189 interim Superintendent Stan Mims, who took over the program 10 months after it began.
The reading proficiency rate, which went from 18 percent to 6 percent among male students, is among the worst in Illinois, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education.
Increasing scores on state reading and math tests among ninth- to 11th-grade students is the primary goal of the ongoing project — known as the Smaller Learning Communities program. Class size is greatly reduced to allow teachers more time to focus on individual students.
But the district’s reliance on the two consultants did not prevent the all-important reading proficiency rate from dropping drastically among males and at a much lower rate among females at East St. Louis Senior High School.
“During the program’s first year, the district actually regressed on the program’s primary objective, (increasing) the percentage of students achieving proficiency on the PSAE,” wrote consultant Sheila Mayberry in a 22-page report obtained by the News-Democrat. Mayberry, the owner of Mayberry Consulting & Evaluation Services LLC, in Belleville, could not be reached.
Her report stated that before the program was launched in September 2007, 18 percent of male students in the three grades at the high school scored well enough on the Prairie State Achievement Exam to meet minimum state reading standards. When the test scores came in for 2008, a year after the launch of the program, that number fell to 6 percent.
Mayberry cautioned in her report that it “would be imprudent to make sweeping conclusions about a project as ambitious as the SLC program based solely upon the launch year.”
Her top recommendation for improvement was to “do more to motivate males. … The steep decline in their reading and math skills over the last three years must be reversed if the project is to have any hope of improving the district’s overall PSAE results.”
Mims, the program’s current director, said the decline isn’t his fault because he took over the project in July 2008, about 10 months after it was started.
“You can’t blame me. I wasn’t there,” said Mims, who was fired and then allowed to resign in 2007 as superintendent of the Birmingham, Ala., school district. School board members there accused Mims of using liquid eraser to alter a report that criticized the management of the school district. He returned to the East St. Louis district as a consultant.
Mims said that while he found the decrease in reading scores “alarming,” they occurred under the previous project director, whose name Mims said he could not remember.
Mims also wrote about the project in a 10-page report in which he is listed as “project director.” But this report made no mention of drops in reading and math proficiency.
The math proficiency rate also dropped for male high school students but rose for female students although specific percentages weren’t given in project reports.
In his report, Mims took credit for increasing the graduation rate at the high school to more than 80 percent, and for running a project where 90 percent of the high school teachers volunteered to participate. He also lauded the school board’s decision to use taxpayer money to pay for full-page ads in The Monitor newspaper in East St. Louis, listing students who made the honor roll.
“This mass celebration sent a clear signal throughout the community that we are truly focused on the academic success of our learners,” he wrote.
The PSAE reading and math proficiency tests are considered a reliable indicator of whether students who graduate are likely to meet overall minimum state education standards critical to getting into and staying in college. Currently, East St. Louis Senior High School has one of the lowest percentages among schools in Illinois of students who meet overall state education standards — 9 percent.
About 1,400 students are in the program. Mims said the results of the program in relation to the PSAE test for the second year of the program have not been received. In her 22-page report, Mayberry praised Mims and, presumably the first director, for meeting some goals other than improving students’ test scores, but concluded, “a look at early outcomes must be worrisome for project organizers.”
Mayberry stated that while the district chose to focus only on the “core subjects” of reading and math, excluding science and writing, “district students lag far behind their peers statewide.”
