Equity-induced illiteracy erased by ISBE’s inflated cut scores

The percentage of Willard Elementary third graders not proficient in reading dropped 29% in one year, a change likely to help adults in charge much more than students and families. 

It was 2016 when mostly new River Forest district 90 board members began voting to elevate social programs above curriculum and instruction. One change was adopting the debunked Lucy Calkins Units of Study curriculum.  The impact on learning was both sudden and sustained and dwarfed declines from remote teaching.

Proficiency fell at both River Forest elementary schools until some teachers at Lincoln disobeyed the administrative order for “fidelity to the curriculum”.  Willard on the other hand, stayed faithful to Lucy as third graders not proficient in reading grew to 44% by 2024.  This is a 30% deficit compared to third graders at Lincoln Elementary.

This year (2025) reading proficiency suddenly rebounded at Willard, just 15.3% of third graders were not proficient in reading – an astounding 29% improvement in one year. Lincoln elementary had just 3.7% not proficient in 2025, a 10% year-over-year improvement.  These must be “Exemplary” schools…or there must be a better explanation.

The Illinois State Board of Education inflated the system used to communicate “Proficiency” and therefore school quality in August 2025.  The change came just in time to protect the adults making bad decisions and to confuse parents before ISBE report cards were published in October. The new scheme stands to stunt the earliest grades most by disproportionately inflating “Proficiency” at the third-grade end of the continuum.  

Defenders of spending more money to lower the quality of schools will call this into question, and here is how.  They say – the state-required IAR test and it’s scoring has not changed, only the proficiency categories - fewer categories and inflated cut scores. This is how River Forest district 90 administrators positioned the change in an October 7^th, 2025 board meeting (timestamp 1:25:30). Although not wrong, that retort fails the honesty and transparency test on several fronts. Here are a few: 

1. The IAR scores for any one school or district(s) are not publicly available for analysis of school quality; residents rely on ISBE proficiency and summative designations. 

   
   

2. New lower cut scores inflate the number of students, schools, and districts considered proficient.

   
   

3. The new scheme seems to disproportionately inflate proficiency of underperforming schools.  Had proficiency at Lincoln been inflated to the same degree as Willard, it might have had more than 100% of third grade students proficient in reading. 

   
   

4. The academic component of ISBE’s Summative Designations for school quality such as “Exemplary” and “Commendable” rely on this calculation of proficiency, not raw test scores.

   
   

5. The changes put tax-paying residents, especially those without students, at a state-sponsored disadvantage for understanding school quality.

Consider this – how could an elementary school rate “Exemplary” based on Spring 2024 testing when 44% of third graders were not proficient in reading?  Further, who believes a 29% improvement in third grade reading proficiency is due to a literacy curriculum change in effect for less than one full school year?

Superintendent Condon, only a few years ago “excited about the new literacy curriculum”, disclosed in June 2025 that Units of Study was no longer in use anywhere in the district. 

Some districts helped residents interpret the impact of inflated proficiency.  The administration at Evanston’s K-8 district 65 provided residents an explanation and a translation showing how the new cut scores inflated school-level proficiency between 1.1% and 18.1% at eleven of its sixteen schools.  River Forest district administrators provided an explanation without a translation.  Superintendent Condon could not answer the question of whether district 90 administrators would provide a similar translation.

When these local schools were local, not political

The district-level change in “instructional philosophy” was championed by Ralph Martire, Exec. Director of his own public union lobby group, member of Obama’s Federal Equity Commission, and advocate and architect of higher spending on education policy and practices producing poorer student outcomes.  After de-tracking district 90’s K-8 schools, Martire led the abandonment of proven interventions at OPRF high school.  Martire called de-tracking freshman year “social justice”, something OPRF superintendent Greg Johnson called “a year to equalize” between black and white students.

The River Forest district 90 board currently is led by president Katie Avalos, a board recruit dating back to 2019. Avalos is a faithful supporter of what she called “the progressive curriculum” and has a history deflecting questions and avoiding accountability for the impact on students.  According to superintendent Condon, Avalos retains oversight for district communications.

It's E3, where equity still means fairness.

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