Adrian G. Uribarri of the Chitown Daily News reported yesterday:

 Chicago’s public schools have made little progress in raising student achievement during the last several years, according to a new nonprofit report.

The study, from the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, finds that substantial gains on the Illinois State Achievement Test are mainly the result of changes in the test, with only modest improvement in real student performance at elementary and middle schools.

On the Prairie State Achievement Examination, more than 70 percent of high school juniors fail to meet state standards, and fewer achieve scores that indicate college readiness on the national ACT exam in math, reading and science.

That Civic Committee also calls CPS "abysmal," noting that less than 10 percent of all high school students are college ready. That CPS has not improved over the last decade while current Education Sec. Arne Duncan was in charge is territory I covered in my Duncan piece last month.

What’s fascinating here though, is that the Civic Committee trashes the very public school system it’s been funding. The committee is an arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago. The corporate largess of the Commercial Club funded "Renaissance 2010" the plan launched in 2004 by Duncan and Mayor Richard Daley to close under-performing schools and replace them with charters.

The Commercial Club shows its true colors in the report by trumpeting the performance of charter schools as a silver lining in otherwise dismal test score data. And its solutions are almost identical to Duncan’s education reforms ("excellent teachers are the answer" as apparently CPS has been limiting their hiring pool to non-excellent teachers).

But parts of the report come down especially hard at Duncan. For example, the Education Secretary is mocked for penning a letter to the Chicago Tribune that crowed about better 8th grade achievement on math tests. It turns out this better performance was because the 8th graders started taking a different test. It looks like Duncan got out of Chicago at the right time.-MB

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