North Cook News

Opinions multiply on Barrington 220 school district's merging of two distinct 6th-grade math level classes into one for this school year, combining grade level math with accelerated math.

"6th grade math @barrington220 merged two distinct math level classes into one this year," D220 Insider said on Twitter. "Combining Grade level math with Accelerated math it was renamed....'HONORS FOR ALL' Parents are told, 'it's a modest change' & 'will provide a more rigorous math experience.'

The consolidation of two distinct math classes comes on the heels of a decline in educational quality among black children in Illinois. According to a Wirepoints report, educational attainment for black youngsters in certain Illinois school districts is nearly zero percent. Of Decatur’s public-school 3rd-graders in 2019, only 2% of black students could read at grade level and just 1% of Decatur’s black 3rd-graders could do math at grade level, Madison-St. Clair Record reported.

“Our assessment is harsh because student outcomes are beyond dismal and no one, it seems, takes any responsibility for them," the report said. "Social promotion, hyper-inflated teacher evaluations and misleading ‘accountability’ designations from the Illinois State Board of Education all help to deflect blame."

The Barrington 220 School District, which is known nationwide for its progressive curriculum, has recently come under fire after allowing a graphic sexual novel to be included on the summer reading list.

“We had a board meeting on Tuesday night that was lively, and we had a full room of people primarily advocating for two things,” school activist Marsha McClary told North Cook News. “One was that the district opt out of the SB 818 comprehensive sexual education standard. And then the second topic was that we have a growing list of books that have obscene and or pornographic content in them that are in the district library, school district libraries."

Learning loss due to Covid protocols disrupting education has been partially to blame for sliding achievement scores. The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University found minority students have suffered the worst. 

"Researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA, and Dartmouth College found that within school districts that were remote for most of 2020-21, high-poverty schools lost a half-year of achievement growth, roughly twice as much as low-poverty schools in the same districts," a press release from the center read.

The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic researchers tested data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), Their study projects that "high-poverty districts that went remote in 2020-21 will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related achievement losses."  It also suggests that "Math gaps did not widen in areas that remained in-person (although there was some widening in reading gaps in those areas)."