North Cook News

The Evanston Township High School District 202 School Board recently discussed the district’s results from the Illinois State Report card.

The board reviewed the results at the Nov. 14 school board meeting. The district received a designation of "Commendable" from the state, which is the second-highest designation possible. The district’s SAT performance has been trending downward since 2018 in both math and ELA—with a gap in 2020 because there was no data that year—but their numbers are still higher than the state averages over the past five years.

"'Exemplary' is the top 10% in the schools," Carrie Levy; Evanston director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment; said in the meeting. "'Comprehensive' is the bottom 5%. So 'Commendable' means there's no underperforming subgroups. Our graduation rate is over 67%."

When breaking down by race within the district, white students were outperforming all other groups in both math and ELA. Black students were the lowest performing, with Hispanic students slightly above them. This data is consistent with trends across the state; however, the state numbers show Asian students slightly outperforming white students.

School officials were conflicted over the report because, although the scores are comparable to all state scores and were given a designation of 'Commendable,' they feel that many large portions of their student body are not growing and achieving as much as they would prefer. They were especially concerned that Black students in the district were dropping in performance levels, especially in math.