Ashley Modica, 14, grades another student's spelling test at South Middle School in Arlington Heights. (Tribune photo by Jerry Tomaselli)

Highlighting the challenges facing Chicago under the state's tough new testing program, 80 percent of participating city schools failed the latest round of exams.

Further, more elementary schools failed the tests—390—than the previous year, when 386 failed.

Although the system represents only a sixth of the public schools in the state, more than half of Illinois' failing schools are in Chicago. The number of failures could have been even higher if Chicago's 80 high schools had not opted out of the tests, a choice the state allowed.

On an upbeat note, several of Chicago's magnet schools and elementary gifted centers, which have selective enrollments, are among the best in the state, according to school-by-school results released Wednesday.

Still, Chicago pupils overall barely improved—if at all—over 1999's scores, posting mixed results in the core subjects covered on the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests. A school is said to have failed the ISAT if more than half of its test results do not meet state standards.

The city's disappointing ISAT results provide a dramatic counterpoint to Mayor Richard Daley's nationally watched efforts to reform the city's schools. Eighty-five percent of the system's pupils live in poverty.

Chicago school officials contend that the scores do not mean those efforts are in vain.

"We have not failed here," Chicago Board of Education President Gery Chico said. "Look, am I ecstatic about my results? No, I am not happy about the results. My job is not to get depressed and fold up the tent and go home. This is a very blunt set of results. We take these results very seriously.

"Because the state chose a very difficult test to determine whether or not standards are being met, we will no longer fight them on that," he said. "We will meet those standards. But it won't take place overnight."

The new scores from the ISAT program, the state's latest effort to find out if local schools are doing their job, disappointed Illinois officials who had hoped to see improvement over 1999.

Statewide, however, students barely improved in writing and dipped in reading. Math scores rose slightly, but they are still "dismal," according to Illinois State Board of Education Chairman Ron Gidwitz.

Of all the ISAT exams taken, only 63 percent had passing scores.

The results underscore the difficult task undertaken by state officials who want to ensure that children receive a superior education even as educators disagree about the best way to measure whether schools are providing one. Although the ISAT program is only two years old, further changes are in the works.

The tests measure the performance of public school children against academic standards set by the state. Students were tested in February in reading, writing and math in grades 3, 5, 8 and 10, and in social science and science in grades 4 and 7.

About one in four schools that took the test, or 750, failed to meet the standards.

In addition, for the first time since 1988, when the state began using annual exams that have evolved into the ISAT, there are no comprehensive state scores for high schools. Because of poor planning and indecision by the state, secondary schools were allowed to choose not to take the 10th-grade tests—and many, including those in Chicago, did.

In the face of these grim results, the state board plans to ask legislators to double spending on failing schools, to $53 million, as well as to create a $20 million pot of rewards for top-performing schools and those that improve.

The state board also wants legislative permission to apply a more lenient standard to determine whether schools warrant an "academic warning" or the harsher "academic watch" designation, which can result in state intervention. Even with the looser standard that the board proposes, 317 schools would be eligible for academic warning and 31 would be eligible for the academic watch list, most from Chicago. And even those 348 are less than half of the failing schools that would face the warning list under the current standard.

Fewer than 100 schools have recently been in these categories, before ISAT was introduced.

The board also wants to implement more tests. If the legislature approves, the testing program would expand to assess reading, writing and math skills each year for all grades between 3 and 11, doubling the number of existing exams.

In Chicago, the state's largest public school system, a few schools improved their scores so that they are no longer deemed failing.

Goudy Elementary on the North Side, for example, now has 53 percent of its test scores meeting or exceeding state standards, compared with 45 percent a year ago.

Principal Patrick Durkin describes his school as a veritable United Nations: The school, on the border between Uptown and Edgewater, has pupils from about 38 countries; they speak 26 languages.

The improvement was welcomed by Durkin, who noted that his school was portrayed as "the worst school in the worst school system in the country" in a 1988 Tribune series.

Durkin, principal since 1989, attributed the turnaround to a dedicated staff and strong participation among immigrant parents.

"I try to pick people who are interested in the child, not just the academics but the whole child," Durkin said of his faculty. "It's more a heart thing than anything else. It's not a job, it's a vocation. It's something that the nuns, ministers, rabbis and missionaries have when they go into a job."

Chico said the system as a whole is also getting better, citing rising scores on other standardized tests like the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, Advanced Placement tests and the ACT. Also, Chicago's enrollment has steadily increased to 436,400, the highest since 1981. That is a sign, he said, that "parents have confidence in what we are doing."

"There are so many indicators that point in the right direction and the system is moving in the right direction," Chico said.

To bolster achievement, Chicago has aligned its own academic standards with the new state standards, officials said. Lesson plans for after-school programs also address the 60 reading skills and 40 math skills required by the state for each grade.

This fall, the system started voluntary "homework clubs" in high schools at a cost of $1.2 million and almost tripled spending on the year-old elementary homework clubs to $1.3 million.

Chico and Chicago schools chief Paul Vallas also contended scores will improve in this school year because the ISATs now will be administered in April instead of February.

It was Vallas who railed in January against the state test after 444 schools, or 75 percent of the system, failed the first year of the exam. In response, state officials agreed to hold the exam two months later and decided not to use that year's scores to create an academic warning list.

Vallas said it was unfair to identify any school as failing until the test is given in April. He also urged the state to factor in whether schools have a large number of student transfers, and whether their ISAT scores show improvement, in determining whether a school is failing.

"The schools will be prepared to take the test this year, and the exam will be given after the standards have been covered. I expect the results will validate that in April, so I'm very optimistic," Vallas said.

In the February testing, Chicago's reading scores remained unchanged from 1999 in 3rd and 8th grades, but declined in 5th grade. Chicago's math scores dropped in 3rd and 5th grades but rose in 8th grade.

The city's writing scores increased in 3rd and 8th grades, perhaps because students were asked to write about a subject they knew well, metal detectors, which are located in all city schools. Fifth-grade writing scores dropped.

"We knew it was coming," Chico said of the low 2000 scores. "We will get over the hurdle. We will answer the bell."