Corporate reform under the radar in Illinois. And the return of Paul Vallas.

Rod Blagojevich, Roland Burris and Paul Vallas back in the good old days.

Jim Broadway, who publishes the always informative Illinois Policy School Updates, brings to our attention the latest in Illinois’ trail of corporate reform: First, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) – drafted by a committee headed by  IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin. PERA required teacher evaluation include student growth performance measures. Then Senate Bill 7, a collaborative effort between the state’s union leadership and Stand for Children. Among its many features, it did away with tenure and seniority rights.

Next in line:  The Illinois State Board of Education’s Center for School Improvement.

It hasn’t received as much attention as PERA and SB7. The St. Louis Post Dispatch carried a brief announcement.

The Illinois State Board of Education announced it has established the Center for School Improvement to help raise student performance in the nearly 4,000 public kindergarten-12th grade schools across the state, particularly the lowest performing schools. The board recently awarded the American Institutes for Research a one-year contract worth just under $10 million in federal dollars to head the effort. The center will work to provide schools with additional assistance, specifically to narrow the performance gap of some groups of students, such as low-income students and minorities. The center will hire specialists to provide schools with expertise and research on improving performance for at-risk students. The cost is supported by the federal school improvement funds under the Title I program.

As Broadway notes:

Underlying the entire structure, driving every cog in what has become the vast machinery of “education reform” in Illinois and in America, is the assumption that school policy decisions of huge import can be based on standardized test scores achieved by children.

When PERA is combined with SB 7, children’s test scores will largely guide an educator’s professional career. They will determine to a great extent who gets laid off when staff positions are cut, who is hired to fill classroom vacancies, who gets the axe for inept performance.

Children’s test scores will decide what districts and schools are subjected to “priority interventions,” which ones are simply taken over in “high-priority interventions.” In the background, always, efforts will continue to assume schools alone can close the achievement gap.

When the corporate leaders first pushed for standardized testing, it was out of distrust of teachers. They complained of “grade inflation” and “social promotion” of incompetent students. The testing industry now has grown to become the central tactic of school improvement.

The tactic has failed for more than a decade, but instead of changing course policymakers have just institutionalized the process. It will proceed for the indefinite future. It is “too big to fail” – but it will fail nonetheless.

Broadway reports that former Chicago school’s boss Paul Vallas is involved in the Center. Since leaving Chicago, Vallas has performed his dirty work in Philadelphia and New Orleans among other places and now markets his “Vallas Turnaround System.”