Giving Compass' Take:

• Cassie Walker Burke and Yana Kunichoff report that 94 Chicago schools received low-performance ratings in Illinois school accountability system.

• How can these schools be improved? What is needed to improve equity within school districts? 

• Learn why schools with failing ratings might be worth keeping.

Nearly half of Chicago schools failed to meet the state’s threshold for performance on its new accountability system, making some of them possible targets for state intervention.

Statewide, the state ranked 20 percent of its nearly 3,800 schools as  “underperforming” or “lowest performer” on the just-released Illinois Report Card.Landing on the bottom two rungs on the state’s new four-level ratings will trigger aid from the state. It will award struggling schools additional money, visits from specialists in academic improvement, and partnerships with higher-rated schools. (Use our database below to see how your school scored.)

“We should be honest about schools that are not performing as well as other schools — it is not fair to do otherwise,” said Tony Smith, state superintendent of education. Illinois developed the new ratings system to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015.

More so than before, this year’s report card penalizes schools for performance gaps by different student groups — from black and Latino students, to students with disabilities, and English language learners.

Of Chicago’s 94 lowest performers, 40 percent were high schools, a disproportionate number considering that high schools count for closer to 25 percent of district schools. One reason: Any high school with below a 67 percent graduation rate automatically landed a low performing stamp.

Read the full article about Chicago schools by Cassie Walker Burke and Yana Kunichoff at Chalkbeat.