(The Center Square) – An educational nonprofit is highly critical of a report on Illinois tax credit scholarship recipients’ test scores.
In the report conducted for the Illinois State Board of Education by WestEd, Empower Illinois said researchers compared low-income Invest in Kids scholarship recipients to all Illinois public school students, rendering the results meaningless because they lack proper context.
“Our issue with that is in the Invest in Kids Act, in the literal law, it says that they are supposed to compare our low-income scholarship students to public school students of a similar socioeconomic background and they did not do that,” Empower Illinois Executive Director Bobby Sylvester said.
Sylvester said according to Illinois State Board of Education data, Invest in Kids recipients outperformed their low-income counterparts in nearly every category.
An ISBE spokesperson said the independent research organization that conducted the report was unable to collect demographic data on scholarship
Read more…
