Hinsdale, Elmhurst Schools Differ On Measuring Performance

HINSDALE, IL – Hinsdale High School District 86's new superintendent has started a new way to measure the performance of Hinsdale Central and South high schools.

He aims to compare them to high schools with similar populations and low-income student percentages.

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Elmhurst School District 205 used to do this, but it largely stopped the practice a few years ago.

These days, Elmhurst compares itself to state averages. But that's a playing field where Elmhurst holds an advantage. That's because half the state's students are from low-income families, while about 15 percent of Elmhurst's students are.

At District 86, Superintendent Chip Pettit, who started in June, calls the district's new system the "league of comparables." Each school chose 14 other demographically similar high schools from which to compare.

Pettit said he wanted to get away from the practice of comparing Central and South. In that case, Central nearly always prevails because it has one of the state's wealthiest student bodies.

At South, nearly a third of students are from low-income families, far higher than Central's 9 percent.

At this week's District 86 meeting, Central's and South's principals showed how their schools rank against their comparables.

Pettit said he wanted to develop "meaningful comparisons that might mean more than state averages or year-to-year growth."

"I'm really pleased to see this was so widely accepted at the building level," Pettit said.

In 2022, Elmhurst school board member Jim Collins said some residents "bristle when we talk about how we're above the national average because I think our community's expectations are far higher than that."

His statement was after the district stopped comparing itself to similar school districts.

Last year, Elmhurst school officials presented statistics at a board meeting showing that elementary and middle school special education students had outdone their counterparts on standardized tests in seven similar suburban districts.

However, the officials did not present similar comparison data for high school special education students. So Patch performed the analysis using the same schools, finding that Elmhurst lagged behind most of them.