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Starting this fall, Chicago Public Schools’ eighth graders will take a longer and different standardized test to help determine where they get into high school.
In an email to principals and a letter to families of rising eighth graders, district officials said students will take the PreACT 9 Secure in October in place of the old High School Admissions Test — known as the HSAT. The new test is a precursor to the ACT exam that Illinois high school students are required to take and is used for college admissions.
All CPS eighth graders take the exam during the school day and private school students take it on a weekend. Their scores can determine whether they get into the high school of their choice outside of their neighborhood. The new test will still be administered on Oct. 7, and there are no changes to the timeline for the high school admissions process for next school year.
The exam will be two-and-a-half hours long versus the hour-long HSAT. In addition to English language arts and math, the PreACT 9 includes sections on reading and science. Additionally, unlike the current HSAT, the exam won’t be offered in languages other than English.
CPS says the new exam will allow families and teachers to receive “meaningful information” about student performance as they enter high school — something the HSAT didn’t do, according to the letter to families.
Districts can use the PreACT 9 “for program placement, high-stakes, or accountability purposes while giving students practice with taking the ACT,” according to the ACT.
The district also said the new test will allow more kids to prepare because it’s a widely used test that has “free or low-cost” prep materials, and it has “greater confidence” that this exam won’t be glitchy like the HSAT has been in recent years, requiring make-up tests. It’s not clear if the school board will discontinue its contract with the company that produces the old HSAT exam.
In its letter to families, CPS did not say that the exam won’t be offered in other languages but did explain that change in a letter to school leaders.
In the letter to principals, CPS said its data show that students who took the test in another language “performed LOWER than English Learners who took the test in English with accommodations.”
Gabriel Paez, a seventh and eighth grade bilingual teacher at Haugan Elementary School, told Chalkbeat he was upset to learn the exam will more than double in length and is “disheartened and distraught” by the lack of non-English options for the new exam.
In his experience, he said, English learners who are newer to the country and are still getting used to standardized testing tend to take the exam in their native language, while longtime English learners tend to take the exam in English with accommodations — which could explain some of the data CPS is citing in its letter to school leaders.
“In the past, it was common to say and to think that English-only was the only right way, and now it sounds like the district is going backwards in time and pushing forth the narrative that having this very important exam in multiple languages harmed our English language learners,” said Paez, who also chairs the bilingual teacher committee for the Chicago Teachers Union.
Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.
