Hinsdale Central Being Blown Away? Hardly

HINSDALE, IL – A Burr Ridge resident told the Hinsdale High School District 86 board last week that Stevenson and New Trier high schools are blowing away schools such as Hinsdale Central.

Standardized test scores suggest otherwise.

During a board meeting, resident Fred Boshardt blamed the previous board and former Superintendent Tammy Prentiss for "some horrible policies."

He said those policies included grade inflation, elimination of deadlines, curriculum alignment, prevention of security from doing its job, and "misguided restorative justice to further some administrators' careers."

"The majority of teachers chose this district because it was highly regarded," Boshhardt said. "We used to compete against schools like Stevenson and New Trier, and now they're blowing us away. That's really the only metric you should measure us by when we're talking about academics."

In an interview with Patch on Wednesday, Boshardt said he wasn't simply looking at standardized test scores. He said he checked services such as U.S. News & World Report and Niche, which rate schools based on several factors.

In the latest edition of U.S. News' analysis, Stevenson was ranked sixth in Illinois, New Trier 10th and Central 11th. Niche gave Central and New Trier overall grades of A+, while Stevenson received an A-.

Hinsdale Central has long been compared with New Trier and Stevenson, which are in the Chicago suburbs. All three are based in wealthy towns.

Boshardt is hardly alone in pointing the finger at Prentiss. Last June, a new board majority ousted her after four years at the helm.

Patch checked standardized test scores over the last 18 years at the three schools.

In 2023, Prentiss' last year, 71 percent of Central juniors were proficient in the SAT's math portion at Hinsdale Central. That compares to 73 percent at Stevenson and 71 percent at New Trier.

For the SAT's English language arts section, 76 percent of Central's juniors were proficient, compared with 73 percent at Stevenson and 80 percent at New Trier.

In 2022, 71 percent of juniors at Central and New Trier were proficient in English, with Stevenson at 72 percent. For math that year, Central was at 73 percent, ahead of New Trier's 70 percent and below Stevenson's 77 percent.

Most schools saw a decline in scores during the pandemic.

All three schools' scores have been near each other since 2006, which is how long such data goes back on the Illinois Report Card website.

Here are the scores from Central, New Trier and Stevenson since 2018 on the SAT's English languages arts section (percentages of students deemed proficient, no testing in 2020):

Here are the scores from Central, New Trier and Stevenson since 2018 on the SAT's math section (percentages of students deemed proficient, no testing in 2020):

Here are ACT scores from Central, New Trier and Stevenson from 2006 to 2017 (SAT replaced ACT afterward):

Source: Illinois Report Card