By Dave Dahl/Illinois Radio Network

SPRINGFIELD – New administration. New schoolmaster. New test.

New results?

Tony Smith, superintendent of the Illinois State Board of Education, has prepared local school districts for bad news from the first year of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers test, or PARCC, the multi-state test that is replacing ISAT and Prairie State Achievement Exam.

The earliest results Smith can share are so incomplete, he can hardly say how incomplete they are. He discussed them on a conference call with reporters before Wednesday’s ISBE meeting.

“I feel like it’s pretty unacceptable that we don’t have more data now,” he said, “and that it’s not already a unified data set and that we don’t have samples for teachers to understand exactly what the performance levels are. Saying I pushed as hard as I could is not an overstatement.”

Smith’s letter to local officials, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, said PARCC should be seen as “simply a new baseline from which we can move forward.”

Smith said comparing PARCC to any other test, including ISAT, is not “a wise use of time.”