By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
A quick glance at the Illinois State Board of Education’s new 2023 Illinois Report Card will leave you thinking things are relatively good in Illinois’ schools. The board’s press release says “families should be proud of the remarkable progress we see.” It claims the “2023 Illinois Report Card shows strong progress with increased proficiency rates and highest graduation rate in 13 years.” And the subtitle goes on: “Improvement in many indicators led by gains for black students.”
But Wirepoints has analyzed the 2023 data and found there’s little to cheer about. Yes, 2023 student outcomes are somewhat improved over 2022, but they are still below pre-covid 2019 levels. And that’s despite a whopping $6 billion increase in operating expenses statewide.
Below we list out five counterpoints to ISBE’s hopeful rhetoric, including two that refute their main headlines.
1. 2023 student outcomes are still below pre-covid 2019 despite a 30% per student spending increase over that time.
Reading and math proficiencies are still behind their pre-covid levels despite a $4,200 increase in per student operational spending since 2019 – 30% more.
The number of school students reading at grade level was just 34.6% in 2023, lower than the 37.4% in 2019.
Outcomes were even worse in math. Just 26.9% were proficient in 2023 vs 32.0% in 2019.
2. A “record-breaking” graduation rate means little as SAT math scores hit a new low.
ISBE continues to make a big deal about its ever-increasing graduation rates even as fewer and fewer high school students test proficient on the SAT.
Illinois SAT scores have been on a general decline ever since they were first introduced in 2017. That year, 39.8% of students tested proficient in reading and 36.4% were proficient in math. Yet 87% graduated.
In 2023, the graduation rate improved to 87.6%, yet math proficiency has fallen to a record low of just 26.7% of students and reading is at a near-low of 31.6%.
3. Minorities continue to suffer the most.
Yes, black students did make gains in 2023 in both reading and math. But the more honest story is dire.
Black students have yet to get back to their pre-covid levels, with just 16% able to read at grade level. For math, just 8% of blacks are at grade level.
Just one more note on the “improvement” of black scores. The reading results for blacks in cities across the state show just how deeply flawed Illinois’ education system has become.
4. Over two-thirds of Illinois schools are labeled “Commendable” despite the collapse in student proficiency.
Illinois’ “accountability” standards remain broken in 2023 and that includes the metric for school performance. Schools are given one of five designations by ISBE: exemplary, commendable, targeted, comprehensive and intensive.
72 percent of rated Illinois schools were given the 2nd-highest rating of “commendable” despite that only 33 percent of students in those schools were able to read at grade level.
That’s because a school’s “summative designation” is based not just on proficiency but “on multiple measures of school performance, including student growth for elementary and middle schools and graduation rate for high schools.” In other words, schools are graded on a curve.
That leads to absurd results where schools with single-digit reading proficiency scores are rated “commendable” by ISBE.
5. Illinois still lacks accountability for teachers: 97 percent were rated “excellent or proficient” in 2023
Official teacher evaluations are entirely out-of-sync with student outcomes. Just 35% of Illinois students were able to read at grade level in 2023 and yet 97% of teachers were rated “excellent or proficient.”
In fact, of the 702 districts that performed teacher evaluations in 2023, 451 of them – nearly two-thirds – declared every single one of their teachers was “excellent or proficient.”
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ISBE’s press release shows why Illinois’ education system remains unfixable. As long as the state’s leadership refuses to acknowledge its problems, hundreds of thousands of students will continue to struggle and suffer as they enter the workforce without the basic skills they need.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- While Illinois set to kill school choice, North Carolina passes school choice for all
- Covering up Chicago’s literacy problem
- Union boss Stacy Davis-Gates slam dunks the case for school choice in letter to union members
- Systemic failure in Peoria Public Schools. Same as in Decatur or Rockford or Chicago.
Appendix.
Chicago
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
As pols tout record hs graduation rates what state/city academic standards, if any, are required to graduate? What do other states require?
The practical answer is that if you can breathe, have an IQ of 75 at least, “participate” at least minimally, attend school “most of the time” and can do your daily human functions well enough it’s a good bet you will be be given a curriculum where you can “graduate”. You really have to want to fail to be ineligible for graduation. Learning and even self-improvement as college grads might hope to occur for their children turn out to have been optional if one judges some graduates by their cumulative GPA scores. Such all too often is “education” in a… Read more »
Here’s some info on Rockford schools. The district built new schools at a cost of $250M.
https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?districtId=04101205025
I do not trust the data. I have learned a lot in the last couple of years, and now I do not trust any data which is not limited in scope to the smallest set. Which means, if I need to go visit an Illinois website, then select my county and my school district – I do NOT trust the data. I want to see the SAME subset which is feeding the State – not consuming the subset which is filtered by the State. Its 2023, and tabulated data no longer need to come from “gatekeepers”. As the matter of… Read more »
Here’s some info from WREX TV13 in Rockford from 2019 on kids being passed on despite failing grades. Now they say that graduation rates are up. Of course they are even if they can barely read/write or do math at grade level.
https://www.wrex.com/news/13-investigates/13-investigates-rps-205-teachers-say-failing-students-still-get-moved-on-to-next-grade/article_8b8b9850-7042-52d4-8301-530f0b8293c2.html
What we also need to question is that if these numbers are authentic. If there is a chance that apples are not compared to apples, year after year, consistently. The fact is, all this upheaval about “algebra is racist because colored kids cannot pass the exams” brings into the question of the integrity of the efforts by the teachers and the administrators. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions – so I am not suggesting wrong-doing. Good intentions have the same capacity to do the same harm as a frontal assault. A few decades ago this was not… Read more »
If you want a good laugh head over to crap fax where they list a bunch of press anecdotes as to how improvement is being made.
I am not proud of anything the Department of Education is doing. They are, without question, following orders. They would graduate a duck if he walked the halls of a high school. They want students uneducated. They want them to do as they’re told, so they will go forward ignorant and unquestioning when the Democrats do their final purge of Conservatives and lead a holocaust in the United States. The education department has one goal, build an army who will kill everyone who disagrees with them.
Wow. One might think you are exaggerating. But with wacko students supporting terrorists you are very Correct
Does this indicate that IQ scores have declined ?
You have to go back a little more than a decade to fully understand these scores (and I apologize in advance for this unusually long post, but this is an issue very near to my heart): Back in 2010, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) adopted common core. In 2011, the state began training teachers in this new teaching method. Common core teaching takes everything you, and your ancestors, going back to Aristotle teaching Alexander the Great, and throws all of it in the trash can. The purpose of this was to essentially standardize learning across all the states,… Read more »
Good luck trying to help your kid with homework. Totally different than the way I learned it. I had a great math teacher in grade school, even the kids that typically didn’t do well learned. Funny when our school went on strike he didn’t along with a number of other teachers. They hired enough teachers and could have broke the strike but the union caved. I remember all the teachers that crossed the line and they were the better teachers.
This is by design. The education industry wanted to make themselves the gatekeepers to education, because you the parent can’t be trusted to help teach your children to read or write or do math. That must be left to the professionals with 16 ACT score graduates from ISU.
Now, of course, this has all failed, and kids are doing very poorly. What’s the solution to common core? Social Emotional Learning (SEL)!
Debtsor – ISU accepts people (non-scholarship athletes) with a 16 ACT? I am merely asking. It does have a 92 percent acceptance rate. That level of score is beneath what it takes to do college work.
At ISU, the 25th Percentile is an ACT of 20 for reading and 19 for math. So yes, 25% of the school’s students have an ACT lower than 19 for math or 20 for reading. An ACT of 16 is not out of the question for a grad especially if this particular grad is an affirmative action with a high GPA. The 25th percentile at Eastern (EIU) is 17 in both reading and math. Crazy if you think about it. Should these people be going to college to study? Or would they be better suited for a career in welding,… Read more »
In the 1960’s and early 1970’s in the Chicago Public Schools, every class at every level had a well defined easy to understand curriculum guide. It covered every topic needed to reach “grade level” in a subject. Eventually, lack of attendance by the increasing low income minorities overwhelmed the subject matter. To paraphrase Yogi Berra; if people don’t want to come in, there is no way you can stop them.
Great comment. Its ta-da for!
Yup, and as he said, “you can see a lot just by observing.”
Democrats rely on stupid people to vote for them. I guess they think the best thing to do is make new stupid people through the government schools.
Yeah, we do love all those supposed plots meant to control our lives all devised by the hated “them”.
James – do you have any insight as to why expectations are so low, particularly for minority students? The performance figures are beyond disappointing.
This is purely anecdotal. My wife is hispanic and her family did not place very much value on education. You finish school and get a job.
There are various sociological factors at play. You can easily start to answer your question if you’ll really ponder it and do some research. It’s documented and regurgitated in the media periodically. You just have to have enough interest to seriously, persistently attend to that topic.
Sociological factors that only came about in 2017, at or near the same time common core was implemented throughout the United States. WHO KNEW?
The COVID situation is only part of the story, but it’s been a primary news story in our immediate era for sure. There are other sociological problems more persistent than COVID that have been in play for many decades.
James – I did not ask about a decline in scores, but rather why expectations are so low. When administrators decide to pass through large numbers on to graduation without anywhere near proficient skills, that is essentially saying that there are limited expectations for these kids. Why not insist on a minimal level of performance to graduate?. What if minimal standards were insisted upon as well as limiting absences? Sure grad numbers would be bad in the short term but in current state the incentives to do the work are lacking. What is driving the low expectations? This is a… Read more »
You’re probabl right that after maybe a ten-year “testing period” of student literally having to meet some high-but-arbitrary testing standards in order to graduate and reallzing that older siblings didn’t meet the graduation standards the younger siblings migt well “buckle down and get to work” on improving their skills. Still, there would be many complaining students and parents that the higher standards are “not fair,” one of common arguments from those who can’t go beyond that simple accusation. That’s an unsolvable set of problems for those trying to explain why so-and-so didn’t graduate while Sally did. Secondly, the taxation level… Read more »
Your answer doesn’t answer why scores of kids with high truancy rates who are passed on and given diplomas. The 5 core class curriculum matters not to this group. Again why are expectations so low? Your answer below states it is because administrators don’t want to deal with the complaints. Maybe so – although I don’t know if a management job in the private sector that doesn’t require resolving complaints. I wonder if the passing on conduct irrespective of skills is being done to camouflage the lack of minority achievement (although the lack of skill permeates every group)? My general… Read more »
I guess one of your unstated assumptions is that a student who repeats a year of elementary school or even a single course in high school will then be able to demonstrate grade-level proficiency. That may be true for slow learners learners or newly minted American students who do try to learn, but repetition where not caring in the least and being an active behavioral problem becomes the core problems the boredom of repetition makes the student even more disinterested in many (most?) such cases. They couldn’t care less whether they learn or even graduate as their attendance records tend… Read more »
If you want a more direct answer to your question. I think part of the “low expectation” problem for high school students has to do with administrators wanting to have as little stress in their work life as possible, a problem many can understand here surely. So, every time a parent or student complains who does the administrator blame? The parent? The student” Nope they do what supervisory people everywhere do, blame the people under their charge. That placates the blamer and sends the stress elsewhere. Then, do you think a mid-level school administrator is ever going to blame his… Read more »
We’re all just yelling into the wind until parents either revolt in protest or remove their children from these indoctrination centers. Unfortunately, many remain blissfully uninformed or worse, don’t care as they look upon the education system as a day care operation. Parents, teachers, administrators: you are stewards of the children. Act like it!!
A third of these students are chronically truant. The parents and the kids are the biggest driver of this failure and you expect them to revolt? You could bus the same group of kids to the highest ranked schools and yet the results would be the same. You can blame the local schools, administrators and teachers all you want but it won’t change then outcome one bit.
We can’t possibly be expected to teach children to read and do math, although civilization has managed to do just that for centuries.
Give us more money!
NOT ONE teaching or staff job can be cut. Not one!
How will cutting staff help the problem if the students don’t show up? Cutting staff will certainly help save money but I have yet to read how that would actually improve the results.
It can’t be done if the parents and the kids don’t put the work in to make it happen. Keep pretending otherwise and the results will remain the same. Blaming it on teachers won’t solve the problem.
Administrators clearly are part of the problem. They are graduating kids who are chronically truant or far short of meeting modest standards. Why are these kids being passed through? I read an article recently about Prince Georges County in Maryland, a poor performing district. A 12 year old girl interviewed was an A student, but her performance was falling off a cliff. When she asked why, she related that her older sister skipped most of her classes and still graduated, so questioned why she should do the work? The schools obviously fear disparities in outcomes among racial groups, but are… Read more »
Agree with much of what you have written. The administrators of these schools have clearly lowered the standards to graduate. This issue does not fall all on the administrators though. Those administrators are influenced by the overall community that doesn’t want their children to fail out of school simply for not passing standardized tests. That’s why there won’t be a massive revolt. The administration is providing exactly what the community wants. If I’m wrong, we will see school board candidates that run on enforcing standards in order to graduate. Somehow, I don’t think those candidates will stand much of a… Read more »
That’s right, just give up on them kids. They ain’t never gonna learn to read. /sarc
Other than some of the commenters on this site, no one is talking about giving up on the kids. What won’t work is blaming the schools or teachers when this is a problem within the community that goes beyond the typical roles of schools and teachers. If teachers work to get additional funding for items that impact the overall community such as food and shelter, people rant about how this is far outside the scope of the job of teaching. You want teachers to just magically teach kids that don’t show up. The reality is that most of the people… Read more »
WHY HAVE THESE PROBLEMS ONLY APPEARED IN 2015 AFTER THE STATE IMPLEMENTED COMMON CORE STANDARDS IN TESTING AFTER IMPLEMENTING IT IN THE CURRICULUM IN 2011-2013?
We had basically 40 years of gains from the early 70’s through 2010 and things were still getting better every year. It was only in 2011 after common core implementation, and 2015 implementation of testing standards, did the regression start, and has only gotten worse with covid.
The education complex will never admit what a failure common core has been. They’ll never admit it, only someone from the outside can come in an fix things.
The widget makers can’t begin to comprehend the problem in total, but you’ve explained the crux of it very well. In the industrial world if you double the inputs the outputs also should double. That relationship kinda, sorta exists exists in education, but its far, far from a predictable straight-line graph and certainly not a 1:1 relationship.
They don’t want to comprehend the problem James nor do they actually want to fix it. Teachers unions tend to support democrats and as such they will be blamed by conservatives because they are viewed as the enemy. Crime is way up but you don’t hear too many people on this site that blame the individual police officer for not preventing crime. Those same people don’t demand cuts to police funding since clearly the money we are spending on the police isn’t working to our liking. We don’t see articles that point out 97% of the police officers receiving proficient… Read more »
LOL this is your most disingenuous argument yet. There’s a video floating around out there from the other day where the officers witnessed a brutal mugging where they beat on a guy at a bus stop. The officer saw what was happening, flipped his lights and sped over to the crime. He pulled up next to the criminals, but didn’t box them in, and then the criminals sped away at 80 mph in their stolen vehicle. The police chased them for a block or two and then called off the chase. Everyone in the comments section said THE POLICE OFFICERS… Read more »
“Because City of Chicago prevents ‘boxing’ in criminal’s vehicles for fear of causing officer or bystander injuries, and prohibits high speed chases because of the danger of innocent bystanders being hit by 100 mph chase” The individual police officer didn’t cause that issue just as passing along students that haven’t learned the material isn’t caused from teachers. If a kid knows he will be passed to the next grade no matter what then he/she has little incentive to learn. The individual teacher can’t possibly teach when a 1/3 of the students are chronically truant. The individual teacher has a harder… Read more »
I’ll give teachers a little undeserved credit because the common core curriculum is so f’ed up and difficult to teach. But every teacher I’ve ever met, except one (who quit teaching BTW) enthusiastically believes and has a religious like devotion to common more, and the more their childrens’ test scores fall, they harder the teach the common core curriculum. How must you feel as a teacher when every year for the past 10 years, fewer and fewer kids are reading at grade level AFTER YOU SPENT AN ENTIRE YEAR TEACHING THEM? And the teachers’ answer always is TEACH COMMON CORE… Read more »
I have yet to hear from any teachers I know that they just need to teach “common core more harder”. Many of them flat out disagree with much of the way things are taught and they have to do their best to follow orders but still do right by teaching the kids. It’s not an easy task. Your limited view on teachers is just that, limited.
Well, I don’t know, I was just at my son’s parent teacher conference with the math teacher, and he didn’t take too well my opinions on common core. He condescendingly looked at me, put his hand out on the table and said, “Well Mrs. so and so, we do things differently now” when I complained about the curriculum. I said yes, you do it differently, and wrong, which is why YOUR students test scores in the Xth grade at THIS school have fallen by 20+ points since 2013 and, while they’ve recovered a bit since the covid drop off, they… Read more »
You are disgusting. We need Vouchers. Every honest person knows this. But teachers and their union own the Democratic Party. They just want more money for less work. Quit blaming everyone else. The teacher’s job is to teach. And stop evil indoctrination
They are teaching Bill. According to the CPS administration over 97% of the teachers are meeting or exceeding expectations. You can pay for kids to attend private school but the current leaders don’t believe the taxpayers should foot the bill. Vote for different people if you want to spend taxpayer money on private education.
The 1:1 return on education dollars happened thousands of dollars ago. Education has run head-first into the law of diminishing returns. For every extra dollar spent on education now, we’re maybe seeing a few dimes in return.
I agree wholeheartedly. Money alone will NEVER bring up the academic results on standardized tests in the vast majority of schools. There are way too many sociological factors at play against the whole process! I’m fairly conservative as to what needs to be done. Personally I’d probably favor the European model of tracking students into pre-set programs based on test score performances, but in this country we foolishly spend money with the hope that most disengaged students will miraculously “turn around” academically and become lawyers, doctors, etc. In general, that may happen 2-4% of the time, so putting almost every… Read more »
I like the idea of tracking. However, in my local school district that has a lot of rich kids and a lot of poor kids, they got rid of AP classes for freshman (and soon sophomores) and got rid of all honors classes for freshman and sophomores. Equity, all kids must learn the same.
Ultimately that slows the growth of quicker students and bores them mightily as well. You’ve reminded me of an era a few decades ago when teachers were supposed to dwell on a topic until literally everyone was some degree of proficient in it. That might set seem good superficially, but what you are going to do is bore most students most of the time. If the topic at hand is reasonably difficult some will never become even halfway proficient in it. But, administrators don’t want to hear that; it’s not a politically popular point of view when every child is… Read more »
Equity means everyone is as stupid as the underserved so as not to make them feel bad, plain and simple.
Widget makers must produce results, or they won’t be making widgets for very long. Widget makers do not blame their customers for their failure in making widgets. If they did so, they would find customers deserting them in favor of others who can produce widgets. Yet you disparage the widget makers, while not giving any solutions to how education can be improved. It’s amazing to see a group constantly reminding us of the impossibility of producing what they are paid to do, and somehow believe that they should continue to be employed and paid. Instead, we hear only that it… Read more »
Teachers ultimately can only recommend to students what they need to do to be successful academically. Students are free to “take or leave it” as is true of every other social interaction they receive throughout life even as adults. Most think they can do as they wish, and if “passing” a class is their only goal they may be right. But, most such people in school or otherwise are simply marking time as if they were a prisoner, learning virtually nothing and soaking up taxpayer dollars to little social benefit other than treating school as their baby sitters.
And teachers consistently produced better Year over Years results from 1971 to about 2010ish, when the various state implemented common core, and removed the ability to parents to help their own children do homework and learn.
WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED!!!
Questions why we need to increase education funding for students that won’t show up no matter how much you spend. Perhaps instead of pouring more money into schools, school districts should direct that funding on truant officers and enforcement. Empower the school districts.
Of course, then the problem is the kid who doesn’t give a damn about school is now in the classroom disrupting all the other students. But with truancy on the rise, you’d expect to see rising test scores for the students that show up, but that’s not happening.
Are the truant students not showing up ever to take the tests or are they included in the results? What’s interesting is that we have witnessed truancy rates decrease slightly at the same time we have seen test scores slightly increase. It would be nice to see results alongside attendance.
And where does the blame for teaching a dumbed down, equitable, diverse curriculum more focused on feelings rather than facts and useful knowledge go? Certainly not to the parents.
You’d be surprised, I bet. Complaints sometimes come from all kinds of parents rather than one readily identifiable group. The problem is trying to placate them where they hold different points of view about what’s more important and how to reward and punish accordingly. Pleasing one set of complainers often displeases another. I know you hold your points of view as important. So, do those of others. But, that’s not to say your points of view are readily acceptable to others, is it? Emphasizing one concept, approach or outcome usually comes at the expense of another one.
That belongs with the school administrators and the school board that approves those changes. Also, it lies with the voters that put those school board members into their seats or the voters that put the politicians into office that select the school board members. It is not from font line teachers doing the job they were assigned to do according to the taxpayers wishes. Ultimately it lies with the parents/voters who put all those people into office.
What a novel thought…it is the voters that are the root causes of the problems
PPF – admins could cease to pass on students who don’t come close to proficient. What incentives are there for these kids to do work if they know they will receive a diploma? I understand parents are a problem but current practices are an incredible fail. My view is that most teachers would embrace holding to standards of substance.
I agree with you Willowglen. Of course teachers would embrace holding to standards of substance. The decision to hold back or pass the student to the next grade level is outside the teachers scope of responsibilities. Not because it should be but because that’s how the schools and the community set it up. The question becomes what happens to these students that are held back for lack of proficiency? Does the third grader attend class with first graders because he is only proficient at the first grade level? Does this student buckle down and work harder to get on track… Read more »
Many parents, having to work to earn a living, can’t home-school their kids and can’t afford the cost and logistic complications of private schools. School choice, with funding following the student, could alleviate these problems considerably, for the same or less cost. But it would threaten many union and union-related incomes.
Are there statistics for White students too, or just black and hispanic? It would help to know if the system is failing everyone or just a certain segment of the population i.e. are we dumbing down America?
Yes, FJB. We were meant to get summary data in our appendix. We’ll add it shortly. Thanks for heads up.
There’s nothing wrong with education in Illinois that a few thousand nuns couldn’t fix.
However, that would end the Democratic Party’s slush fund.
What is most appalling to me is that these abysmal proficiencies stayed under the radar for so long.
Thank you, Wirepoints, for exposing this issue – was no one in academia reading the ISBE reports?
Hey, Mayor Johnson! Look over here for a root cause … then consider how ill prepared young people, especially BIPOC, are after “graduation.”
Once upon a time graduates were prepared to enter the workforce; no more. Try that for a root cause, Mr. Mayor. Your CTU is a root cause, sir!