By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
There’s a big push in the state education bureaucracy to lower the school reading standards that determine whether a child in Illinois is considered proficient in reading and math or not.
If lowering standards makes no sense to you, you are right to be confused. Lower standards will do nothing to help Illinois kids become more proficient in reading. In fact, it will likely make things worse.
Because the issue is a bit convoluted – there are different state tests with differing standards, and a federal test, too – let’s break down the arguments in order.
At issue is a complaint that Illinois state standards for reading and math proficiency are far too strict when compared to state standards in the rest of the country. That makes Illinois’ school system look bad, and that’s not fair, proponents of lower standards say. So the only solution, their argument goes, is to lower the “proficiency” standards.
They are not entirely wrong. At least not at first glance.
Take, for example, Illinois state standards for 4th-grade reading proficiency, among the strictest in the country, and compare them to Virginia’s state reading standards, the slackest in the country.
Illinois’ reading proficiency based on its state test shows that just 37% of the state’s 4th-grade students tested proficient in reading on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR) test in 2019. (We use 2019 data throughout this piece to avoid the difficulties of comparing later, more volatile, results that were heavily impacted by the covid pandemic.)
Virginia, in contrast, has among the lowest state reading proficiency standards in the country. That allows Virginia to report that 75% of their 4th-grade students were proficient in reading per its own 2019 tests.
And that’s where the problem kicks in. Any ordinary person looking at those outcomes will think that Virginia does a great job teaching its kids to read and that Illinois does a lousy job. Never mind that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, it’s just what people will think.
So why make Illinois look bad on purpose when we can just lower our standards to look better?
You can see where this all gets very messy. Does Illinois lower its standards all the way down to Virginia’s level? Or does it go to something in the middle of the country? And if everybody has different standards, how do we ever get to a level, apples-to-apples comparison?
Now comes the second glance – and that’s when the arguments for dropping Illinois’ standards fall apart.
Fortunately, there’s a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, that students from all states take. It’s one test and one standard that allows for apples-to-apples comparisons between states.
And on that test, Illinois state proficiency standards line up very well with the national proficiency standards. That’s not a Wirepoints opinion, but a fact based on the findings of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test. They mapped all 50 states and determined that Illinois’ proficiency requirements align very well with the NAEP standards. A graphic of that mapping for 2019 is in the appendix.
To test that fact, we compared Illinois’ proficiency results on both the Illinois state test and the national NAEP test. The results shown here for 2019 are for all practical purposes the same on both tests. That holds across grades and across race/ethnicity. The bottom line is, Illinois standards line up nearly perfectly with the national standards. What our state tests tell us about proficiency is mirrored by what the national NAEP tests tell us. And that’s good.
Now, that’s not the case for Virginia. We said above that their 4th-grade reading proficiency based on state tests was 75% in 2019. Their low standards make Virginia proficiency levels look pretty good relative to Illinois. But on the 2019 national NAEP test, Virginia’s proficiency was at just 38%.
The real apples-to-apples comparison based shows that Illinois and Virginia’s 4th-grade reading proficiencies are far closer than state-level tests show: 34% vs. 38%, respectively.
In the end, a state like Virginia can manipulate its own state-level proficiency standards as much as it wants so it can report really high proficiency levels to its residents. Unfortunately, that only serves to mislead its residents and leads to complacency. Everyone will think kids are doing better than they really are – removing any urgency to improve outcomes.
Some Illinois lawmakers want to play the same game that Virginia is playing. Lower the standards, fool residents.
We say no. Having state standards that align with NAEP standards is perhaps one of the few good things to come out of our public K-12 education system.
Educational outcomes are bad enough in Illinois. Based on both state and the national NAEP scores, 1.1 million Illinois students can’t read at grade level. In math, 1.2 million kids aren’t at grade level.
Don’t let Illinois lawmakers play games with your kids and their literacy.
Appendix
Read more from Wirepoints:
- 2024 data: Not a single child tested proficient in math in 80 Illinois schools. For reading, it was 24 schools.
- What one business owner said to me: Why expand in Illinois when there’s little economic growth?
- Open borders + sanctuary status + free benefits + Gov. Abbott = Chicago population growth
- Illinois politicians killed school choice. Now the federal government could deliver it anyway.
- The Bally’s ripoff
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.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
What about special ed students? Wouldn’t many loose educational services if the state standards are lowered?
It’s my understanding that a child must have a deficit greater than 33% to qualify for special ed services.
This proposal does not help students.
No one cares about education in Illinois, especially the educators. The education system is for adults to get nice salaries, benefits and huge pensions at young ages.
Il school system failing. Shouldn’t lower standards to accommodate teachers, schools and Pritzker. Should increase standards for schools and teachers.
State educational standards aren’t being now, yet you think raising them would help. What sense does that make? You might have a few students get more serious about school, but far more will simply drop out along the way. While that would reduce the costs of education to the taxpayers it likely will raise the costs associated with the teenage misbehavior which is bound to explode when they have less daytime adult supervision.
Standards have been steadily lowered over the past several decades. This is nothing new. It’s always been smoke and mirrors.
Just lowering the requirements or standards, lies to the public and manipulates the numbers to appear to be doing better. It simply takes the heat off of the School Districts, Administration and Teachers. Remember, even with the dismal performance scores of the students on reading and math, the teachers and school districts perform internal evaluations and all vote and rate themselves as – Excellent. Isn’t that nice. These changes would lower standards, lie to the public about the actual results and make that fake internal evaluation match the student performance numbers and that, dear tax payers, translates into more money… Read more »
Standards are far from a “requirement,” like it or not. A requirement would be a REQUIREMENT and disallow a course completion and ultimately maybe graduation as well. Apparently an educational “standard” few meet in our era at least. It’s laughable as a consequence in that failure to achieve at that level essentially has no repercussions that are immediately obvious to most in the negative sense.
With a national test to provide the information for comparison, why even have a state developed test? It seems the only reason would be to allow manipulation of results as discussed.
The results show virtually no change from 4th to 8th grade. The primary grades set the course of future student development. Poor reading skills guarantee a student will struggle in everything else, in school and in life.
Teachers in higher grades deal with the fallout of the failure to teach reading at the primary level. Teachers should be leading the charge to improve early reading scores.