Gov. Pritzker name-calls rather than admit to Illinois’ dire educational outcomes – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It took only 15 seconds last week for Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reveal what’s so wrong with his brand of leadership, where he refuses to acknowledge Illinois’ many problems and instead, prefers to deflect and name call when someone else draws attention to those problems.

Those few seconds came during the governor’s recent debate against challenger Darren Bailey. Bailey brought up a recent hard-hitting Wall Street Journal editorial that reported, among other failures, that just 2 percent of Decatur Public School’s black 3rd-graders could read at grade level in 2019, while nearly 100 percent of the district’s teachers were evaluated as proficient or excellent. The WSJ called its piece “Illinois’ Shocking Report Card: The Land of Lincoln is failing its children and covering it up.”

Most of the data came directly from Wirepoints’ recent report: Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.

Instead of addressing the very real facts about Illinois education, Pritzker attacked with ad-hominems: “So many untruths that have been said, I can’t even address all of them. Let’s start with this. He [Bailey] talks about what was in the Wall Street Journal. That was provided to them by a right-wing carnival barker organization here in the state of Illinois. It’s just wrong, they are wrong.”

Carnival barkers? For simply pointing out the dismal data reported by the state government’s own Board of Education? Read our report about Rockford, Mt. Vernon, Waukegan, Elgin and other cities’ depressing educational outcomes. Pritzker should be joining us in the conversation, not trying to shut down all discussion.

And we were “wrong?” Hardly.

Here’s what’s really wrong with what Pritzker – and later, his supporters – said about Wirepoints, the WSJ, and the state of education here in Illinois.

1. The data Pritzker criticized as “wrong” comes directly from his own education agency. The dismal education data that the governor says is “just wrong” comes straight from the Illinois State Board of Education’s Illinois Report Card website or its data library. Every datapoint Wirepoints reported on student reading and math proficiencies, teacher proficiency ratings, district graduation rates and more can be found there.

Take the 2 percent reading proficiency statistic for 3rd-grade blacks in Decatur, for example. Here’s a picture direct from ISBE’s Report Card:

2. Pritzker isn’t to blame for the state’s abysmal 2019 student outcomes – but the system he supports is. Pritzker supporters claim Wirepoints was wrong to blame the governor for the state’s 2019 results. But we never did. Our entire report never mentioned Pritzker once. Instead we blamed the state’s “educational-industrial complex” for the failure in student outcomes – a system far bigger than any one governor or bureaucrat.

Instead, it was Pritzker that engaged himself in the discussion when he publicly rejected the veracity of the 2019 numbers and backhanded both the WSJ Editorial Board and Wirepoints. Regardless, the governor has made it quite clear he supports the public education system that continues to fail students year after year.

3. Pritzker is to blame for Illinois’ 2021 student outcomes, which he directly made even more dire. Pritzker may not own the 2019 numbers, but he surely owns those from 2021. His school shutdowns, his forced remote learning, his masking and more – among the most draconian school mitigation measures in the country – had a massive, negative impact on learning. Illinois only had 37% of children in school, on average, during the pandemic. In contrast, 96% of Florida’s kids remained in the classroom, according to a report recently published by the National Bureau Economic Research.

We’ll be releasing those results shortly, but in the meantime, consider the following: Nearly half of Illinois’ 859 school districts experienced a drop in student reading proficiency of 25 percent or more between 2019 and 2021.

4. ISBE’s criticism is absurd. Not only did Wirepoints use ISBE’s own data, but our coverage of the system’s was comprehensive. The Illinois State Board of Education released its own response to Wirepoints’ work:

For decades, Illinois ranked worst in the nation for funding education, and Gov. Pritzker is reversing that travesty. This uninformed article is clearly a politically motivated attack that uses bad data analysis to try to bash Illinois public schools. Looking at proficiency alone, and looking at performance in a vacuum, is an uneducated and uninformed way to examine student achievement and school performance, and most education experts agree that measuring growth in performance is key to understanding school improvement.

Where to start? How could Wirepoints be using “bad data” when the data comes directly from ISBE itself?

And how can “growth in performance” matter when only 5 percent of all black students in Decatur could read in 2019? Or just 18 percent of Hispanic students in Waukegan…and on and on. “Progress” means nothing when tens of thousands of children are doomed to exit the system neither college nor career ready every year.

And we didn’t look at “proficiency alone.” Wirepoints also examined student “on track” rates and graduation rates, teachers’ extremely high “excellent or proficient” teacher ratings, and ISBE’s school “accountability” ratings to reveal just how hypocritical and broken the state’s education system is.

Not to mention ISBE’s initial statement – that Illinois ranks low in education funding – is a falsehood that Wirepoints has refuted multiple times.

5. And if you want to see just how nasty this administration has become, check out how it employs dirty tactics. Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh was triggered when we pointed out the Chicago Public School’s drop in reading results, especially for blacks, where just 11 percent were reading at grade level in 2021. She immediately invoked the race card – “You think I’m interested in your garbage take after referring to students of color as “blacks”?

Excuse us, but what? The Illinois State Board of Education refers to students as “black” – along with “white”, “Hispanic,” “Asian” and more. We were simply using the state’s own preferred racial/ethnic descriptors to write our report.

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The responses from the Pritzker administration are disappointing, but not surprising.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system
• New U.S. Census data: Illinois education spending soars while outcomes flatline
• Addendum to ‘Trapped in Chicago’s Public Schools’: 100% of CPS teachers rated proficient or excellent in 2021
• Parents gasped when they saw their school district reading results. – Wirepoints’ presentation on Illinois’ collapsing student outcomes
• ‘F*** Wirepoints’ Says Chicago Teachers Union When Confronted With Facts From The School District Itself