By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
It should be considered one of Illinois’ most egregious failures. School officials announced last week that in 2024 the state graduated high school students at a record 88 percent rate, even though the same data release showed that nearly 70% of graduating students can’t read or do math proficiently.
Take black students statewide. 81% of them graduated in 2024 though just 11% of those graduates were proficient in reading on the SAT as juniors the year before. Just 7% of the graduates were proficient in math. The student outcome data comes straight from the Illinois Report Card.
It’s not much better for Hispanics – an 85% graduation rate, with only 18% of them able to read and 14% able to do math proficiently on the SAT.
Overall, 88% of students statewide graduated despite SAT proficiency rates of just 32% and 27% in reading and math, respectively. State SAT results remained virtually unchanged between 2023 and 2024.
What that disparity shows is just how willing the educational establishment is to cover up its failures.
The Illinois Board of Education itself is celebrating the record grad rates, with no mention of students’ dismal results.
So too is Gov. Pritzker. His new tweet celebrates Illinois’ new 88% graduation rate, while ignoring the tragic high school literacy rates.
Chicago’s results mirror the results statewide. A vast majority of students graduate, but very few meet the standards for reading or math despite the district spending over $30,000 per student annually.
Nearly 150,000 students received a diploma last year. The sad question is, just how many of them have been set up for failure by Illinois’ education establishment?
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Chicago Public Schools spends $100 million yearly on its 20 emptiest schools. And it wants to spend another $1 billion on them.
- Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system – Wirepoints Special Report
- The evidence so far on Illinois’ ‘Evidence-Based Funding’ for K-12 schools: It’s a flop – Wirepoints Special Report
- Illinois has more educators, less students than ever, yet officials complain about a ‘teacher shortage’
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.
Uh oh, someone is confusing a Democratic Party grift mechanism with education again.
Wow impressive. Educating morons for generations. Nothing a few more billion of your money can’t fix. If you are not already feeling it, you are being set up for the slaughter. City’s bankrupt and failing, State is bankrupt and failing, school systems are bankrupt and failing. Guess what’s next. Ding ding ding, you guessed it. More taxes for everyone across the board and more taxes after that when those don’t fix the problem. You are the fatted calf that is about to be sacrificed.
Reminds me of the lyrics to the old Rawhide show. Move’em on, head’em up, head’em up, move’em on….
This has been going on for decades. But it seems to be getting ever worse as WOKE politics take over and every child should get a trophy for participation. And if they don’t it’s racist or sexist.
The practice of promoting students to the next grade despite the fact that the students are failing needs to stop. This practice is not helping Students, but rather is to make teachers look like they’re doing their job.
Social promotion is a symptom of the underlying problem. Denying social promotion would mean that CPS would hold back a majority of students and most would never, ever graduate. It would make problems worse. The solution is to fix the cause of social promotion – TEACH THE KIDS TO READ AND DO MATH. As I’ve repeatedly said, schools these days spend very little time teaching basic, and when they do, they use the absurdly confusing common core method. Kids can’t learn to do something as simple as 9÷3=3 because they are never taught this. Instead they are taught word problems… Read more »
Your issue seems to be related to the concept of how much volume there is in a liter, so it seems to me a poorly constructed question rather than simply due to being a problem expressed in words. If one were to rewrite it with the hope of some understanding given there or already in place about the painting capacity being part of the kids knowledge base, and it’s a more readily answerable question. Being a word problem is not the basic issue here; it’s the lack of training/learning regarding the capacity of a liter. Real life is full of… Read more »
This reply got me thinking. For decades, schools have turned away from teaching phonics in favor of the plug and chug “whole language” method of teaching reading. Meanwhile, rote learning of basic arithmetic such as multiplication tables is rejected as plug and chug mindlessness. Much better to serve up word problems that they can’t read or understand to teach basic arithmetic.
No wonder students cannot read or do math at grade level. Go back to phonics in reading and flash cards in arithmetic.
Yes, they fail to understand that the rote and repetitious math and reading is what lays the foundation for higher level critical thinking. Which makes sense, because every complicated task requires mastering the basics first. “Wax on, wax off!” This is not new or difficult, it’s something we’ve known for millennia. You can’t just teach ‘critical thinking’ in isolation of from everything else; critical thinking IS the end product of mastery of all the underlying pieces.
Try convincing a room full of teenagers of your point of view. Believe me, eyes will roll and minds will start to wander. They’re too young to understand that persistent care and effort are necessary to be really skilled at doing anything. Thus, most “wing it” without the requisite intellectual interest and get the expected results come test time. Still, “the grading curve” inevitable comes to bear and tends to make even the poor-performing students seem mostly average when grades are given, aggravating the situation in many cases.
Your room full of teenagers were not taught basic skills in the primary grades, but were passed along anyway. Of course they are rolling their eyes at you. They do not have the foundation of skills needed to do the next level work you are trying to teach.
Maybe someday teachers frustrated with teenagers rolling their eyes will be motivated to seek a better way to teach basic skills in the primary grades. Until that happens, nothing will change.
Spot on PP. Old Joe was able to master difficult things due to a thorough grounding in the basics.
Back in the old days nuns spent half the day on phonics. Tons of rote exercises that formed the basis of my writing and reading comprehension skills today.
You’ll never get a Pol to admit that thousands of nuns were onto something 60 years ago.
James, I understand the critical thinking argument vs. rote mathematics. Sure, teaching kids critical thinking seems like a great idea. Except, somewhere along the way, the education industry managed to royally screw things up. Everyone outside of the education industry sees what an abject failure this experiment has been, and typical response by nearly everyone involved is akin to a redditor shouting “sources? Sources!”. In fact, if you look on reddit forms for any criticism of common core or new math, the poster immediately gets shot down by 30 redditors screaming that the OP is just too stupid to understand… Read more »
This has been going on for decades so you now have the illiterates teaching the illiterates. Very few in this state care about education. The attitude in this city and state is ‘it’s like this everywhere’. Nothing to see here. Everyone just crawl back into your holes.