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| Illinois school report card slips even further |
| 2023-11-08 |
| [American Thinker] On October 30, the Illinois State Board of Education released the 2023 Illinois School Report Card, which reveals that the Prairie State is failing miserably in one of its most basic and essential tasks: properly educating the next generation of Illinoisans to thrive in an increasingly competitive world. "We are moving fast toward recovery, but we still have a significant distance to travel," said State Superintendent of Education Dr. Tony Sanders. While Sanders is correct in admitting that there is ample work to be done, his assessment that the state is on the fast track to recovery is quite a stretch considering academic achievement is stagnant at best, and in many cases, is trending in the wrong direction. Consider. The Illinois Assessment of Readiness measures math and English language arts (ELA) skills for all Illinois students enrolled in public schools for grades three to eight. In 2023, only 35.4 percent of Illinois public school students met or exceeded proficiency levels for ELA and only 27.1 percent met or exceeded proficiency levels for math. In 2019, 37.8 percent of students met or exceeded ELA proficiency standards and 31.8 percent met or exceeded proficiency levels in math. Moving on to high school, where the SAT is used as the general assessment tool, only 31.6 percent of Illinois students met or exceeded the proficiency standard for ELA whereas 36.3 percent scored proficient in 2019. In math, a similar trend emerges. In 2023, 26.7 percent of Illinois high schoolers scored proficient in math. In 2019, the number was 34.4 percent. On the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), "the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas," Illinois students performed far worse in 2023 than they did in 2019. For instance, in 2019, 56 percent of Illinois fourth graders scored proficient in ELA. In 2023, that dropped to 31 percent. Even worse, the percentage of Illinois fourth graders who tested proficient in math decreased from 69 percent in 2019 to an abysmal 21 percent in 2023. Similar trends are found in NAEP ELA and math scores for Illinois’ eighth graders. In 2019, 69 percent scored proficient or higher in ELA versus only 34 percent in 2023. Likewise, in 2019, 60 percent of eighth graders tested proficient in math while just 26 percent did so in 2023. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #4 well a lot of middle class people have moved out of Illinois taking their relatively high achievement children out of the school so the 2019 and 2023 demographics, parents education levels and income distribution may be way different in these two years |
| Posted by: lord garth 2023-11-08 16:11 |
| #3 This is what Chicago wants - so gratz to them. The rest of the state? |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2023-11-08 11:44 |
| #2 If you split Chicago out of the averages, how does the state look? |
| Posted by: James 2023-11-08 10:03 |
| #1 ...failing miserably in one of its most basic and essential tasks Because all the main participants* in the system are not interested in reading, writing and arithmetic. Period. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-11-08 07:33 |