Advance Illinois Statement on the 2023 Illinois State Report Card
Today, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) released its 2023 Illinois Report Card. There is good news on several key measures and encouraging signs that students are continuing to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, two areas of caution: First, most would agree that we should seek to exceed pre-pandemic performance, which generally underperformed the nation and included unacceptable equity gaps. Second, persistent disparities across lines of race, ethnicity, and family income, a continued decline in college enrollment numbers, and troubling rates of chronic absenteeism and teacher attendance make it clear there is more work ahead.
The promising news:
Following steep setbacks in reading and math proficiency during the height of pandemic in 2021, student proficiency in English Language Arts has continued to rebound, especially in the middle grades, and most notably for 8th grade students. While this is good news, (1) both reading and math remain below pre-pandemic levels, with math proficiency showing little sign of recovery, (2) proficiency levels remain below pre-pandemic levels in both ELA and Math, and (3) troubling disparities across income and race continue.
High school graduation rates largely held steady from SY21-22 to SY22-23, but continue to exceed pre-pandemic levels by 1.6%.
As importantly, the SY22-23 9th grade on track rates (strong predictors of high school graduation three years later) held steady, and continue to surpass pre-pandemic levels, suggesting graduation rates will remain stable at these higher rates for future cohorts.
These highlights are cause for celebration and are a credit to the hard work of our schools and educators to support students in making up lost ground caused by the pandemic. Still, as the report card makes plain, we have largely not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, and racial, ethnic, and income disparities across these and other measures – disparities that widened during COVID – require ongoing attention and investment.
While almost all student groups saw progress in 3-8 English Language Arts (ELA), Black students saw the largest percentage point increase in rates of proficiency, helping to shrink disparities that widened during the pandemic. Still, Black students as well as Latinx students continue to fall behind their white peers when it comes to both Math and ELA proficiency.
Although 9th grade on track rates stayed relatively stable, gaps remain among student groups. While Black student 9th grade on track rates have increased significantly--from 74.5% pre-pandemic in 2019 to 78.9% in 2023--that rate falls significantly short of the state average.
And while high school graduation rates remained relatively the same from 2022, and Black and Latinx graduation rates have increased from 2019 to 2023, significant gaps remain among student groups. Graduation rates were 7.5% lower for Black students (80.1%), 16% for students with disabilities (78.7%), and 4.9% for Latinx students (85.5%). Furthermore, students’ SAT scores remain stubbornly low at pre-pandemic levels with significant gaps by race.
On top of this, many students and in particular Black students, continue to be missing a significant portion of the school year. While there was a small improvement in chronic absenteeism, of about 1.5 percentage points—29.8% in SY21-22 and 28.3% in SY22-23– nearly a third of all Ilinois students are missing critical instruction time. This is deeply troubling. It is even more so when we discover even higher rates of chronic absenteeism among Illinois’ Black students and students from low-income households. This is unacceptable, and we are grateful for ISBE’s investments in its Regional Offices of Education, SEL hubs, community partnerships and other programming meant to address this crisis.
Aligning with what we’re seeing nationally, and with pre-pandemic trends, college enrollment continued to decline amid the pandemic, with just 65% of the class of SY20-21 enrolling in a 2- or 4-year college after graduation, down from 73.5% for the Class of 2017.
Our recent report, The State of Our Educator Pipeline, 2023, report, showed concerning teacher attendance rates in SY21-22. Sadly, while rates were low in SY21-22 (66%), they fell in SY22-23 to 64.4%. Put another way, fewer than two-thirds of our teachers were in attendance for at least 95% of school days. As Illinois deals with a shortage of substitutes to cover for teachers who are out, this is of significant concern – both in terms of supporting our teachers, and in terms of the impact this trend has on students. The extent of staffing challenges for this most recent year will come into sharper focus when unfilled positions data is released in January of 2024.
Today, we appreciate ISBE’s acknowledgement of the persisting challenges and where they are rooted: underinvestment in the very school districts that need resources the most – districts that disproportionately serve students from low-income households, Black and Latinx students, and students with disabilities, and districts that saw disproportionate impacts from COVID. Fortunately, since 2018, the Evidence-based Funding formula has—with the exception of one year—directed new state dollars to the districts farthest from the adequate level of funding needed to ensure all students have access to quality education experiences. What’s more, we applaud ISBE for the measures and programs it has put in place to accelerate student recovery and do so equitably. But it is clear that more support and more investment from our state, for our students, our teachers, and our schools is urgently needed to support academic outcomes that exceed pre-pandemic levels.
We celebrate schools for the progress to date as they dig in to further engage, educate, and support students in this current academic year, but we also call on state leaders and elected officials to heed the alarms embedded in this data: more must be done.