What to know about Illinois education as students head back to school

Students in Illinois are steadily returning to class across Illinois’ 852 school districts, where improvement is needed on the 35% of elementary students who can read at grade level. What to know about how well the state’s public schools are preparing students for life.

Students are either back in school across Illinois or gearing up for their first day in a state where only 35% of elementary students read at grade level and 27% met math standards in 2023.

Here are measures of how public schools in the state are performing and what parents can expect as their children return to classrooms.

Learning in Illinois

The most recent test scores available for Illinois students show many students are still struggling to meet grade-level standards in core subjects, despite small improvements in reading and math proficiency rates.

There were 35% of students in third through eighth grade who could read at grade level in 2023. Only 27% met proficiency in math.

Illinois state education administrators celebrated “strong progress” for Illinois students as proficiency in both reading and math increased between 2022 and 2023. But what remained consistent was fewer students were performing at or above grade level in 2023 than prior to the pandemic, when the proficiency rate was 38% in reading and 32% in math.

Among 11th-grade students in 2023, 32% were proficient in reading on the SAT and 27% were proficient in math, compared to 36% and 34% in 2019.

An added concern is the number of elementary schools in which no third-grade students could read at grade level in the spring of 2023. Third grade is a critical reading milestone because students need to have learned to read by then or they will not be able to absorb the rest of their education.

In the most recent test data available from spring 2023, not even 29% of Illinois third-grade students met or exceeded reading proficiency standards on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness. That means 7 in 10 third graders could not read at grade level.

Not a single third-grade student could read at grade level in 81 of Illinois’ public schools. Chicago Public Schools accounted for 51 of those.

Enrollment

Illinois public schools enrolled 1,853,391 students in prekindergarden through 12th grade in the 2023-2024 school year, according to the Illinois State Board of Education’s fall enrollment count. That marked a drop of 4,399 students last school year compared to the public school enrollment count from the Illinois Report Card for the 2022-2023 school year. This marks the first school year since 2015 in which the drop in enrollment is fewer than 10,000 students.

Year-over-year enrollment in Illinois public schools has dropped 13 times during the past 15 years. There were only two periods, in the 2010-2011 and 2014-2015 school years, where year-over-year enrollment has increased.

Students skipping school

Chronic absenteeism in Illinois public schools remained high in 2023 in the state’s most recent data, threatening students’ academic progress – especially for low-income students.

High absenteeism is a warning sign for students, as research suggests frequent absences from school put students at a higher risk of poor outcomes, such as dropping out of school and lower academic achievement.

About 28% of Illinois students were chronically absent in the 2022-2023 school year. That compares to a rate of 17.5% in the last full school year before the pandemic.

The rate was 10 percentage points higher among Illinois’ low-income students: 38% missed at least 10% of their school days in 2023.

School spending

Illinois continues to spend more on education each year. In the 2024-2025 school year, Illinois’ general funds budget for K-12 public education reached a record $10.9 billion, an increase of nearly $525 million since the previous year.

Illinois education budgets have increased by $4.4 billion during the past decade. Illinois’ general fund education budget was $6.5 billion 10 years ago during the 2015-2016 school year when Illinois enrolled over 188,000 more students. The general fund budget has only decreased once year-over-year during the past decade, with it dropping by $113.9 million between the 2014-2015 school year and the 2015-2016 school year.

Looking ahead

As the new school year begins, leaders at Illinois public schools should be looking to address the low rates of proficiency, high rates of absenteeism and other critical issues facing the state’s public schools if they hope to reverse students exiting the public school system.

But more important than reversing Illinois’ enrollment declines is ensuring every Illinois student graduates their public school with the skills necessary to succeed in life beyond secondary school.

A vital first step is to ensure more third grade students are equipped to read proficiently by the end of their school year.

It’s time Illinoisans took note of the poor proficiency rates plaguing the state’s schoolchildren. There is more at stake than bad grades for young Illinoisans who are struggling to learn vital literacy skills in their early school years. Elementary students need intervention now before their lack of childhood learning becomes a barrier to a high school diploma and higher earning potential, and a slide into poverty.