4 things wrong with how Illinois leaders want to change public schooling
A report outlining public education reform in Illinois doesn’t address a core issue facing students: reading proficiency. It also lowers standards for students and threatens to muddle the understanding of students’ progress.
A new vision for Illinois public education has been released by eight Illinois education organizations, but it fails to address one of the core issues facing Illinois students: poor literacy.
Neither literacy nor reading specifically is mentioned a single time in the report.
The Vision 2030 report is intended to articulate what “the education community stands for and aspires to realize.” But what it reveals is the stakeholders in Illinois public schools want less rigor, less accountability and less transparency.
A few of the actions recommended by the report include calling for the state to lower proficiency benchmarks for students and switching Illinois’ current state assessments from outcome-based assessments to more holistic assessments.
Just 2 in 5 students in third through eighth grade can read at grade level on state assessments. Even fewer 11th graders met grade-level reading standards in 2024.
Here are four things you should know about the report’s failure to address literacy and recommendations which could ultimately harm students.
1. Vision 2030 lacks needed literacy reform measures
There is a literacy epidemic facing Illinois students, especially young Illinois learners.
Yet literacy was not mentioned once in the Vision 2030 report, authored by the Illinois Association of School Administrators, Illinois Principals Association, Illinois Association of School Boards, Illinois Association of School Business Officials, the Superintendents’ Commission for the Study of Demographics and Diversity, Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, Illinois Alliance of Administrators of Special Education and the Association of Illinois Rural and Small Schools.
Studies show third grade marks a critical literacy point for students. In Illinois, only 31% of third graders met proficiency standards on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness in spring 2024. Research shows these low levels of proficiency threaten the wellbeing of students throughout their lives.
“Students who do not ‘learn to read’ during the first three years of school experience enormous difficulty when they are subsequently asked to ‘read to learn,’” according to the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators. If a student struggles to read at grade level by the end of third grade, up to half of the printed fourth-grade curriculum is incomprehensible.
A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation warns about the harms of a student’s inability to read effectively by the end of third grade. The research shows a student’s likelihood to graduate high school can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by their reading skill at the end of third grade. By the beginning of fourth grade, students transition from learning to read to reading to learn math, social studies and the rest of the curriculum.
The foundation warns “if we don’t get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty, and the price will be paid not only by individual children and families, but by this entire country.”
The low literacy rate among Illinois’ early learners is a core issue facing the Illinois public education system. Education organizations and lawmakers can learn from major advances in states such as Mississippi and Florida to promote meaningful literacy reform in Illinois.
2. Vision 2030 lowers proficiency benchmarks for students
Rather than addressing literacy, the Vision 2030 report calls for reforms to the way Illinois assesses student achievement. Specifically, it recommends lowering the proficiency benchmarks for students rather than investing in measures to increase the percentage of students meeting current standards.
The organizations authoring the report argue this change would align proficiency benchmarks to national distributions. This doesn’t mean aligning Illinois’ state proficiency benchmarks to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ proficiency benchmarks, but rather to lower Illinois’ benchmarks because Illinois students currently outperform the national average on the NAEP.
But outperforming the national average is a low bar for students. Even as Illinois students outperform the national average on the NAEP, most Illinois students do not meet NAEP’s proficiency benchmarks.
If anything, Illinois’ performance on the Nation’s Report Card shows Illinois’ benchmarks are appropriately aligned with national distributions yet under-aligned to national standards.
In reading, 32% of fourth graders and 29% of eighth graders nationally met or exceeded proficiency standards on the NAEP in 2022. In Illinois, students slightly outperformed the national average with 33% of fourth graders proficient in reading and 32% of eighth graders. But Illinois’ outperformance of national averages still meant only 1 in 3 students met NAEP proficiency standards in reading.
The story is similar for math proficiency rates. The national average math proficiency rate is 35% for fourth graders and 26% for eighth graders. In Illinois, a higher 38% of fourth graders met NAEP’s math proficiency standards and 27% of eighth graders were proficient.
Illinois students in third through eighth grade take the Illinois Assessment of Readiness each spring. In 2022, the most recent school year in which there is data for both the IAR and NAEP, there was a discrepancy in the percent of students proficient on the Illinois assessment compared to the percent proficient on the NAEP.
But looking back on 2019, prior to the pandemic-era school closures and the subsequent learning and testing issues, Illinois students’ proficiency on the IAR largely aligned with proficiency on the NAEP.
In reading, Illinois students were more proficient on the state assessment in 2019 than on the NAEP, disrupting suggestions that Illinois’ reading proficiency benchmark is higher than the national benchmark.
3. Vision 2030’s suggested lower standards could harm students
There are unintended harms to lowering proficiency benchmarks. It is not in students’ best interests to lower assessment standards so more students can meet proficiency benchmarks, especially in the wake of pandemic-era proficiency declines.
While the Vision 2030 report claims the effort to lower proficiency benchmarks would create a “transparent definition” and would “ensure a more accurate reflection of student performance,” researchers warn it misleads parents.
Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher, has been tracking students’ recovery from COVID learning losses and said, “Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are lagging behind. Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”
Lowering the proficiency benchmarks threatens to not only mislead parents but also to leave some students without the academic support they need. Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, explained schools use proficiency benchmarks to determine if students need extra help. Lowering the bar could mean some students don’t receive the aid they need.
4. Vision 2030 muddles the ability to understand how students are really performing
In addition to lowering standards, the Vision 2030 report recommends Illinois make other changes in how students are assessed and how schools are held accountable. The changes threaten to muddle parents’ and the public’s understanding of how Illinois students and schools are performing.
One recommendation is to change the current student assessment system itself by implementing an assessment which would track a student’s growth over time rather than only measure proficiency at a particular grade level. The report argues this would better fulfil the goal of Illinois’ assessment system to “measure academic proficiency and growth against grade-level learning standards… [and] accurately measure growth over time.”
While there is disagreement on the most effective method for schools to assess students –whether through standardized or adaptive or other assessments – the move to a new assessment system threatens to harm the ability of families, school personnel and others to analyze changes in student performance over time. New assessments – or new benchmarks – would make analyses of student performance in coming years against the performance of students in years prior to the assessment or benchmark change difficult, if not impossible. We’ve already seen that with the implementation of Common Core State Standards and Illinois’ previous changes of state assessments which created greater difficulty in comparing students one year to the next. In higher grades, the same can be said for switching from a required SAT to a required ACT in 11th grade. Once that switch happens this year, there will be a disruption in data. That makes it difficult to assess any increases or decreases in proficiency as displayed through those tests.
The report also recommends reforming the state’s current accountability system. It ultimately seeks to reevaluate Illinois’ current system of outcomes-based accountability for schools to focus on more “holistic views of student success,” which would mean giving more weight to student growth as opposed to actually meeting proficiency benchmarks. Specifically, it recommends giving more weight to academic growth for students who are scoring below proficiency benchmarks and less weight on student growth for students who are proficient.
It also calls for a de-emphasis on chronic absenteeism as “an isolated metric” and instead to assess chronic absenteeism as just one metric within a set of student success and readiness indicators.
Illinois needs more robust education reform
The Illinois public school system is not preparing students to perform at grade level as evidenced by the low rates of reading and math proficiency on Illinois’ state assessments. But the answer is not to hide the struggles of Illinois students by lowering proficiency standards or changing tests.
Reforms are needed in Illinois. Vision 2030 fails to address one of the core issues facing Illinois: literacy. It is imperative for the state to get more students on track to read proficiently, and that means using science-based literacy instruction as Florida and Mississippi have done.
Illinois education leaders can adjust standards all they want, but it won’t solve the problem: most Illinois children can’t read at grade level. Their futures are bleaker as a result.