Illinois school report card continues to show wide achievement gaps
[October 31, 2025]
By Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD — The first school report card issued under Illinois’ new,
revised scoring system shows higher student proficiency rates in English
language arts and math, but continuing disparities between racial,
ethnic and economic subgroups.
The 2025 report card shows more than half of all students (52.4%) scored
proficient or better on English language arts exams, but only 38% met
grade-level proficiency standards for math.
Those numbers are based on standardized tests that students from third
grade through high school took in the spring 2025 semester. They reflect
a new scoring system the Illinois State Board of Education approved in
August that established new benchmarks for proficiency.
“Illinois’ previous benchmarks for English language arts proficiency
were the most restrictive in the country, resulting in the mislabeling
of high achieving college ready students as being not proficient,” State
Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said during a media briefing on
the report card.
“This meant that the students who were succeeding in school passing
advanced placement and dual credit courses, taking leadership roles
within their schools, enrolling in college and still being labeled as
not proficient on our state assessment.”
The change in scoring systems was expected to result in more students
being classified as proficient in reading and math, but fewer in
science. And that is what happened.
In 2024, only 39% of students who were tested scored proficient or
better in English language arts and only 28% did so in math. On the
science assessment, which is given to fifth and eighth grade students,
the proficiency rate dropped from 53.1% in 2024 to 44.6% in 2025.
But Sanders said the 2025 scores cannot really be compared with previous
years because the year-over-year changes are mostly the result of the
new scoring system, not a change in how well students performed.
However, he also said there were other indications that student
performance did improve in 2025.
“They would have increased if we had kept the same cut scores,” he said.
“However, we changed the cut scores, so we can’t tell you what they
would have been. But we know they would have improved.”
Performance gaps
All states have issued annual report cards since the 2002-2003 school
year when they were mandated by the federal law known as the No Child
Left Behind Act. They were intended as a tool to hold districts and
individual schools accountable for bringing all students up to a level
of proficiency in reading and math, and for improving their high school
graduation rates.
That also meant closing the persistent achievement gaps between racial,
ethnic and economic subgroups of students.
But the law also gave states flexibility to establish their own
standards for proficiency and to develop their own tests to measure
student performance.
In Illinois, most students in grades 3-8 take the Illinois Assessment of
Readiness for English language arts and Math. Students in fifth and
eighth grade also take the Illinois Science Assessment.
At the high school level, ninth and 10th grade students take the PreACT
Secure exam. High school juniors and some high school seniors take the
ACT with Writing, which includes tests in English, math, reading,
science and writing.
In Illinois, the 2025 report card shows there are still wide gaps in
proficiency rates between white, Black and Hispanic students in both
English language arts and math.
Among fourth graders, for example, 55.4% of white students scored
proficient or better in math, compared to 28.8% of Hispanic students and
17.4% of Black students.
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Among eighth graders, two-thirds of white students (66.6%) scored
proficient compared to just over one-third (36.7%) for Black students
and 45.4% for Hispanic students.
The 2025 report card also includes data for the first time for a newly
categorized ethnic group — “Middle Eastern or North African,”
abbreviated MENA in the data files.
Among MENA students, the 2025 report card showed a 53.9% proficiency
rate in fourth-grade English language arts and a 42.3% proficiency rate
for eighth-grade math.
Graduation rates
One area where Illinois has made progress in closing achievement gaps is
high school graduation rates.
In 2025, the statewide four-year graduation rate reached a 15-year high
of 89%. That was up 3.4 percentage points from a decade earlier. But the
rate was also up across all demographic groups, and the gap between
those groups narrowed significantly.
In 2015, the four-year graduation rate among white students was 90.2%.
That was 14.7 points higher than the Black graduation rate, and 9.5
points higher than the rate for Hispanic students.
In 2025, the graduation rate for white students inched up to 92.4%, but
it also rose among other groups. As a result, the gap between white and
Black students narrowed to just 9.5 percentage points, and the gap
between white students and Hispanic students narrowed to just 6 points.
Sanders gave credit for much of that improvement to the Evidence-Based
Funding formula, which lawmakers passed in 2017. That law called for
adding at least $300 million per year in new funding each year to the
state’s K-12 education budget.
Since then, Sanders said, Illinois has added more than $3 billion in EBF
funding to the budget, with the bulk of that money targeted toward the
least-funded school and earmarked for things specifically designed to
improve student outcomes.
“Districts have used these resources to expand interventions like summer
school,” he said. “They’ve added mentoring, credit recovery courses,
transition programs for English and math, and they broadened access to
career and technical education, advanced placement, international
baccalaureate and dual credit. These opportunities keep students engaged
and on track for success.”
Other findings
The report card also contains data on several other measures of the
state’s education system.
The number of full-time equivalent teachers working in Illinois reached
a new high of 137,899, an increase of 687 from the previous year. The
teaching workforce also became slightly more racially diverse, with
21.1% of them classified as nonwhite, compared to 20.4% last year. But
total student enrollment decreased slightly to just under 1.85 million.
Chronic absenteeism declined for the third consecutive year in 2025 but
still remained high at 25.4%. Students are classified as chronically
absent if they miss 10% or more of the days in a school year, regardless
of whether the absence is excused or not. The rate shot up during the
COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a peak of 29.8% in 2022.
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by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. |
