SAT scores are dropping for high school students in Illinois and Chicago. Here’s how Illinois’ 20 largest school districts compared to the state average in reading and math.
Illinois’ 11th grade students will again take the SAT in April, a measure of their reading and math abilities that tells the state how well it is educating high school students as well as how ready they are for college.
Statewide, there’s been a decline. In Chicago, the story is the same.
The 20 largest school districts are mainly in Chicago and its collar counties. Here’s a look at how students did statewide and how the largest 20 districts performed against the statewide average.
Statewide performance on the SAT
Illinois 11th grade students scored on average 486.4 on the reading portion of the SAT and 473.8 on math in spring 2022. This marked a nearly 10- and 13-point drop in reading and math since the previous academic year, and an 11- and 23-point drop since 2019, the last test year prior to the pandemic.
Since 2017, the first year in which Illinois used the SAT rather than the ACT to measure high school students’ academic progress, average SAT scores statewide have decreased each year.
Illinois bucked the national trend of decreased participation on the SAT, because Illinois requires all high school juniors to take the SAT to graduate from high school.
SAT scores in the 20 largest school districts in Illinois
Among Illinois’ 20 largest school districts based on 2022 enrollment, nine districts scored above the statewide average in reading on the SAT. In math, 10 scored higher than average.
Of those 20 districts, the highest performing was Naperville Community Unit School District 203, with an average reading score of 567.1 and 564.7 in math. Waukegan Community Unit School District 60 registered at the lowest with a reading score of 418.6 and math score of 402.4. Districtwide, nearly 70% of Waukegan’s student body is low-income, but just 15% of Naperville’s students classify as low-income.
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