The Illinois State Board of Education failed to publish diagnostic reports required by the Invest in Kids Act to track scholarship recipients’ progress starting in 2019. State lawmakers are letting the program expire without seeing a single report.
By Patrick Andriesen | Illinois Policy
The Illinois State Board of Education routinely failed to publish annual reports mandated by the Invest in Kids Act tracking scholarship recipients’ educational gains against public school students’ since 2019.
Those reports were intended to tell state lawmakers whether the experiment was working. The program is ending without that information.
When asked why the reports had not been published to the Illinois State Board of Education website, a spokesperson for the department provided this response: first year, not required; second year, pandemic; third year, low participation; fourth and fifth years, being compiled.
Lawmakers adjourned Nov. 9 and won’t return to Springfield until mid-January, allowing the program to expire at the end of this year. State lawmakers took no action and Gov. J.B. Pritzker invested no political capital in saving the program that gave a choice of schools to over 9,600 low-income students.
Section 45 of the Invest in Kids Act required ISBE to publish annual reports on their website tracking program participants’ educational improvements starting in the 2019-2020 academic year. There are no reports.
These diagnostic reports were supposed to include, to the extent possible, annual comparisons of how Invest in Kids scholarship recipients’ standardized test scores measured against Illinois public school students of similar socioeconomic means.
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