Illinois Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders | Photo by Andrew Adams
Peter Hancock | Capitol News Illinois
SPRINGFIELD – Illinois education officials plan to launch a statewide initiative over the next several months aimed at boosting student performance in math.
State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders made that announcement during a recent media briefing to unveil the most recent school report card. That annual report shows how individual schools, districts, and the state as a whole are performing across a wide range of educational measures, including academic performance in English language arts, and math.
“This will be the first-of-its-kind effort here in the state of Illinois,” he said. “As a state, we adopted new learning standards for math in 2010, but there’s never been a concerted statewide effort to provide support to educators in understanding and implementing these shifts in instruction.”
The new report, which is based on standardized tests students took in the spring of 2024, shows student scores in English language arts have fully recovered statewide from the hit they took during the pandemic.
More than 39% of all students scored at or above the state standards for proficiency in English language arts, including a record-high 41% for students in grades 3-8.
But in math, where proficiency rates have always been lower, overall scores remained troublingly low. Only about 28% of all students, and 28.3% of students in grades 3-8, met or exceeded state standards for proficiency.
Math scores also continued to show disturbing gaps across racial and ethnic lines. Across all grade levels, 38% of white students met the state’s proficiency standard, compared to just 15.3% of Hispanic students and 8.9% of Black students.
More students are proficient in reading than before the pandemic
On state tests, 41% of Illinois students reached a “proficient” score for reading, outpacing pre-pandemic levels. Math scores are more slowly recovering, still about 5% lower than pre-pandemic scores.
Sanders cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions from those numbers, noting that Illinois sets a relatively high bar for what qualifies as “proficient.”
The report card divides test scores into five broad categories, based on the state’s definition of “proficient.” The two highest categories are “met” and “exceeded” the standard. Below those are “approached,” “partially met,” and “did not meet” the standard.
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