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.
By Hannah Schmid | Illinois Policy Institute
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.
Read the 3 others here.
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