Few Illinois third-grade students can read at grade level. Even fewer low-income and minority students are at grade level in reading. Research shows this is a warning sign for Illinois students’ academic success and adult earning potential.
Just over one-fourth of all third-grade students in Illinois can read at grade level. For low-income and minority students, reading proficiency is even worse.
A student’s “academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing someone’s reading skill at the end of third grade,” according to the National Research Council.
By this measure, the outlook for Illinois third-grade students is grim. Even more troubling is the outlook for Illinois students from low-income and minority families.
What’s at stake isn’t just poor grades on report cards in third grade, but what poor reading proficiency means for students’ futures. As noted in the research to follow, the poor rates of reading proficiency plaguing Illinois threaten to condemn a portion of the state’s future adults to poverty. The price will be paid not just by the children our education system fails but also by society at large.
Third-grade literacy in Illinois
Statewide in 2022, only 27.4% of all students could read at grade level by the end of third grade. A startling 89% of the 734 school districts for which the Illinois State Board of Education recorded proficiency rates among third graders had a higher percentage of third-grade students failing to read at grade level than reading at grade level. There were 12 school districts in which no third-grade students were proficient at reading.
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