Absenteeism and academic struggles mar Illinois public school stats

(The Center Square) – Illinois public schools are aiming to improve academic proficiency numbers in the 2024-2025 school year.

According to the Illinois Board of Education’s most recent Illinois Report Card, 27% of Illinois’ public-school students in grades K-12 are meeting grade-level standards in math with 35% meeting grade-level standards for English and Language Arts proficiency.

Mariana Barragan Torres, research specialist for the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative at the University of Illinois, told The Center Square that Illinois is recovering from pandemic-related losses in learning.

“So what we see in the data is that elementary and middle-school student scores are almost back to what they were before the pandemic, especially in English, however, this is not the case in math,” she said.

High school students seem to be stuck in both reading and math, as indicated by SAT scores, Barragan Torres said.

“Their scores have been decreasing consistently since the beginning of the pandemic, with no recovery across either subject,” Barragan Torres said.

Enrollment numbers in Illinois public schools have declined each of the last eight years, while chronic absenteeism rates have risen dramatically.

The 2023 Illinois Report Card showed a chronic absenteeism rate of 28.3% in public schools, up from 16.8% in 2018.

Barragan Torres said students are missing too many classes.

“We see that there has been a tremendous increase in both chronic absenteeism and also just average absenteeism rates across the entire state,” Barragan Torres said.

The Illinois Report Card measures absenteeism by the percentage of students who miss 10% or more of school days per year. The state average is 28.3%.

Barragan Torres said there are more substantial absenteeism rates among high school students and in urban areas.

East St. Louis School District 189 students have a chronic absenteeism rate of 65%, while the district spends $25,000 per student in taxpayer dollars.

Chicago Public Schools students have a chronic absenteeism rate of 40%. CPS spends $18,000 per student.

It’s a different story in Effingham, where the chronic absenteeism rate in CUSD 40 is 19% and the district spends $9,900 per student.

Carterville CUSD 5 spends $11,000 per student. The district’s chronic absenteeism rate is 14%.

Barragan Torres said there is concern that districts will no longer be receiving federal emergency funding for extending learning and tutoring programs.

“Finding the resources to really promote the type of programs that we know work as well as focusing on the areas where we know they’re most needed is going to be really important to try to maximize and spend these resources in the most efficient way,” Barragan Torres explained.

Illinois taxpayers are currently spending on average more than $16,000 per student annually in the state’s public schools.