The public education system in Illinois is so egregious that families who send their children to its schools might as well not send them at all.
That’s the takeaway from a new report highlighting the many educational failures in the state’s schools, which were struggling to meet basic standards of learning well before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
In 2019, just 36% of third grade students were able to read at a grade level, according to the report by Wirepoints, which was highlighted by the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Among minority students, that number dropped even further. Just 27% of Hispanic students and 22% of black students in third grade statewide were able to read. And in the worst-performing school districts, such as Macon County, only 2% of black third graders were able to read, and just 1% were able to do math.
The numbers are stunning, but those familiar with Illinois’s education system know this is a long-running problem. Data gathered in 2018 showed 83% of third grade students in Rockford Public Schools were unable to read at their grade level. In 2016, two-thirds of students across all grade levels failed to meet basic proficiency levels in reading and mathematics.
Pandemic school closures accelerated the Illinois public education system’s decline, with students in Chicago Public Schools suffering a 70% drop in reading proficiency and an 80% drop in math.
Meanwhile, Illinois’s leaders are busy figuring out how to inject woke liberalism into every corner of the classroom. In February of last year, the state’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules passed a new rule called “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” that, among other things, tells public school teachers they must “embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.” So don’t worry: Your third grader might not be able to read and write, but he will be able to rank his privilege and tell you his pronouns.
Don’t bother holding out hope for a reckoning within the system. As the Journal noted, 97.3% of teachers in Macon County were rated as “excellent” or “proficient” in 2017, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. And even as test scores continue to drop, funding for public school districts continues to grow. Chicago’s public schools, for example, will collect more than $7 billion from taxpayer dollars in fiscal year 2023. For comparison, in fiscal year 2010, the district’s budget was $4.5 billion.
How can we fix a system that is so irreparably broken that it not only condemns children to failure year after year after year, but rewards itself for doing so? There is only one solution: Illinois families have to be able to leave the system for good.
Those who can afford to do so are already leaving Illinois’s public schools in droves. Chicago Public Schools alone have lost 80,000 students over the past 12 years. But there are tens of thousands more who are trapped in failing schools because they can’t afford to pay for better alternatives.
If Illinois truly cared about its students and hoped for their success, it would pass school choice reform and give families the financial freedom to help their children learn. Sadly, the teachers unions and state Democrats responsible for driving the Illinois public education system into the ground in the first place have a vested interest in making sure that never happens. This leaves Illinois families with only one other option: Vote every last one of them out of office, or pray that your child becomes the exception in the state’s public school system rather than the norm.
