Daily Herald opinion: The right direction, but …: Education report shows Illinois schools still have work to do to reach achievement goals
As is often the case with such reports, there is much that is encouraging to be found in a newly released education advocacy group’s update on the current state of education in Illinois — and much that suggests a need for attention.
Interestingly, both conditions can apply to the same topic, namely education funding.
Perhaps the least surprising and most consequential finding of the Advance Illinois report titled “The State We’re In” is that the 2017 legislative overhaul of education funding is having a perceptible impact on the quality of schools — and especially on the equality of opportunity among schools — in Illinois.
“One of the things that’s showing up in the data is that those districts that were deeply underfunded and severely understaffed are adding teachers, adding counselors, adding social workers,” Advance Illinois President Robin Steans told Capitol News Illinois in a story we published Thursday. “It’s good that they’re in a position to do that.”
Indeed it is. But there are worrisome signs, too. For while the state K-12 education spending increased by nearly $1,500 per student in 2023 compared to 2019, students’ proficiency levels have not risen accordingly on state assessment exams.
That is not necessarily alarming because many factors are at play in analyzing test results. But an overall sense of stagnancy does lead to natural questions about how effectively all those new teachers, counselors and social workers are being used in the education of Illinois’ schoolchildren.
The report references lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is not unreasonable to believe that such impacts remain. But, it is also not unreasonable to expect to see some significant rebounds now that the pandemic is at least three years behind us.
Steans and other educators take some comfort in noting that Illinois’ ranking in some key subject areas has increased, but it is hard to celebrate those advances when you consider that they come not because Illinois students are doing better, but because other states’ results are declining. Still, it’s obvious we are, as Steans said, moving in the right direction.
“Between third and eighth grade, you want to show five years of academic progress, at least,” Steans said. “We have typically beat that five years, and we’re typically in the top 10 performing states. We’re now second and third in the nation in reading and math for the growth that we’re getting between third and eighth grade.”
It would be wonderful, of course, if a report like “The State We’re In” could declare that everything in Illinois education is chugging along on all cylinders and all we have to do is to keep doing what we’re doing. But in fields as complicated and diverse as providing and measuring the ability of young people to adapt to the demands of a world changing more rapidly than perhaps at any time in history, it would be a remarkable circumstance indeed if we could be so bold.
The true silver lining in the Advance Illinois report, then, is not that it claims Illinois students are achieving all we could hope for but that it shows some places where we can look to learn how to get to that point.