Navigating the Report Card

How Is The Report Card Organized?

The Report Card begins with a demographic profile of the Illinois education system. it is then organized into three sections — Early Education, K-12, and Post-Secondary Attainment. Each section provides data on Key Outcomes, as well as relevant Conditions for Learning & Leading Indicators.

What Data Is Provided?

We have focused on those indicators that are most important in illuminating how well we are educating our children. We acknowledge that we could have added more indicators, that some indicators are sub-optimal, and that data cannot capture all things that matter. We hope and expect that this list of indicators will change over time, as research and data collection methods evolve.

For each indicator, we show the:

•    Current value for Illinois based on the most recent data available;
•    Two years’ prior value, to indicate whether our performance has been improving or declining;
•    Leading state data and Illinois’ rank in the nation, to show how Illinois stacks up against other states (in time, our aim should be to compare ourselves to international leaders);
•    Equity gap data, which breaks down information wherever possible by race, socioeconomic status, and special education status to show how effectively we are moving all groups forward.

Why Keep Indicators with Missing Data?

In some instances we do not have data to populate an indicator. Where a measure is nonetheless important, we chose to keep these lines in the Report Card in order to highlight where a data solution is needed. Thanks to a newly approved longitudinal data system, some of this data is on the way.

How Is Illinois Doing?

To provide a quick snapshot of our performance, we have assigned a letter grade for each of the report’s three main sections. Grades have been determined by looking at how Illinois ranks on each indicator and then taking an average score across those measurements. If Illinois’ average ranking of the indicators in that section is in the top 10 states, that would earn Illinois an A. If the average rank is between the 11th state and the 20th state, that earns a B; 21st to 30th a C; 31st to 40th a D; and if Illinois’ average ranking is in the bottom 10 states across all the indicators in the section, that would earn Illinois an F.

For each indicator, we have also issued sub-grades based state rankings. These are communicated as color codes:

• Green: if Illinois ranks in the top 15% of ranked states in the category
• Yellow: if Illinois ranks between the top 15%–35% in the category;
• Red: if Illinois ranks in the bottom 65% of states in the category.
• INC. Incomplete: means there is insufficient data to reach a judgment.

We also provide color grades for the state’s performance against equity gaps. To do this, we divide the performance of the lowest scoring group by the state’s performance as a whole. Where the lowest performing group achieves less than 80% of the state’s performance we assign a red grade.

It’s worth noting that although our ratings are based on comparisons with other U.S. states, the U.S. has been losing ground to international peers. That makes poor grades all the more worrisome and means that even good grades do not justify complacency. In the future, we will benchmark our performance against other countries as well.