Advance Illinois Statement on the 2025 Illinois Report Card
Data in the 2025 Illinois Report Card offer a nuanced view of how Illinois K-12 schools and students are faring – with reasons to celebrate, as well as areas where further attention and work will be needed to ensure every Illinois student has the resources and supports needed to thrive.
"It is encouraging to see continued gains on some critical metrics and some narrowing disparities between student groups – Illinois students are continuing to recover from COVID, and it shows,” said Robin Steans, Advance Illinois President. “But inequities persist and some stagnating and worrisome data points underscore important ongoing challenges.”
Where We’re Celebrating
Most notably, Illinois students are graduating from high school at among the highest rates in years. This past school year, the 4-year graduation rate was 89% - reflecting an increase from the previous year and an ongoing upward trend. Importantly, continued improvement on this metric was seen across student groups, and while disparities persist, gaps are closing. Further, it is worth highlighting the strong growth of English Learners. Indeed, their gap to the overall graduation rate was 14.2 percentage points pre-pandemic, and has shrunk to 8.7 percentage points. This progress can be attributed to the tireless and collaborative work of educators, families, and the students themselves.
It comes as little surprise, then, that a key indicator for high school graduation - 9th grade on track – continues to improve as well. The 9th grade on track rate increased from 88.2% in 2024 to 89.3% in 2025. And while equity gaps persist across student groups, for Black students, the gap to the statewide average has shrunk markedly since 2019, from 12.1 percentage points to 7.8 percentage points in 2025. Students with IEPs also showed significant progress and are surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
Thanks to the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS), we have a window into children’s readiness as they begin K-12 schooling. Since its launch in 2018, an overall increase in the assessment’s participation rate is allowing educators and state officials to gain more accurate insight into the needs of young learners. There has been significant growth in the percent of incoming kindergartners demonstrating readiness across all 3 developmental domains since 2018, and steady improvement in the number of students not ready in any area. That said, results were largely flat this year. We will continue monitoring these metrics closely – the survey being an important tool for identifying instructional and intervention needs early on to ensure every child gets a strong start in school.
What We’re Watching
In 2024, the state announced it would revert to the ACT for its required high school accountability assessment. At the same time, the state also changed the benchmarks it would use to report proficiency, and changed the way in which it shares data from this assessment. As we all adjust to these changes and although the ACT has undergone its own changes since the last statewide administration in 2017, it is worth noting that the composite score for state students on the ACT is 18.8, over a point below state composite averages when the ACT was last administered statewide. Moreover, using the proficiency rates reported by the state, it is clear that significant gaps in English Language Arts and Math exist across lines of race and income. While more administration of the test is needed to fairly assess how students are doing, 2025 Report Card data highlights significant gaps to the statewide averages for proficiency— 51.7% in Math and 39.3% in reading among student groups, and most demonstrably for Black and Latinx students.
Similarly, a recent change to IAR cut scores for determining proficiency means we are unable to compare proficiency rates from 2025 with those of 2024 and years prior. We expect to have access to the underlying scale scores in the coming weeks, and will plan to analyze and issue a statement on what that data reveal about the underlying gains that students may have experienced. Regardless, in the elementary grades, too, equity gaps persist: where White and Asian students outperform the state average, Black and Latinx students perform below the state average in both Math and ELA. Report Card data show that English Learners, students with disabilities, have IEPs or are from low-income households are also proficient at rates much lower than the statewide average. Indeed, students with IEPs have the lowest proficiency rate of any other student group, suggesting more targeted support is needed.
Stewarding our Educator Pipeline to Support Our Students
We applaud the state for its ongoing work to build the educator workforce. The efforts are paying off with ongoing and steady growth as the state added nearly 700 teachers last year. Since 2019, teacher FTE has grown by more than 5%, reducing class sizes considerably. At the same time, teacher retention is also high and surpassing pre-pandemic levels, posting a 3.8 percentage point increase from 2019. But there’s still work to do. Despite the increasing diversity of Illinois’ k-12 student population, teacher diversity improved just slightly last year. For example, although Illinois has more Latinx teachers, they represent just 8.9% of the teacher workforce, while Latinx students now represent more than 28% of all K-12 students in Illinois.
The Right Direction but ...: Chronic Absenteeism
In our latest report, The State We’re In 2025: A Report on Public Education in Illinois, we explored the various conditions impacting student learning – critical among them being a student’s time in the classroom. Chronic absenteeism (defined as missing 10% or more of school days regardless of excuse) remains one of the most alarming and persistent issues stemming from the pandemic. Where once (2018), average chronic absenteeism was just 17%, that rate rose dramatically and despite modest improvement, remains at 25.4% statewide. Worse still, chronic absenteeism is significantly severe for students of color (39.3% for Black students and 31.7% for Latinx students), for students from low-income households (35.1%), and other student groups. And chronic absenteeism is at an alarming 40.1% for CPS students. Research has long made clear the impact of absenteeism on student learning. A recent IWERC report underscored that since 2019, the negative relationship between IAR scores and days absent has worsened. For a 3rd grader in 2023, each additional day absent resulted in a 0.31 decline in IAR Math score compared to -0.26 for a 3rd grader in 2019. So while it is good news that chronic absenteeism declined by .9%, we have a great deal of work to do.
What the research tells us about the state of student mental health may offer some insight – from 2007 to 2023, the percentage of high school students who feel sad or hopeless grew from 29.6% in 2009 to 40.4% of students in 2023, and still that is a far cry from fully understanding what all is at play in keeping students out of school. It is therefore heartening to live in a state that is urgently working to understand what is impacting students and their communities – lately through tools like the Children’s Adversity Index – and do something about it through initiatives like the statewide initiatives implemented by the state included the SEL Hubs and RSSI. But the work ahead remains considerable. A deeply systemic approach to addressing childhood trauma is needed more than ever. Even now while there has been in a slight improvement in the ratio of school support personnel (nurses, counselors, school psychologists, social workers) to students, Illinois still trails the levels recommended to ensure every student can access care that supports their resiliency.
Finally, it is clear that postsecondary enrollment, which stood at 73% in 2019, has not yet recovered from the vicissitudes of COVID. According to the State Report Card, 66% of Illinois high school graduates enrolled in postsecondary within 16 months. CPS enrollment has also suffered, and 16-month enrollment stands at 64%, and while that number is down, it compares more favorably than the state as a whole. Importantly, at both the state and Chicago level, significantly more high school graduates are enrolling in 4-year colleges than 2-year – a gap that has widened.
In Conclusion
At a moment when school districts, communities, educators, families, and students are being asked to navigate and respond to significant challenges, we want to recognize the real improvements we have seen in kindergarten readiness and high school graduation since 2018. But we would be remiss not to point out where the data tell us there is tough work ahead. Our chronic absenteeism, along with languishing ACT scores and postsecondary enrollment rates remind us that the impact of COVID is still being felt, and we need to double-down on both rigor and support. And while we are adding needed staff and retention rates are stable and relatively high, teacher attendance suggests that classroom professionals are also feeling the strain of ongoing student mental health issues.
As for elementary academic progress, changes in IAR cut scores make it difficult to assess how much academic progress we made this past year. We look forward to reviewing underlying scale scores as they become available and revisiting this important issue.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate what’s working, and recommit to providing more rigor and more support.