(The Center Square) – The Illinois State Board of Education’s latest Illinois Report Card shows improved student achievement numbers, but it is not clear if billions of additional taxpayer dollars helped fuel the academic gains.
“Illinois students are making meaningful progress across the measures that matter the most,” State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said in his announcement touting improved student proficiency numbers.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker said last week that he increased public education funding by $3 billion a year.
When asked by The Center Square about the correlation between taxpayer funding of schools and student proficiency, Research Professor Elaine Allensworth of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research said there is not a clear, easy answer.
“It depends a lot on how those funds are spent,” Allensworth said.
The 2026 report card showed statewide proficiency gains of 3% in English language arts, from 52.4% to 55.4%, and 0.8% in math, from 38.4% to 39.2%. Science proficiency rose from 44.6% to 48.7%.
Some lawmakers suggested last spring that the state would report improved proficiency after changing its performance assessment levels. The Illinois State Board of Education announced in August 2025 it was adopting new “research-informed and right-sized” benchmarks.
Allensworth said the old standards were set at an extremely high level.
“So it made it seem like Illinois students were failing or that students weren’t showing the same kinds of skills as students in other places,” Allensworth said.
Allensworth said proficiency metrics are unstable, and there are questions about the size of Illinois’ recent gains.
“With a number of folks pointing out that we are not seeing the same kind of gains when we look at another assessment, which is the National Assessment of Education Progress, there have been questions about whether the scores are getting higher in a way that’s really not reflective of students’ underlying skills,” Allensworth said.
Sanders touted the state’s record four-year graduation rate of 89.8%.
“That probably excites me more than anything because we know that high school graduation matters so much for students’ life outcomes,” Allensworth told The Center Square.
Illinois has added more than 12,000 teachers since 2019, even though student enrollment dropped 10% from 2014 to 2024.
The state reported another enrollment decrease this year, from 1.85 million students in 2025 to 1.82 million in 2026.
