A look at the data from Illinois public schools for 2024 finds not a single child rated proficient in math in 80 schools and in 24 schools no child was proficient in reading.
Despite these dismal numbers, 70 percent of students were graduated to their next grade in 2024, according to the data reviewed by Wirepoints.
The numbers also show more than 18,000 Illinois students among its more than 4,000 schools were not proficient in basic education at age levels.
The majority of schools that failed students so badly were in the Chicago Public School system. Some were in the metropolitan area on the Illinois side across from St. Louis, some in Kankakee, just south of Chicago, and Peoria also found some of its schools on this list of failure.
While those numbers represent the worst of the worst in the Land of Lincoln, the data is still discouraging by raising the proficiency percentage. For instance, in 307 of the state’s schools, fewer than ten percent of children can read at level. It is worse in math where less than ten percent are at level in math in 853 schools. Taken as a whole, nine percent of all Illinois kids in grades 3-12 cannot read well and 24 percent are lacking in math skills.
Common Core has been a disaster. https://t.co/nmWkNSOuhF
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 28, 2020
Education in Illinois has gotten worse since COVID, as well. In 2019, before the school closings started over the virus, there were 21 schools that had no children reading at level and 37 with none proficient in math. By 2024, those numbers grew to 24 and 80.
Immediately after COVID, in 2023, Wirepoints found that fully 55 schools in the Chicago Public School System had zero children proficient in math and reading.
Chicago’s teachers seem to fully understand how bad it is, too. Last year, it was discovered that almost one third of Chicago school teachers send their kids to private schools and not their own public schools.
Even the current leader of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Stacy Davis Gates, sends her son to a private school, according to the Chicago-based Illinois Policy Institute.
Meanwhile, CPS teachers make on average $70,000 a year while only 11 percent of black students can read, even as the district spends $29,000 a year per student. But even with the per student spending rate nearly doubling since 2012, proficiency in math and reading has plummeted.
“Since 2012, education spending has increased by 97%, while reading proficiency has decreased by 63% and math proficiency by 78%,” the Illinois Policy Institute reported last year.
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