Public education budgets balloon while enrollment, proficiency, standards drop

By Jim Talamonti | The Center Square
The Center Square

(The Center Square) – In return for soaring state spending on education, Illinois taxpayers are getting chronic absenteeism, poor academic proficiency and declining enrollment from the state’s public schools.

The Illinois Policy Institute found that Illinois’ education budget increased by nearly $4 billion over the last decade, while the number of students enrolled in public schools decreased by about 177,000 during the same period.

Illinois Policy Institute Policy Analyst Hannah Schmid said poor academic proficiency and chronic absenteeism are coming at a higher cost.

“So the state spending has grown over two times faster than student achievement has grown. We’ve actually seen achievement in math decline over the past few years,” Schmid told The Center Square.

The state’s education budget for the 2025-26 school year is a record-high $11.2 billion.

“Spending is up 24%, reading is just up 9% and math has actually dropped by 11%, so we’re seeing poor outcomes for students,” Schmid said.

According to the Illinois State Board of Education’s Illinois Report Card, the state’s public school students had a chronic absenteeism rate of 26.3% last year.

“Research suggests that frequent absences from school put students at a higher risk of these poor outcomes that we’re talking about, such as dropping out of school or poor academic achievement,” Schmid explained.

Schmid said high rates of chronic absenteeism in Illinois public schools signal a warning for students’ futures.

Chicago Public Schools students fared far worse, with an overall chronic absenteeism rate of 40.8% in 2024. The chronic absenteeism rate for CPS teachers was also reported around 40%.

On August 13, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) announced it was adopting new “research-informed and right-sized” assessment performance levels.

“The new, unified levels correct long-standing misalignment between Illinois’ state assessments and other real college and career readiness expectations,” ISBE said in a statement.

State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said Illinois’ proficiency benchmarks mislabeled students, causing qualified students to miss out on opportunities for acceleration and telling a whole generation of students who were ready for college that they were not.

“Illinois’ new performance levels bring much-needed alignment between grade levels, subjects, and actual college and career readiness expectations,” Sanders said in a statement from ISBE.

Schmid said the board lowered the scores needed for students to be considered proficient in reading and math.

“This lowering of standards or lowering of benchmarks will ultimately inflate the percentage of students that we see meeting these proficiency standards in this upcoming October (ISBE) Report Card that we’ll see from the spring 2025 test,” Schmid said.

Schmid said the new standards will not provide a more accurate view of student performance.

“Instead we’re seeing actions by the State Board of Education that threaten to obscure the crisis of students who are struggling in our state to meet proficiency in core subjects,” Schmid said.

Schmid said students could be denied the extra help they need if they are no longer marked as struggling or failing to meet proficiency standards.