Nov. 7—Educational test scores recently released by the Illinois State Board of Education contained more bad news that, unfortunately, doesn’t come as a surprise.
A bare majority (50-plus percent) of public school students can read at grade level while substantially fewer — 39 percent — were proficient in math.
To make matters worse, the state recently lowered the scores needed to be proficient at grade level.
Under normal circumstances, this shoddy education performance would be a call to arms to save a generation of semi-literates from entering the adult world with the kind of skills basic to a successful life.
In fact, it’s just more of the same that produces considerable hand-wringing but little else when it comes to improved K-12 public school student performance.
One statistic disclosed on Oct. 30 reveals part of the problem: One in four students is “chronically absent.” That means they missed at least 10 percent of their classes.
Students can’t learn if they aren’t in school.
Statistics suggest the absentee problem is a self-inflicted wound, fallout from the coronavirus epidemic that prompted state leaders to shut down, among other things, public schools.
In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the absentee rate was 17.5 percent. It jumped to nearly 30 percent in 2022. Even though it’s dropped back down, the latest absentee rate exceeds the 2019 number by more than 7 percent.
Public school shutdowns were, in many ways, a mistake that private schools did not make because they were beyond reach of heavy-handed bureaucrats and powerful teachers’ unions.
There are, of course, many factors that contribute to poor educational outcomes that are unrelated to the quality of schools and teachers.
Poverty, family dysfunction and disintegration, mental illness, unstable housing, crime, drugs, lack of positive role models and a lack of family interest in academic success are contribute.
But overcoming those hurdles is all the more reason to provide a rigorous curriculum that emphasizes the basics — reading, writing and arithmetic — and offers challenging remedial services.
People talk a lot these days about social divisions in terms of income and achievement. Those are real problems that will only get worse if greater efforts are not made to lift up those in danger of failing.
The state’s recent education report — once again — has laid out the problem in stark and frightening terms. If this problem can be addressed in a meaningful way, it’s time for a muscular response.