Illinois students are struggling to meet proficiency standards on state assessments. Instead of working to improve student learning, the state is lowering standards to hide the crisis.
Most Illinois students are struggling to read or do math at grade level on their end of year state assessments. The State Board of Education’s solution? Lower the standards.
The board of education approved a plan to lower the scores needed to be considered proficient in reading and math on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness. It also determined the scores needed to be considered proficient in reading and math for 11th graders as the state moves from the SAT to ACT as the state-required assessment for high school students.
The most recent state data available shows only 41% of students in third through eighth grade could read at grade level in 2024 and just 31% in 11th grade. In math, 28% of third through eighth graders were proficient and 26% of 11th graders
New proficiency rates will be implemented on the 2025 Illinois Report card released in October, leaving Illinoisans unable to compare scores to previous years’ proficiency rates.
Lowering proficiency benchmarks will inflate the percentage of students meeting proficiency standards this year and moving forward, but it will do little to improve students’ actual performance in core subjects. Instead of addressing low proficiency, the board is minimizing the problem by changing the definition of a student struggling.
New scoring allegedly aligns proficiency benchmarks to rest of nation
The state board approved the lowering of “cut scores,” or proficiency benchmarks, on state assessments because it claims Illinois has been “misidentifying students as being ‘not proficient’… due to misaligned cut scores established several years ago.”
Cut scores are the state test results placing students into one of four performance levels:
- Below proficient
- Approaching proficient
- Proficient
- Above proficient
According to the board, the new cut scores mean 53% of students will be considered proficient in reading and 38% would be proficient in math on the spring 2025 state assessment data, which will be officially released October 2025. That marks an increase of 12 percentage points in reading proficiency and 10 percentage points in math proficiency.
Proponents of lowering cut scores point to data showing Illinois has among the highest proficiency benchmarks in the nation, according to the 2022 State Standards Mapping Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.
But digging into those standards reveals proponents are misrepresenting what the national testing really shows.
Illinois education leaders focus on proficiency standards instead of student performance
The move to lower Illinois’ proficiency benchmarks shows education leaders are more focused on comparing the state’s standards to other states than how Illinois students perform compared to students from other states.
According to the most recent 2022 mapping study which compares proficiency standards on state assessments to NAEP proficiency standards, Illinois had the fourth-highest proficiency standards among all 50 states and Puerto Rico for fourth grade reading, highest for fourth grade math, second highest for eighth grade reading and third highest for eighth grade math. State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders and other Illinois education leaders view this as reason to lower benchmarks in Illinois.
But in the “frequently asked questions” section of NAEP state standards mapping notes, “This report is a comparison of performance standards, not of student achievement. NAEP achievement scores of states’ student populations would be a better measure to compare achievement across states than where states set their bar for proficiency.”
While the study showed Illinois has higher “benchmarks” than other states, students don’t have higher performance on NAEP than other states.
Most Illinois students do not meet NAEP proficiency standards
NAEP measures student achievement in reading and math for fourth and eighth grade students every two years. In Illinois, 30% of fourth graders met NAEP proficiency standards in 2024 and 33% of eighth graders. In math, 38% of Illinois fourth graders met NAEP’s math proficiency standards and 32% of eighth graders.
Illinois students matched or outperformed the national average proficiency level in reading for fourth and eighth grade and slightly underperformed and outperformed the national average in math for both grades.
But matching or outperforming the national average is a low bar for students. Even as Illinois students outperform the national average on some NAEP assessments, most Illinois students do not meet NAEP’s proficiency benchmarks.
Yet Sanders and the state board of education are changing the way Illinois determines student achievement, focusing more on comparing its standards to other state standards than to how Illinois students perform when compared to students from other states.
