Billions Wasted: Chicago, State of Illinois Reward a Failing Education System with More Tax Dollars
Rather than championing high standards, accountability and expanded quality school choices, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker are strengthening teacher unions
First distributed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1969, the Nation’s Report Card annually measures student progress across the country. For decades, this analysis has served as a user manual by educators to assess progress and develop methods to improve education in the United States. The 2024 results are in, and Illinois' were simply awful.
Despite Illinois pouring billions more into education than prior to the pandemic — $44 billion in 2024 against $35 billion in 2019 — all the evidence points to that money being wasted. Fewer Illinois students can read or compute proficiently today than could five years ago and overall state test scores are abysmal. Rather than sound the alarm over the bleak findings, Governor J.B. Pritzker is calling Illinois’ dismal results an inspiring success.
Responding to the latest NAEP results, Pritzker said:
“Illinois students are proving what we’ve always known — when we support our schools, our kids thrive. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card shows our 8th graders outperforming the national average in both math and reading, a testament to the great strides Illinois students are making academically. Congratulations to our students, parents, dedicated educators and principals whose hard work and dedication made this achievement possible.”
Only in Illinois, where just a third of Illinois students are proficient in reading and math can such numbers be considered “great strides.” Wirepoints reports that Illinois’ results are even worse than they appear when considering the amount the state’s budget devotes to education in comparison to most states. The 2022 Census data shows Illinois spent nearly $21,700 on education per student — the 10th-most in the country. Regionally, Illinois spends $2,000 to $8,000 more per student than all other Midwestern states.
By now, everyone should recognize that K-12 public education is in serious trouble, not only locally but nationally. The recent NAEP results show children falling further behind in reading and making little improvement in math on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) national exam. This should come as no surprise, for last year’s report released by the Programme for International Student Assessment (ISA) showed U.S. students lagging behind their peers in many industrialized countries. Teacher unions are quick to blame the poor showing on COVID; however, ISA reading scores have been falling since 2018 and math scores have continued to plummet since 2009.
Unfortunately, the abandonment of standards and grade inflation appears to be U.S. public schools’ answer nationally to increasingly worsening student performance, which is especially troubling because recent reports show COVID-19 erased 20 years of academic progress. According to a report from the American College Testing (ACT), higher grades for less achievement has grown significantly since 2016. Grading standards were found to have declined in schools spanning all socioeconomic communities; the ACT reported a notable correlation between lower income and higher levels of grade inflation. The ACT findings provide a sobering counter to the intensifying political assault on standardized tests in states such as Illinois, where the teacher’s unions and many educators are calling such testing a “racist relic of the past.”
What the teachers unions are really driving for is an end to measures of student performance that could lead to public demands for accountability for failing schools and teachers. This has taken on an added urgency because the teachers unions forced school closings and disastrous remote learning, creating dire consequences for student achievement as well as their social-emotional and physical health. The sharp decline in traditional public school enrollment and corresponding large increase in private, parochial, and charter school enrollment is evidence parents are dissatisfied with the quality of traditional public education and are willing to sacrifice financially if needed to ensure their children receive a quality education.
Perhaps nowhere has the assault on standardizing testing been more apparent than in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Chicago Teachers Union leadership, their supporters, like their peers nationally, are pressing their districts and states to move away from what they like to call “high stakes testing,” even though currently there are few actual consequences for the schools, their staff or their students for failure. The latter will just be socially promoted to the next grade level and out of high schools wholly unprepared for college or the work force for that matter.
While CPS boasts record graduation rates, its academic performance on both state and national tests is atrocious. Since 2017, when the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was first used to measure college readiness, the SAT scores have collapsed across all demographics and is significantly worse among Black and Latino students, according to an Illinois Policy Institute analysis. Wirepoints reports that while the Black student graduation rate was 79 percent last year, their graduates’ SAT scores were 11 percent proficiency in reading and 8 percent math. Latinos had an 84 percent graduation rate, but recorded only 18 percent proficiency in reading and 15 percent in math. Critics of state testing claim exams carry a damaging presumption public school students aren’t proficient. Proficiency testing helps measure the quality of classroom instruction, determines needed academic supports and assesses whether students have met the standards. Removing accountability standards threatens to bring back what was once called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and not just with respect to students but also among the teachers.
CPS is already moving to a “soft” scoring and assessment system for measuring school performance rather than student performance. CPS’ new policy for measuring schools’ performance expands the metrics used to evaluate schools, placing greater emphasis on how schools promote students’ social and emotional development. While factors such as staffing levels, curriculum, and other district investments are important, diminished student outcomes in evaluations is the institutional partner to grade inflation for students.
The district is also systematically dismantling its magnate schools while the Board of Education has voted to end the ranking of schools by performance. This is part and parcel to the campaign to in effect stop keeping academic score and to eliminate embarrassing contrasts in school performance. Given state mandates, the district will continue reporting standardized test results at the school level but those results will no longer be part of the district’s own assessments of schools.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has long been a fierce opponent of standardized testing. In August 2024, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates went on Chicago radio station WVON to decry standardized testing as a holdover of “white supremacy.” Schools were once ranked and labeled under CPS’ School Quality Rating Policy, which ranked schools based on how students performed on state assessments, attendance, and graduation rates. The district is effectively abandoning ranking schools based on student outcomes.
CPS is also rapidly abandoning teaching standards, which is evident from teacher evaluations. For evidence of the abandonment of standards for educators, one need only to glance at how CPS teachers have been rated since 2021, despite the dramatic drop in student scores, CTU walkouts and union-forced remote learning. Recall that according to the Illinois Report Card, 100 percent of CPS teachers in 2021 were “evaluated as excellent or proficient,” up from 98 percent in 2020, 91.4 percent in pre-COVID 2019 and 85.6 percent in 2018. There is a deep disconnect here between teacher evaluation and students test performance.
Although teacher evaluations and student performance are incompatible, the CTU continues to demand the new teachers contract dilute teacher evaluations further. The union is demanding that evaluations be changed from annually or biennially to once every three years; tenured teachers rated excellent or proficient will be on three-year schedule, all other tenured teachers on annual rating schedule. They similarly are demanding the number of observations per cycle be lowered from three to two, with a third observation conducted only if the observer and the teacher agree.
It’s obvious teacher’s unions and their allies want to return schools to a time when inflated grades and social promotion hid the lack of student achievement and covered for failing schools and teachers. For certain union leaders who shout “racism” to advance an agenda that strips schools of any real accountability, a return to social promotion and the diminishing of student outcomes in school evaluations is the real return to the past – specifically, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
As standards continue to slide, public education worsens. This anti-accountability push should deliver a strong message to every parent that the quality of their child’s public school education is deteriorating. Some parents will no longer tolerate it. In less than 20 years, Chicago School District 299 has witnessed a drop in enrollment exceeding 25 percent. Today, there are half the number of Black students attending Chicago Public Schools than there were two decades ago. CPS teachers are aware of the failure: Forbes reported nearly 40 percent of CTU teachers send their children to private schools, while many others have found a way to enroll their children in magnet schools.
Why should the teacher unions worry? With the systematic destruction of school accountability, the district will continue to graduate students who can barely read or compute — with no consequences to the schools or teachers. As for enrollment loss, there are few financial consequences. The schools will continue to receive well over half of all the property taxes paid by Chicago residents and businesses regardless of enrollment levels, while the state-aid formula partially protects districts from enrollment loss.
Meanwhile, the state’s failures to extend the Invest in Kids private school scholarship program and its complicity in allowing the CTU to slowly eliminate public school alternatives to failing neighborhood schools like public charter and magnet schools is effectively eliminating competition to CTU controlled schools. Abolishing the Illinois State Charter School Commission (SCSC) Scholarship has allowed the CTU to pressure the district to not only cap the number of public charters but their enrollment as well.
In response to the failure of schools and poor student performance, many states are taking needed steps to reverse the poor academic slide by enacting phonics, ending social promotion, and, most importantly, embracing school choice. Thirty-three states including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have at least one kind of private school choice program and nineteen states have created or expanded private school choice since 2023. All of Illinois neighboring states have moved ahead with private school choice, leaving Illinois as the only state in the nation to retreat from it. Illinois is the only state to forsake public-school choice by effectively capping public charter schools.
It should be noted that according to the Nation's Report Card (NAEP), private schools continue to perform significantly better than all public schools, with students scoring higher on average in most subjects, particularly in reading and math, indicating a positive outcome for private schools on the national assessment. Last year, a data analysis of the 2023 NAEP by Kathleen Porter-Magee at the Manhattan Institute concluded: “If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.”
Public education is in crisis. The state’s underperforming public schools continue to raise taxes even as they see more of a decline in enrollment. The dishonesty from state and local leadership makes the situation worse as political leaders like Governor Pritzker who capitulate to the teacher’s unions are not just tolerating failure, but tout it. Rather than sound the alarm and champion high standards, accountability and expanded quality school choices, those in charge are further strengthening the teacher unions destructive monopoly while characterizing Illinois’ dismal results as a great success.
