SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois State Board of Education recently released the 2024 School Report Card, showing a record-high proficiency rate for students in grades 3-8 in English language arts while math scores still have not fully recovered from the low point they hit during the pandemic.

In response, ISBE has announced plans to develop a comprehensive, statewide strategy for boosting math skills across the board.

In a podcast interview recorded Wednesday, Nov. 6, State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders spoke with Capitol News Illinois about the report card and the need to address the sagging math scores.

Following is an edited transcript of that interview. Listen to the full interview on this week’s edition of Capitol Cast. Listen below or subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

CNI: Before we get to this math plan, what is this state report card that comes out every year. Why do we do this?

Sanders: So the state report card really is a result of federal requirements. All the way back to the early 2000s, school districts had to start under – then the law was called No Child Left Behind – had to start reporting annually, school-by-school, on the progress being made by students. Individual states developed their own accountability systems, so they all look different. But it was a way to inform parents, taxpayers and others on how students were doing across the state and within your local community.

CNI: You use the words “accountability report.” In what way do these reports hold schools and districts and state departments like yours accountable?

Sanders: The accountability system focuses on schools and districts that are underperforming. So the school districts that really are struggling the most in student growth and student attainment are the ones that typically are identified for supports. And with that comes additional monetary support. So they get more money to do additional strategies to improve student outcomes at those schools.

Within Illinois, parents can expect to see their schools currently labeled in one of four areas. They’re either going to be labeled as “exemplary,” meaning they’re in the top 10% of the state; “commendable,” which is about 72% of our schools; or they’re going to be “comprehensive” or “targeted status.” Those are the schools that are the lowest performing schools in the state academically.

CNI: And roughly how many of those do we have, and are they located in particular areas?

Sanders: So it is limited to the to 5% of the schools. There’s about 400 schools that are currently on that list, and they’re all over the place. They’re in large urban systems. They’re in small, rural communities. So you’ll find schools being labeled as “targeted” or “comprehensive” everywhere in the state.

CNI: Getting back to the math scores, a lot of people will just say in casual conversation, “You know, math was never really my subject. I was never good at math. I can’t balance my own checkbook.” And the test scores have always borne that out. The achievement scores are rarely as high in math as in other subjects. Why is that? Is that a cultural thing for Americans? Are we just not a math-prone society?

Sanders: No. If you look back over the history of standardized tests, all the way the NAEP assessment (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which is given across the nation, the scores have not changed significantly all the way back to the 1950s.

I try to think back to the time when Sputnik went up, and suddenly there was this urgency to improve math and science across the nation. And despite all those efforts back in the 50s and 60s, we still haven’t seen a lot of significant gains in math over decades of time.

CNI: What goes into developing a plan like this? The Literacy Plan took a long time.

Sanders: Yeah, it took a couple of years. That one was spurred on, really, by the General Assembly. They saw our English language arts results and prompted us. Nationwide, there’s been a conversation about the “science of reading” and shifting practice of literacy instruction. But we’ve not yet had that national conversation about math. So we intend to follow, again, the same type of process we did before: pulling together experts from across the state and the nation to look at what are best practices currently in terms of math instruction, pulling in curriculum experts, pulling in experts in English language learning.

CNI: You did a media briefing about the report card itself, and kind of walking us through step by step. And one of the things you said when it came to math was that Illinois adopted new learning standards for math back in 2010. It’s been almost 15 years. And you also added that there’s never been a concerted statewide effort to provide teachers and educators with training in how to implement these standards. And it struck me that a child who started kindergarten in 2010 has now already graduated high school, but we still haven’t implemented a training program for teachers to deal with these new standards. Was that a failure on the state’s part?

Sanders: Every state adopted new standards for math and English language arts around the same time, around 2010.

CNI: Those were the Common Core Standards.

Sanders: The Common Core Standards were implemented. And then they became the Illinois Learning Standards. When that shift happened, teachers, principals and local school districts all began taking a harder look at their curriculum and their practices in both English language arts and math.

The challenge with math, from a local district perspective and a teacher perspective, is that there’s too many standards within a student’s one-year span of time for a teacher to be able to hit every single standard and ensure every child is competent in that standard.

If you’re taking a look at them grade-by-grade, it’s a lot that we’re asking our teachers to cover. And so I think part of our work – and I would never call it a failure – but I think part of our work is really being very explicit about which are the power standards. Which are the ones that we need to ensure students must master by a particular grade level in order to progress to the next grade level? And I think that’s going to be part of the work that we’ll have to do as we roll out this math plan.

CNI: Is there anything else in the report card that you think should be highlighted?

Sanders: We have so much to be proud of in this year’s report card. Our students need to be very proud of the work they did. Our teachers need to stand up and take a bow for working so hard, not only during the pandemic, but after the pandemic, to fully prepare our kids.

We’ve seen historic rates of proficiency in English language arts, 40.9% of our kids being proficient in English language arts, which is an all-time high for the state of Illinois. That’s something to celebrate. The highest ever known graduation rate on record. That is something to celebrate. Lowering our chronic absenteeism, so more students are showing up on a daily basis to school. That’s a win.

So much of this year’s report card is positive news. Even the math scores are an improvement. They’re just not moving as fast as our English language arts scores. So, by and large, Illinois has a lot to be proud of in this report card. It demonstrates a lot of hard work on the part of our teachers and students over this last academic year.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.