Illinois School Report Cards released. Here are 3 key takeaways

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) published the 2020 Report Card on Friday afternoon. The annual report card breaks down academics, demographics, staffing and finances to give a snapshot of every school and district in the state.

The Report Card looks different this year. Like so much else, parts of the data collecting was impeded by the coronavirus pandemic, if not outright scrapped.

But here are 3 key takeaways from the 2020 Report Card:

It can’t provide much insight into how COVID-19 has affected student learning.

The Illinois Report Card measures student achievement with state assessments and the SAT, which were canceled in the spring because of the COVID-19 shutdown. That data is also typically used to look at achievement gaps between students by race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Without the tests, the state can’t calculate those other data points.

McKinsey published a report in June that predicted low-income, Black and Hispanic students would likely experience the greatest learning losses, which could deepen achievement gaps compared to middle- or upper-class or white peers.

ISBE is working on a study this fall, which would give a statewide look at learning loss, though not a breakdown by district like the Report Card provides. Assessments are still planned for the spring, which could also give insight into how months of unconventional schooling affected student learning.

Test scores and year-over-year changes are used to identify which districts and schools need more support. Ratings — exemplary, commendable, underperforming or lowest performing — will roll over from last year, which means new schools will not be identified for targeted support, but schools that received it last year will continue to do so this year.

New data may not be comparable to previous years

Officials from ISBE were adamant that, because of COVID-19, some of the figures provided aren’t comparable to previous years.

At a glance, the statewide student attendance rate for 2020 looks marginally higher than it’s been in the last 15 years — 95.4%, compared to a 94% average for the previous 15 years. However, it wasn’t possible for the state to create a standardized way of taking attendance after schools closed in March because of the coronavirus pandemic, making accurate comparisons impossible.

ISBE Director of External Communications Jackie Matthews said that while some districts were able to take attendance during online classes, other districts had to resort to weekly paper packets because of internet connectivity issues. In some districts, she said turning in that packet was counted as attendance for the entire week.

“We want to urge extreme caution in interpreting this data, and we strongly recommend against making year over year comparisons, especially at the state level,” State Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said in a press call.

Dropout rates, graduation rates, chronic absenteeism, chronic truancy, teacher attendance and teacher evaluations were among the other data points marked with concern.

Statewide student enrollment continues to drop

Enrollment, which is reported at the beginning of the school year, was not impacted for the 2020 report card in the same way attendance was. ISBE officials said it wasn’t clear yet how enrollment would be affected for next year’s report card.

Illinois student enrollment dropped 27,501 students between the 2019 and 2020 report cards, which is a loss of 1.4%.

Illinois has lost students in 12 of the prevoius 15 years. Cumulatively, there are 118,259 fewer students enrolled in 2020 than in 2006 — a 5.7% drop.

While enrollment has dropped, the number of teachers has increased, as has the ratio of administrators to students.

Since 2006, Illinois has added 4,220 teachers to its workforce, for an increase of 3.3%. More teachers retired in 2020 — and later, making it harder to fill their positions — than the previous two years.

Anecdotally, schools officials have pinned the surge of retirements to COVID-19. ISBE surveys districts in the state in the fall for which open positions were left unfilled at the start of the school year. When that’s published, it could provide more information about how the pandemic affected the teacher workforce.

The ratio of students to administrators has dropped substantially since 2006. In 2006, there were nearly 222 students for every administrator; in 2020, there are about 171 students for every administrator.

Both teacher and administrator pay went up approximately 1.5% from 2019.