Despite COVID, more Illinois students than ever took advanced coursework in 2020

More Illinois students took advanced coursework in 2020 than any other year, despite the challenges of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Illinois State Board of Education released statewide data from the Illinois Report Card on Friday. The data covers everything from student achievement to administrator diversity, and teacher experience. The newly released data from 2020 is one of the first in-depth looks at how the pandemic affected education statewide.

Advanced coursework, as described by ISBE, includes Advanced Placement classes, dual-credit courses that simultaneously earn students college credit, and career and technical education.

In most areas of advanced coursework, there was a years-long trend of increasing enrollment. But, more than 90% of Illinois students started last school year without access to full in-person learning.

Given the circumstances, Brenda Dixon, Chief Research and Evaluation Officer, said ISBE was not anticipating the increased enrollment in advanced coursework in 2020.

While the overall numbers of students increased, the growth did slow compared to previous years.

The Illinois State Board of Education started tracking career and technical education enrollment in 2016. Since 2017, those numbers have increased each year, from 277,461 in 2017 to 287,191 in 2021. The increase between 2020 and 2021 was 954 students, the smallest increase since 2018.

For non-vocational training, there are three main types of advanced coursework: AP, dual credit, and International Baccalaureate, or IB. Overall, there was an increase in student enrollment in these types of classes, but that growth was not spread equally.

Since 2016, when ISBE started reporting enrollment in advanced coursework, IB courses have enrolled the fewest number of students of the three, by far — only 6,121 students were enrolled in IB in 2020, compared to 145,267 students in AP and 79,370 in dual credit. In 2020, fewer freshmen and sophomores were taking IB courses than ever.

While more students overall took AP courses last year, fewer graduating seniors enrolled in 2020 than in 2019. That showed in other Illinois Report Card data points that are specific to the senior class.

For seniors, the number of AP exams taken, the number of AP exams passed, the number of students who took the exams and the number of students who passed at least one exam all dropped. That data is not reported for other grade levels.

For all four of those AP data points, growth had slowed or, in the case of the number of students taking and passing at least one exam, had already started to fall by the year before.

The bulk of the growth in Illinois comes through dual credit courses, which allow students to simultaneously earn college credit as they work towards their high school diploma. In some school districts, dual credit programs are structured to allow students to graduate high school and earn an associates degree at the same time.

Among all high school grades, 9,375 more Illinois students were enrolled in a dual credit course than last year, which is the largest increase since ISBE started tracking in 2016. A total of 79,370 high school students took a dual credit course last year.

Growth in advanced coursework was not consistent between grade levels. CTE data is not broken up by grade level, but data for advanced coursework show that year-over-year growth was more likely to slow for last year’s high school seniors.

For dual credit, in particular, freshmen, sophomores and juniors saw a much steeper increase in enrollment.

This story was originally published October 31, 2021 at 6:00 AM.