By: Diane Benjamin
More on this story: https://blnnews.com/2025/12/04/can-your-3rd-grader-read-likely-no-in-public-school/
The 3rd graders tested last spring weren’t affected by school closings during COVID. They weren’t old enough to be in school. They were in:
3rd grade – 2024/2025
2nd grade – 2023/2024
1st grade – 2022/2023
Kindergarten – 2021/2022
Illinois schools were closed for COVID in March 2020. They reopened in August 2021. Last year’s 3rd graders started Kindergarten when they were supposed to.
Expect better reading results? Successful programs have two things in common:
Phonics is taught
No promotion to 4th grade if you can’t read
I was asked yesterday how much each school district spends per student. They can be looked up here: illinoisreportcard.com
The proficient percent can be looked up in this story: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/how-well-are-your-local-third-graders-reading/
Unit 5: $15,000 10 schools ranging from 4.3 to 54.9 proficient
District 87: $18,000 6 schools ranging from 1.7 to 30.9 proficient
Tri-Valley: $13,000 78.1 proficient
Olympia: $16,000 North-28.9 South 45.7 West 9.1 proficient
Heyworth: $16,000 41.9 proficient
Ridgeview: $21,000 12.1 proficient
Lexington: $14,000 34.3 proficient
Obviously the money spent per student is immaterial to results.
Another banger of a column. Good work!
The Report Card’s cost per student numbers are intentionally understated. For some silly government reason, the state board of education excludes debt service from the snapshot calculation of expenses per student. Imagine trying to exclude your mortgage and car payments from your personal budget!
What you unfortunately have to do is go to the district finances page to see the total annual expenditures and then manual divide by the number of students.
For example, unit 5 fake expense per student says $15,000. When total district expenditures of 220,000,000 are divided by total student enrollment of 12,219, the actual per student cost rises to over $18,000.
D87 real cost per student is $19,871.
https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=environment&source2=expenditureamounts&Districtid=17064005026
I agree, just reporting what is posted
Keep naming those buildings and dedicating those gyms and tax funded building projects after ex and retired admin and teachers)staff –
Image and sports, alumni school pride and alumni promo is everything) Kids learning- not so much after seeing huge pay and retirement plans (aka the Golden parachute club)
Taking phonics, class aids and physical writing/reading comprehension out and replacing with systems and computers did lots of long term damage and made education a show and joke STEM was suppose to be the big thing but ended up being a huge money and projects $ funnel.
Funding gifted programs a
For the “good kids” and removing aids in classes also was a big metrics and marketing push for the connected legacy/families in Central Illinois and Unit 5 rural schools. (All going to same colleges and getting handed jobs at same orgs )
Now SEL and Behavioral analytics and digital seems to be the system instead making many wealthy in the name of education and systems.
What could go wrong?
I’m wondering now if the main reason kids are failing is because parents don’t care.
Change will only happen when the customers stop buying the product. Otherwise the education industry will just keep pumping out junk and soaking the customers.
Since public education is more or less a monopoly, the only thing left to do is to vote. But again parents don’t really care, they just want babysitters.
Truancy rates would support that theory
The reason the results are as good as they are is because they lowered the definition of success.
Well, well… I’m sure you’re very aware of the outcome disparities between students who have pre-K education and students who don’t, and so you’re equipped to explain why these students not getting a pre-K experience due to COVID didn’t impact their literacy scores. Or I’m sure you’d be happy to explore how parents asking for assignment substitutions at a hugely inflated rate because of their political leanings doesn’t factor in here.
There are a lot of factors to consider, but the bottom line is that current public education for most children is mostly about politically-driven indoctrination and low-level child abuse; education is only maintained enough to keep that from being Too obvious and to keep the money flowing in.
Yes, current 3rd graders missed out on pre-k, and yes, that’s a factor.
However, many the best and most dedicated parents woke up when the schools were kept closed unnecessarily and pulled their kids for private schools or home schooling, or made plans to do so. So many of the best 3rd graders followed their siblings elsewhere or never entered the pipeline. Yank half of what would have been the top 10%, and the average will inherently drop.
And the number of illegals needing ESL shot up recently as well. They tend to not have the same enrichment background as locals raised in a town dominated by insurance and education. Another drop. Plus that requires resources that would have otherwise gone towards native third graders. Another drop.
Yes, one can cherry-pick ‘missing pre-K’ as a (the?) counter-explanation, but it’s not significant in the soup of other reasons.