How do we measure how Illinois students are faring throughout the K-12 system? How do we know they are ready for what comes after high school? Over the last decade, the answers to these questions have been confusing and complex for school leaders and students across the state – different measures of student readiness used different cut scores on the same exams, and “readiness” as measured by these proficiency levels did not match real-world outcomes for students. Last week, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) adopted unified performance levels and “right-sized” proficiency benchmarks for state standardized tests, bringing them into alignment with other college and career readiness expectations. These changes will be included in the upcoming October 2025 release of the Illinois Report Card.
“For years, Illinois’ assessment data sent the wrong message to students, families, and educators. Proficiency rates on state assessments did not match up to realities in the classroom.”
– Illinois State Board of Education
While many might perceive this as lowering standards, we believe this was the right action at the right moment. Since the implementation of the test scores over a decade ago, educators and district leaders have expressed concern that the proficiency levels were too high in many cases, which was borne out by examples of students thriving in early college coursework with strong grade point averages being deemed as “not ready” for college and career under those standards. For example, Illinois’ college enrollment rate recently passed 66% even though the readiness rate on the state assessment is only 31%. Aligning the proficiency scores more closely to actual success makes practical sense, particularly when we think about how these measures can be used to inform continuous improvement processes in schools and districts.
Further, test scores are only one metric of college in career readiness. At EdSystems, we have long held that readiness should be measured in a variety of ways, including test scores, GPA, success in early college coursework, completion of high-quality work-based learning, and experiences in the workforce. With this in mind, readiness measures based on test scores should be at a level that captures a broad enough set of students that readiness in other domains can be used to support important next-step conversations for local practice and student advising. We encourage districts and ISBE alike to utilize the College and Career Readiness Indicator (CCRI) metric within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) school quality framework as an additional point of reference to the change in proficiency levels.
While we welcome the change in proficiency levels, we are concerned about the challenges high school districts, in particular, will face in monitoring student growth over the next several years. Many school and district leaders use the change in proficiency rates to monitor their success over time. When proficiency levels change, the percentage of students deemed proficient changes without any change in the underlying performance of students, obscuring opportunities to learn about what is or isn’t working for students.
While ISBE recommends that districts use Student Growth Percentiles to help monitor these differences across cohorts, these are not presently available for high school readiness measures. One option to alleviate this is for ISBE to report proficiency rates for prior years using the new proficiency levels. Another would be cross-walking prior benchmarks to estimate how they relate to the new levels. These might help schools and districts to continue to monitor change.
We applaud ISBE for making the move to improve the proficiency levels and urge the agency leaders to provide additional support to help districts monitor performance to drive continuous improvement and student success. Making these levels a more accurate representation of students’ preparedness will help schools, families, and communities have better conversations about how their students are doing. We should also take this opportunity to think about how we use data and recognize that being able to track students’ improvement over time is a key element to school improvement efforts. School and district leaders have shared that these are key metrics that they are looking for and that, without them, they make the most of the data they have. We look forward to working with ISBE and school districts on improving data literacy and improving the metrics schools use for improvement.
Stay tuned this fall as we release our annual reflection on the data released in this year’s Illinois Report Card, which will include these new cut scores.
