By PETER HANCOCK
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]

SPRINGFIELD – As the flow of billions of dollars in federal pandemic-related aid is about to end, many students in Illinois are still struggling to catch up academically from the learning loss that occurred when schools were forced to close.

A new study from the University of Illinois System says only about one-fourth of all public-school students are back to pre-pandemic performance levels in English language arts while even fewer have returned to pre-pandemic levels in math.

Learning recovery has been especially slow at the high school level, where test scores have been declining, the study found. And recovery in math scores has lagged English language arts scores across grade levels.

The study was conducted by the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative, or IWERC, which is part of the University of Illinois System’s Discovery Partners Institute. 

The findings suggest school officials face some difficult decisions in the months and years ahead as they look for ways to continue their recovery efforts without the federal resources they’ve been relying on.

“Of course, we are concerned about the loss of things like high-dosage tutoring and the extended-day programs,” IWERC Director Meg Bates said in an interview. “The research on those has always been pretty strong that more time in academic learning and more intensive one-on-one time are positive for learning.

“So, in as much as districts can’t maintain those because they lose funding, I do expect to see some issues, but it’s possible that districts have found ways to weave things like tutoring and extended day into their normal funding.”

Bates said IWERC conducted the study in partnership with the Illinois State Board of Education. The findings were presented last month to the P-20 Council, a state organization that advises the governor and General Assembly on issues related to education from preschool through adulthood.

One of the key findings of the study, Bates said, is that recovery has been uneven, both across grade levels and among socioeconomic groups. Overall, academic performance has improved more quickly at the elementary school level than for high school. 

But the study also found that districts with high concentrations of Black, Latino, and low-income students remain furthest from their pre-pandemic performance levels. Those districts also tend to be the ones that relied the most on remote learning during the pandemic.

“We absolutely do see that districts that spent longer in remote learning lost more and as such, are not back to where they were prior to the pandemic,” Bates said. “But we also know that the districts that were more likely to spend time in remote learning are districts that serve high proportions of students from low-income families, and income is often correlated with achievement. And those communities were also hit harder by the pandemic itself.”

Enrollment and attendance

The study also found schools have not yet recovered from the enrollment declines that occurred at the height of the pandemic. And for those students who are still enrolled, chronic absenteeism has risen sharply.

From 2019 to 2021, according to the report, statewide enrollment fell by nearly 60,000 students, to 1.71 million. That included a drop of more than 15,000 students from Chicago Public Schools alone.

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By 2023, according to the report, enrollment outside of CPS had rebounded slightly, but CPS enrollment continued to fall to less than 300,000.

Enrollment had been trending downward even before the pandemic, due largely to declining birth rates in Illinois, but Bates said the declines that occurred during the pandemic were beyond what would otherwise be expected.

“Of course, we are seeing some declines due to birth rate, families having fewer children,” she said. “But we also see, sort of curiously, that enrollment declines were happening in the middle grades. So that’s not from birth-rate decline. That’s from choosing to leave.”

Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year, has also risen sharply in Illinois and remains above pre-pandemic levels.

Using data from the Illinois State Board of Education, the study found chronic absenteeism peaked at 30 percent statewide, and 45 percent in Chicago Public Schools, during the 2021-2022 school year. 

The rates were highest among Black and Latino students and students from lower-income households. Absenteeism was also higher among high school students than elementary students, which the authors suggested may help explain the decreasing SAT scores.

Federal Funds

To help schools throughout the country deal with the effects of the pandemic, Congress approved three separate federal relief packages that included billions of dollars in emergency education funds known as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER funds. 

Illinois’ share of that aid totaled just over $7.8 billion.

The flow of those funds, however, will come to an end when the current federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning programs and services that have been funded with those federal dollars will either come to an end, or schools will have to fund them through other means.

According to the state’s ESSER Spending Dashboard, about one-third of the money that came to Illinois, or nearly $2.4 billion, went toward salaries for teachers, substitutes, paraprofessionals, and other school personnel, including those who ran summer and after-school learning programs.

“We saw just about over a thousand expenses on what we would call a full-time teacher,” Bates said. “So we do expect there to be some difficulties this fall with teachers.” 

She said she expects a bigger loss in staffing for after-school, summer school and tutoring programs. 

“That’s where we expect to see a real cliff, these extended opportunities. We suspect schools will find ways to keep their teacher core relatively intact,” she said. 

Bates said the challenge facing school districts now is integrating the programs and practices that worked for them during the pandemic into their normal budgeting process.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.