Illinois publishes a detailed report card for every school in the state, every year. Enrollment, attendance, graduation rates, demographics, teacher staffing, accountability designations. It’s one of the richest public education datasets in the country.
We loaded eight years of it (2018-2025) into OpenData, then cross-referenced it with national ACT and SAT scores, NAEP assessments, Census poverty estimates, and fifteen years of the predecessor truancy metric (2002-2017). The answers aren’t encouraging.
The headline number
In 2018, 16.8% of Illinois students were chronically absent (missing 10% or more of school days). That was already a problem. By 2025, it’s 25.4%. One in four kids is missing more than a month of school per year.
That 2020 dip is misleading. When school went remote, attendance was often just logging into a Zoom call. The 11% figure tells you more about how attendance was measured during COVID than about whether kids were actually learning. The trajectory tells the story: the rate went from one in six to one in four, and three years later it’s barely recovering.
Before chronic absence: the truancy trend
A fair objection to the above: two pre-COVID data points (2018 and 2019) aren’t enough to establish a trend. ISBE only began reporting chronic absence in 2018. But Illinois tracked a predecessor metric, chronic truancy, from 2002 to 2017. It measures something different: chronic truancy counts students absent without valid cause for 5% or more of school days, while chronic absence counts all absences regardless of reason at a 10% threshold. Different definitions, different populations, so you can’t stitch the two into one trendline.
But the direction is hard to ignore. Chronic truancy increased sixfold over fifteen years, even before the definition changed.
The 2012 jump from 2.75% to 7.10% is likely a measurement artifact: legislation that year tightened truancy reporting requirements, so schools started counting what they’d previously underreported. The 2009 spike aligns with the Great Recession. But even within each era, pre-2012 and post-2012, the trend climbs. And the 10.3% truancy rate in 2017 was already flashing red a full year before ISBE began tracking chronic absence at 16.8%.
None of this proves COVID didn’t cause the chronic absence spike. But it’s consistent with a crisis that was building for over a decade, which COVID then made dramatically worse.
The gap between best and worst
Chronic absence doesn’t hit evenly. ISBE assigns schools an accountability designation (Exemplary, Commendable, Targeted, Comprehensive, and since 2023, Intensive) based on academic performance. When you split chronic absence by those designations, the spread is huge.
The average Intensive school (the lowest tier, introduced in 2023) has a 67% chronic absence rate. The average Exemplary school: 12%. Across the tiers that existed in both years, the gap between Exemplary and Comprehensive schools grew from 33 percentage points in 2018 to 35 in 2025. The Intensive tier, carved out of Comprehensive in 2023, sits even further behind at 67%.
Poverty tracks closely with all of this. Exemplary schools average 27% low-income students. Intensive schools average 89%. Same state, sometimes the same city, but these might as well be different school systems.
It tracks with poverty, not school quality
When you group schools by the percentage of low-income students rather than accountability designation, the pattern sharpens.
Before COVID, the gap between low-poverty and very-high-poverty schools was about 17 percentage points. By 2022, it was 31 points. It’s come down slightly since then (26 points in 2025), but the pre-COVID gap hasn’t returned. COVID didn’t create this gap. It widened it, and it hasn’t closed back.
Here’s what makes this harder to untangle: Illinois statewide child poverty actually fell over this period, from 16.2% to 14.1%, according to the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. Median household income rose from $65,000 to $83,000. The state got richer on average. The schools that serve the poorest kids didn’t feel it.
Part of the explanation is who left.
The quiet enrollment cliff
Over this same period, Illinois public schools lost 153,000 students.
That’s a 7.6% decline. The biggest single-year drop was 2020-2021, when nearly 70,000 students vanished from public school rolls. Some went to private schools. Some families left the state (Illinois has been losing population). Some shifted to homeschooling during COVID and never came back. The families who left came disproportionately from less-poor households. When they chose private schools or homeschooling, the remaining public school population concentrated the poverty that was already there. Statewide poverty fell. School-level poverty deepened. Both happened at the same time.
The demographics of who remained shifted too. White enrollment dropped from 48.0% to 44.3%. Hispanic enrollment grew from 26.2% to 28.6%. English Learner students went from 11.7% to 17.5%, a 50% increase. The student body is getting smaller, more diverse, and has more language needs. School funding and staffing formulas haven’t kept pace.
The demographic dimension
That demographic shift shows up in absence rates too.
Majority-White schools went from 10.7% to 17.1%. A big jump, but they’re at least trending down from the 2022 peak. Majority-Black schools went from 26.9% to 37.3%. They’ve barely budged from the 2022 peak of 43.6%. Three years after the worst of COVID, these schools are still stuck.
But race and poverty overlap heavily here. Majority-Black schools in Illinois average 75% low-income students. Majority-White schools average 39%. We can’t say from this data alone whether race or poverty is the stronger predictor (you’d need to control for one while measuring the other). What we can say is that they’re tightly correlated, and the schools where both concentrate are the ones not recovering.
The recovery map
Poverty, race, accountability tier, they all tell the same story at the school level. Break it down by county and the geographic pattern gets just as sharp. Monroe County in southwestern Illinois has a 10.6% chronic absence rate. Alexander County, at the state’s southern tip, sits at 43.4%. That’s a 4x gap between counties in the same state. Monroe has 19.5% low-income students. Alexander has 98.9%.
But the more interesting story isn’t the gap itself. It’s the distance between “before” and “now.”
Alexander County went from 18.4% chronic absence pre-COVID to 43.4% in 2025. That’s a 25-point gap, the largest in the state. 578 students, nearly universal poverty, and getting worse every year.
Even the counties that dropped the most from their 2022 peaks haven’t made it back. Winnebago fell 13.9 points from its worst moment, the biggest rebound in Illinois, and it’s still 7 points above where it started. Sangamon cut 11 points from its peak and remains 6.5 points above pre-COVID. “Better than 2022” is a low bar, and no county in the state has cleared it.
But county averages still hide the sharpest contrasts. To see those, you need to go one level deeper.
One county, two school systems
County-level averages still flatten the story. Zoom into a single county and you can see the mechanism.
Lake County sits on Chicago’s northern edge. It has 47 school districts, 120,000 students, and one of the widest wealth gaps in the state. Lake Forest, on the lakefront, has a median household income above $200,000 and 1.3% low-income students. North Chicago, six miles north, has 91% low-income students. Round Lake, inland, went from 67% to 86% low-income over this period. Same county, same tax base conversations, completely different realities.
Plot every district’s poverty rate against its chronic absence rate and the relationship is almost mechanical.
Lake Forest (1.3% low-income): 7.9% chronic absence. North Chicago (91% low-income): 34.4%. Waukegan, the biggest district at 13,551 students: 68% low-income, 35% chronically absent. Poverty doesn’t just correlate with absence here. It is the story.
The trajectory over time makes it sharper. Three districts spanning the poverty spectrum, eight years of data.
Lake Forest went from 0% to 7.9%. Even the wealthiest district in the county got worse. But Waukegan went from 25% to nearly 49% in 2021 and is still at 35% three years later. The gap between two districts that share a county border went from 25 points to 27. COVID didn’t create it. It just made it harder to ignore.
The same concentration effect from the statewide story plays out here in miniature. Waukegan lost 2,724 students since 2018, a 17% decline, the biggest drop in the county. The affluent districts barely moved, and a few actually grew. The families who left the high-poverty districts didn’t disappear from Lake County. Many of them moved to lower-poverty districts within it, or to private schools. Round Lake’s low-income percentage jumped from 67% to 86% in seven years. The poverty concentrated, and the absence rate followed.
Deerfield moved 1.7 points. Round Lake moved 15.9. North Chicago moved 8.1. The lines get longer as you move down the poverty scale. Every district got worse. The ones that were already behind got worse faster.
Teacher pay follows the same pattern. Low-poverty Lake County districts average $93,000 and retain 91% of their teachers. High-poverty districts pay $73,000 and retain 86%. That retention gap actually narrowed over this period (from 10 points to 5), one of the few bright spots in the data. But $20,000 less for harder work, in the same county, helps explain why experienced teachers keep moving up the income ladder.
The graduation paradox
So far, this is a story about who’s falling behind and where. But here’s what’s strange: despite chronic absence rising 50%, graduation rates didn’t budge.
In 2018, 85.4% of high school students graduated. In 2025, 89.0%. That’s essentially flat through a period where a quarter of students weren’t regularly showing up to school.
A few possible explanations. Grading standards may have softened during COVID and never fully reset. Credit recovery programs have expanded. Some students who would have dropped out pre-COVID may have been carried to graduation through pandemic-era flexibility. Or graduation requirements and chronic absence just measure different things. You can miss a lot of days and still accumulate enough credits, especially if schools are working to keep kids on track.
National standardized tests suggest this isn’t just an Illinois quirk. It’s a measurement problem.
The tests that don’t grade on a curve
The ACT is the one standardized test that doesn’t care about local grading standards. And it’s telling a different story than the diploma.
In 2000, about a quarter of ACT takers scored 17 or below, a threshold that signals serious college readiness concerns. By 2023, it’s 44%. The share scoring 28 or above (strong preparation) peaked at 15% in 2020 and has since dropped to 11%. One caveat: Illinois adopted the SAT as its mandatory state exam in 2017, making the ACT optional. Post-2017 ACT takers are a self-selecting group, so part of the decline reflects who’s still choosing to take it, not just a drop in preparation. The pre-2017 trend, when the ACT was effectively mandatory, still shows steady deterioration.
The ACT is national. But Illinois has its own mandatory exam now: the SAT, taken by 96-99% of juniors since 2018. That’s the cleanest signal we have for what’s happening in Illinois specifically, because nearly everyone takes it.
Illinois juniors scored 1,019 on average in 2018, the first year the SAT was mandatory. By 2023 it was 970, a 49-point drop, or about 4.8%. The national average fell 3.0% over the same period (1,060 to 1,028), so Illinois is declining faster than the country as a whole. And unlike the ACT, there’s no selection bias here. This is nearly every student in the state.
These are the metrics that don’t adjust to local standards. They don’t care whether a school uses credit recovery or flexible grading. And they show that while diplomas kept printing, the learning behind them didn’t keep up. If graduation rates and standardized test scores are moving in opposite directions, it’s not the tests that got easier. Graduating did.
What the teacher numbers tell you
Illinois added about 9,000 teachers over this period (129,000 to 138,000) while losing 153,000 students. On paper, that should mean smaller class sizes and more individual attention. Average teacher salary rose 19%, from $65,700 to $78,500, though that roughly tracks inflation over seven years (about 2.5% annually), so real compensation is basically flat.
More teachers, fewer students, flat real pay. And chronic absence still got worse. That’s not an indictment of teachers. It suggests the things driving chronic absence (housing instability, health care access, transportation) are outside the classroom.
Teacher retention tracks the same pattern: Exemplary schools retain 88% of their teachers. Intensive schools retain 75%. The schools that need experienced teachers the most can’t keep them.
What the data actually tells us
Eight years of school-level data, cross-referenced with national test scores and poverty estimates, points to a few things:
The data is consistent with COVID accelerating a crisis that was already building. Two years of chronic absence data before the pandemic isn’t enough to prove causation on its own, but fifteen years of a related measure, chronic truancy, trend in the same direction: steadily worsening. The schools that got hit hardest by post-COVID chronic absence were already the ones with the highest absence rates, the highest poverty, and the lowest accountability designations. The pandemic widened gaps that were already there.
More teachers and more money didn’t fix it. Teacher headcount grew, class sizes shrank, and salaries kept pace with inflation. None of it budged chronic absence. The interventions that matter probably look less like school policy and more like public health, housing, and transportation policy.
The diploma is measuring less than it used to. Graduation rates rose while chronic absence spiked and national standardized test scores fell. ACT data shows 44% of test-takers now score below the college-readiness threshold, up from 25% in 2000. SAT total scores dropped 32 points in six years. The diploma and the test scores are telling different stories, and the tests are the ones that don’t adjust to local grading standards.
Concentrated poverty is the strongest signal in the data. Statewide child poverty actually fell from 16.2% to 14.1% over this period, but the schools where poverty concentrates got worse. Schools where 75%+ of students are low-income have chronic absence rates 3x higher than schools where less than 25% are. That gap grew after COVID and shows no sign of closing. The state got richer on average. The schools serving the poorest kids didn’t feel it.
