The Illinois School Report Card uses numerical metrics, including anonymized collective test scores, to measure the abilities of Illinois public schools and school districts to educate their pupils. The report card is issued by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and uses information that each school district must send to the ISBE as part of its state school aid agreement. The Report Card is public information, and every Illinois resident can look up the numbers generated by their local school and school district.
Some advocates have hopes that Report Card data could begin to show positive results from the specialized intervention activities that have been undertaken in many Illinois schools to help challenged students and students from varying socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. However, the Fall 2025 Report Card presented anonymized data generated from groups of students, and these numbers continued to show wide gaps in student achievement between subgroups of students.
Overall numbers published in Fall 2025 showed higher levels of Illinois “student proficiency” than the numbers generated from data published in the prior 12-month Report Card cycle. However, major changes in calculation methodology implemented for the first time in 2025 meant that the Fall 2025 Report Card figures were not comparable on a student/student basis to the figures published in Fall 2024. The school/school figures are comparable, because they show which schools are doing better than others, and the Fall 2025 school-over-school Report Card showed excellence gaps comparable to the excellence gaps published in Fall 2024.