“Chronic absenteeism continues to be an issue in the Illinois public school system with 1-in-4 students chronically absent this past school year,” notes the Illinois Policy Institute:
Absenteeism skyrocketed after pandemic-era school closures, but it continues to remain stubbornly high….Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses 10% of school days within an academic school year…
In the 2018-2019 school year, the last full school year before pandemic-era school closures, 17.5% of Illinois students were chronically absent. That rate skyrocketed in the 2021-2022 school year to nearly 30%. While absenteeism is slowly declining, it still stands nearly eight percentage points above pre-pandemic levels. Illinois students aren’t the only ones recording high absenteeism post-pandemic…22% of students were chronically absent nationwide in the 2024-2025 school year….Absenteeism was worst among Illinois high school students, specifically seniors…
“Children who are chronically absent for multiple years between preschool and second grade are much less likely to read at grade level by the third grade.” Third grade is a critical reading milestone for students: if a child has not learned to read by the end of third grade, that child is likely to struggle throughout his or her education. Illinois already has a literacy crisis among its third graders, and student absenteeism threatens to worsen it.
Illinois has a lousy educational system despite having the nation’s highest property taxes. Illinois has “an effective property tax rate of 1.83%, the typical Illinois homeowner paid around $4,584 that year.” By contrast, neighboring Indiana has an average property tax rate of 0.77%, neighboring Kentucky has an average rate of 0.73%, and Missouri has a average rate of 0.88%.
Progressive Illinois has much higher taxes than neighboring Indiana, whose taxes are $4,050 less per household. Yet conservative Indiana provides better roads (it ranks #2 in road quality, compared to Illinois being only #30), and Indiana processes people’s tax returns much faster and more accurately than Illinois does, and has a better criminal justice system. Illinois should be able to do better than Indiana, because it is much more fortunate than Indiana (Illinois contains wealthy Chicago suburbs that generate lots of tax revenue. Indiana lacks similarly populous wealthy areas to finance it.)
But somehow, Illinois has managed to run up vastly higher levels of debt than Indiana. Illinois has at least $70 billion in debt (and $144 billion in unfunded pension obligations), compared to $30 billion in state debt for Indiana.
Violent crime rose in Chicago as the percentage of violent criminals who are arrested plunged to only 13%.
Thousands of Chicago school laptops ended up in China, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
