Illinois 2025 report card: new cut scores change picture of proficiency
Chalkbeat's coverage of the Illinois State Board of Education's decision to lower proficiency cut scores on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), the state's grades 3–8 ELA and math test.
What changed
ISBE adjusted the cut scores defining proficiency on the IAR after consulting teachers, school leaders, and advocates. Per State Superintendent Tony Sanders, the previous cut scores were "among the highest in the nation and confused parents because they were not aligned with grade level standards."
| Year / scoring | ELA proficient | Math proficient |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 (old cut scores) | 39.4% | 27.9% |
| 2025 (new cut scores, statewide) | 52.0% | 38.0% |
| 2025 (new cut scores, CPS) | 40.6% | 26.2% |
Exact numerical thresholds are not given in the article.
Chicago Public Schools' own retrospective analysis of CPS ELA proficiency under the new cut scores. Source: Chalkbeat, "Illinois State Report Card 2025"; image attributed to CPS.
Critic perspectives
- Robin Steans (Advance Illinois) — without side-by-side comparisons it's hard to assess genuine growth.
- Jessica Handy (Stand for Children) — changing standards obscures whether students have recovered from pandemic learning losses; called it "a change in the goal posts."
- Sanders himself acknowledged: "They would have increased if we had kept the same cut scores, however, we changed the cut scores, so we can't tell you what they would have been."
Communication to parents — what's missing
ISBE did not provide comparative data alongside the new scores; Chicago Public Schools had to run its own analysis to see what would have happened under prior thresholds. This is itself an achievement-communication failure: parents now see "52% proficient" without an accessible explanation that proficiency means something different than it did last year.
Significance
A concrete, recent example of a state changing what proficiency means rather than how proficiency is communicated. Compare with Learning Heroes B-flation, which argues for clearer communication, not redefinition. Both diagnose the same problem (parents don't understand bands) but propose opposite fixes — a tension worth tracking.
The stated rationale ("not aligned with grade level standards") implicitly concedes that previous bands had drifted from intuitive parent meaning. See proficiency bands and cut scores.