Prairie State Wire

The People Who Play By The Rules PAC has launched a new series, K-12 Parents Speak, featuring parents whose children were severely affected by Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s lockdowns and school closure policies during COVID-19.

The political action committee’s first episode of this new series featured Anastatia Andrews, a parent and resident of Barrington. Andrews spoke about the negative effects that the lockdowns and school closure policies had on her children, pointing out that test scores are down.

“The decisions that Gov. Pritzker has made for our state have not been to further our children’s future,” she said, according to the political action committee’s Facebook page. "Mandated school closures for such a long time, and when he did finally open the schools, he mandated masks and had this overreaching authority. They’re realizing that the schools’ test scores are down, year over year, nationally, and the entire system was broken.” 

In December, the Chicago Tribune reported on test data from roughly 90% of the school districts that administered the Illinois Assessment of Readiness for grades 3-8 and the SAT for high school juniors. The data showed that, from 2019 to 2021, 17% fewer students met grade-level standards in English, and 18% fewer met grade-level standards in math. The participation rates were lower than in previous years, with about 70% taking the tests. 

From 2020 to 2021, the Illinois State Report Card reported a decline in enrollment of nearly 70,000 students statewide, which is a decrease of 27,501 students from 2019 to 2020. 

Multiple factors have contributed to the decline in Illinois school enrollment, including dropout rates, statewide population, state fertility rates and parents who have chosen to homeschool their children. Recent Census reports show that Illinois’ population has decreased, with 141,000 people leaving the state since April 2020. 

Since 2010, Illinois also has posted an average decline in the total fertility rate. As of 2020, Illinois ranked 40th in the U.S., with 53.8 births per 1,000 women, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. 

Homeschooling can be difficult to track, as Illinois does not require parents to register, so it is hard to gauge its effect on the declining number of students. However, the known data indicates a significant rise in homeschooling nationwide. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that at the start of the 2020-2021 school year 11.1% of households with school-aged children decided to homeschool, a 5.6% increase from the previous school year. 

The National Center for Education Statistics in 2021 reported that 14.5% of parents who chose to homeschool their children said the reasons were related to dissatisfaction with academic instruction.