Prairie State Wire

Gubernatorial candidate Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Louisville) vows to replace the Illinois State Board of Education if elected.

Bailey said that the board has presided over a complete failure of the public school system across the state. 

"When I first started coming up in the Chicago community, people would tell me I had no idea what was taking place here," Bailey said. "And I would argue, I said, I actually do. You know, our schools have problems. Our median income is the lowest in the state. Now, I really do. And accountability and transparency. When we flush all of these agency directors, when we flush what’s sometimes termed as a swamp, all of these people that work in these, they’ve been there forever. And they’re not doing our job. If they were doing their jobs, we wouldn’t have these problems. We will select an entirely new state board of education that a lot of people don’t realize that [a] governor has that ability. And then we will have a new state board superintendent. They will be tasked, [a superintendent] that serves on the school board for 17 years."

Bailey stressed the importance of teaching the youth the basics needed to prepare them for their future. 

'We have to get back to our basics, reading, and writing," he said. "And that’s where we’re failing at. And if we fail in all that, nothing else matters. If our students can’t go out and fill out a job application, if they can’t move on, you know, reading books, the fine arts, everything that’s been taken away and ignored, you can look back and equate that to all the problems that we’re having right now."

Shannon Adcock, president of Awake IL, a non-profit social welfare organization, is calling for Dr. Carmen Ayala, commissioner of the Illinois State Board of Education, to resign. She also wants "every member on the board who did not fight for children and lawful due process the last two years who all waged war on our children" to resign as well. Adcock and her organization lobbied authorities regarding the what she saw as overreach during the COVID pandemic. She wants those leaders to be held accountable.

A study entitled "The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic" written by Dan Goldhaber, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Tyler Patterson, and Douglas O. Staiger, used data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C. to "investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty." The study compared academic growth during the pandemic, fall 2019-fall 2021 to a pre-pandemic period fall 2017-fall 2019. The study claims that "remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps" over the past several years. It also found that there was no change in math gaps in areas that remained to have in-person schooling, indicating that remote learning was detrimental for students.

Wirepoints recently put out a study showing just how dire the educational crisis is in Illinois: "It’s not about money, it’s not about race, it’s not about curriculum and it’s not about critical race theory. It’s about a system that fails at its most basic function: to prepare Illinois children for their future." 

The study found that only 40% of all students in Illinois are proficient in either reading or math. According to that same study, 2% of Black third-grade students in Decatur can read at grade level, and just 9% of all third-grade students in Decatur can read at grade level.

The same study says that just 1% of Black third graders in Decatur are proficient in math. For Black students in Decatur in other grades, the number for math does not get above 4%. While white students in Decatur perform better than their black classmates, white students in Decatur still perform much worse than their white counterparts statewide. 

According to the same study, 7% of Black third graders in Rockford can read at grade level; 8% of Black third graders in Peoria can read at grade level; 28% of white third graders in Quincy can read at grade level; 16% of Hispanic third graders in Waukegan can read at grade level, and 30% of black third graders in Chicago can read at grade level.