CPS math and reading scores are much worse than advertised

A much-vaunted recovery turns out to be a mirage

When we were pulling together our 2025 scoreboard last week, I was struck by just how poor the math and reading scores were at Chicago Public Schools. In 2024, just 23% of CPS fourth graders were proficient in Reading, and 24% were proficient in Math. Those numbers aren’t just low – they’re also dead last among the four biggest cities in the country (New York, Los Angeles, and Houston).

Part of what surprised me here, as that in 2024, we got really good news: national researchers had found that CPS reading scores rebounded especially quickly from the pandemic. So I figured it might be worth digging a bit further into the data to understand what’s going on.

It’s not good.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are falling almost everywhere. But they’re falling faster in Chicago than in almost all of our peer cities. Since 2017, Fourth Grade Reading and Math scores have fallen by roughly 4% in Chicago. That’s the worst trajectory among any of largest cities in the country. In Math, we’re now second to last overall.

Reading scores are only slightly better. We’re on a steady downward slide, but still rank ahead of Philly, Dallas and Ft. Worth.

The picture is only a little less bleak with eighth graders, where Chicago has historically performed a bit better. Since 2017, scaled reading scores have dropped 2% and math scores are down more than 4%. That math drop is the second worst in the country among the ten largest cities – only Fort Worth posted a faster decline.

I’ve also been shocked by how little coverage this development has attracted. When the data came out in January, Chalkbeat wrote a story looking at the trajectory of Illinois overall relative to other states (slightly positive), and mentioned the most recent CPS results. The Tribune did something similar. But I haven’t seen a single major workup of CPS’s NAEP performance over time, or in comparison to other districts.¹

It’s hard to knock the Chicago press corps here – in a difficult media environment, few reporters have the luxury to play around with new datasets until they see something interesting. But I’m struck by the contrast to 2024, when researchers from the Education Recovery Project estimated that CPS had done a better job recovering from the pandemic than other districts:

• WTTW: CPS Shows Strong Academic Recovery After COVID-19 Pandemic, Study Finds

• Sun-Times: CPS students’ reading gains rank among top 3 large districts in the nation, study finds

• ABC7: CPS ranked No. 1 among other large cities for reading improvement after COVID pandemic

• Chalkbeat: Chicago Public Schools recover from pandemic declines more than other districts, study shows

The district was quick to highlight the results in 2024 - which probably helped spur the positive coverage. But what triggered the reversal?

There appears to be a serious problem with Illinois state tests

For the Education Recovery Scorecard, researchers compared CPS student progress on Illinois state tests to the performance of other districts on their state tests. It was an important effort, but isn’t nearly as rigorous as a like-for-like comparison of the federal NAEP test.

That’s exactly what happened here. As Larry Gavin details in a terrific piece of explanatory journalism for the Evanston Roundtable², Illinois implemented a series of technical changes in test administration between 2022 and 2024 which seem to have triggered a massive jump in scores. Statewide, the share of eighth graders deemed proficient in reading jumped from 30% to 50% in two years. Since CPS students were being measured by that state test, it’s not surprising that the district was crowned a top achiever.

The Education Recovery Project researchers knew what data to trust. When the discrepancy emerged in August 2024, they issued a report calling out “anomalously large” reading improvements in Illinois, and dropped us from their national analyses. At the time, they wrote that the upcoming federal NAEP data “will be far more informative” than the state-level sources they were relying on. Now we have NAEP data, and it’s very bad for CPS.

A policy problem and a political football

This matters first and foremost because it’s hard to fix a problem you refuse to admit even exists.³ But it also has a lot of implications for the future of CPS. The district used federal pandemic aid to aggressively hire full-time positions. And a number of advocates, including the Chicago Teachers Union, pointed to that mix of increased funding and improving test scores as evidence for further spending increases.

Now the numbers run in the opposite direction. Since 2019, Chicago’s spending per pupil is up 27% when accounting for inflation. That’s 3^rd highest among our peer group. But we ranked dead last in academic progress for 4^th graders, and were decidedly average when it came to 8^th grade progression.

That doesn’t mean that more spending can’t improve student outcomes. In the aggregate, studies find a weak but positive relationship between district spending and learning outcomes. But it does indicate that something is deeply broken at CPS – and ever-higher levels of spending are not consistently or reliably translating into more learning.

We will spend much more time on this issue in the coming weeks. For now, I’ll just note that we’re five months away from selecting Chicago’s first fully elected school board. Any candidate whose platform starts and ends with more funding hasn’t reckoned with the real challenges at Chicago Public Schools.

They may not have even bothered to look at the data.

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Join us for a couple of upcoming events:

• June 3rd | Edgewater Happy Hour: Come on out and join the A City That Works crew to talk housing (and anything else) with Alderwoman Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth (48th) on Wednesday, June 3rd. We’ll be at Pasteur starting at 5:30. Register here to let us know you’re coming.

• June 14 | Unlocking Our Potential: Discussing Housing Reform in Chicago: Chicago Growth Project is hosting a forum on the housing policies shaping our city’s future, from 4-7pm at Midwest Coast Brewing. Attendees will include Cong. Mike Quigley, State Senator Sara Feigenholtz, Ald. Red Burnett, and Democratic nominees Paul Kendrick (State Representative) and Drake Warren (Cook County Commissioner). Register here.

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1. I’d love to be corrected, and will update this post if so.

2. Between this and their reporting on the 9th District Congressional race, the local Evanston press corps is crushing it.

3. It’s also a helpful reminder that you should be *deeply* suspicious when anyone celebrates a metric that they have direct control over that isn’t backed up by outcome metrics they don’t have control over.