Chicago Public Schools students return amid low proficiency, underused schools

Chicago Public Schools students return to class Aug. 24. Most still aren’t reading or doing math at grade level and absenteeism remains high.

Chicago Public Schools students return Aug. 24 to a district where academic struggles remain serious despite Illinois lowering the test scores considered proficient.

Most CPS students don’t meet state standards in reading and math. Two-in-five were chronically absent last year.

Enrollment resumed its long-term decline, while spending has gone in the opposite direction. CPS enters the school year with a record $10.11 billion budget.

Chicago students deserve better academic outcomes, and taxpayers deserve a district that operates within its means.

The Chicago Policy Center offers the CPS Excellence Agenda, a roadmap of reforms for the school board to help ensure excellence in academics, finances and district governance, including:

• Requiring proven and research-backed instructional practices, ensuring specific interventions in struggling schools and giving families access to and stability in high-quality schooling options.
• Transitioning toward zero-based budgeting, requiring departments and schools to justify spending rather than simply building new budgets on previous years, and mandating a higher threshold for approving new borrowing.
• Implementing a Blue Ribbon Commission for CPS’ facilities planning, including assessing the district’s facility footprint, establishing a framework to optimize facilities for student success, setting consistent standards for school enrollment and performance and comparing CPS’ capital financing ability with other large school districts.

For now, here’s where CPS stands.

Most Chicago students aren’t proficient in reading or math

The most recent Illinois Report Card shows 43% of CPS students in third through eighth grade met the state’s proficiency standard in reading in spring 2025. Just 27% were proficient in math.

Among 11th graders taking the ACT, 40% met the reading standard and only 25% met the math standard.

Those numbers look better than the previous year, but parents should be careful comparing the two years after the state lowered the scores considered proficient beginning with the 2025 Illinois Assessment of Readiness test.

That change boosted proficiency rates on paper and makes direct comparisons with previous years misleading. Even under the lower standards, most CPS students failed to meet grade-level expectations in reading, and nearly three-quarters failed to do so in math.

Chronically absent students

In 2025, 40.1% of CPS students were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year, with or without an excuse.

That’s down slightly from 2024 but remains dramatically higher than 24% in 2019, the final full school year before pandemic-era school closures.

Frequent absences are associated with weaker academic achievement and an increased risk of dropping out.

Chronically absent teachers

More than 2-in-5 CPS teachers missed 10 or more school days in 2024-2025. That’s lowest recorded CPS teacher attendance rate in nearly a decade and nearly 10 percentage points higher than the statewide rate.

It’s possible that some teachers missed many more than 10 days, but the state reports only the rate of teachers missing fewer than 10.

Research points to teacher absence as a leading indicator of student achievement. Chicago students’ low proficiency rates aren’t helped when their teachers aren’t there.

Chicago is spending more to educate fewer students

From 2020 to 2025, CPS enrollment fell by more than 24,000 students, or 7%, while as of the new budget, annual operating expenses since 2020 have increased by $2.4 billion, or 39%. CPS added 8,250 positions during that period.

That mismatch is a major reason CPS faces recurring deficits.

The budgeting process for fiscal 2027 started with a projected deficit of $732.5 million. The final budget restored more than 1,000 planned layoffs by assuming another $150 million in state funding that has not been awarded.

The budget also relies on temporary or uncertain fixes that don’t solve the underlying imbalance between how many students CPS serves and how much the district spends.

Over 250 Chicago schools have too many empty desks

CPS isn’t just educating fewer students. It is maintaining 255 school buildings with large amounts of unused space.

Fifty-four percent of CPS schools are underutilized, or below 70% of capacity. Some are nearly empty.

A moratorium on school closures is in place even as enrollment declines and the district struggles to balance its budget. The moratorium ends after this school year, making a long-term facilities strategy increasingly important.

Chicago should have a school system where students learn to read and do math at grade level, classrooms are vibrant and taxpayers’ dollars are directed toward students rather than perpetuating structural deficits. The Chicago Policy Center’s CPS Excellence Agenda is a place to start the reversal.