Numbers tell a story, but rarely without help.

Partially buried in a flurry of veto session and federal immigrant enforcement headlines was the late-October release of the State Board of Education’s annual statewide school report card.

It’s almost a crushing amount of data, which is to be expected with 864 districts operating 3,827 schools teaching 1,848,560 students – almost 15% of overall population.

The information is available at illinoisreportcard.com, along with historical data from 2006 through 2020, all available at the individual district level. The state-level figures are interesting – we’re down two districts, eight schools and 2,730 students from 2024’s snapshot – but the tool probably is more widely useful for people who want to look into local districts, either as parents, taxpayers or both.

One writer has no business telling any reader how to perceive these numbers, micro or macro, but I do encourage taking the plunge. Then pay attention when people cite the data, whether they be elected leaders and candidates or teachers and administrators.

This report is a textbook example (pun most definitely intended) of how one piece of source material provides useful leverage for a spectrum of talking points. Want optimism? Chronic absenteeism is down and the graduation rate is up. Pessimism? Only 39% of tested students graded as proficient or better in English, only 28% in math and 44.6% in science.

Those who trend towards probabilism or skepticism should especially love the 2025 report because a new scoring system makes it almost impossible to compare the current data to even last year. State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders offered a ringing endorsement during a media briefing on the card, saying proficiency rates “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. But we know they would have improved.”

Parenting a high school senior whose college search spans large and small public and private institutions in multiple states – and especially commiserating with other parents – has freshly illuminated the challenges of distilling the educational process to the raw numbers of grade-point averages or standardized test scores. Academic rigor varies by district (as does, more importantly and not unrelated, spending per pupil) and we’re not all preparing our kids for the same future.

Not long ago a local school board candidate bemoaned our placement rate in Ivy League institutions, the kind of statement that might get one laughed off the ballot outside the suburbs. Others rail about declining enrollment absent the context of overall population trends.

Numbers are useful but they aren’t everything. Take the time to see how your schools are performing, then use that information to start a conversation.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.