The Poverty Gap Is Closing: Economically Disadvantaged Students Gained 5.4 Points

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Economically disadvantaged students in Illinois are graduating at 83.7%, up from 78.3% in 2019. The 5.4-point gain outpaced the overall state improvement of 2.8 points, narrowing the poverty gap from 7.9 percentage points to 5.3.

What makes this trend notable is its persistence. Across the six year-over-year moves between the 2019 and 2025 graduating classes, the gap narrowed five times. The one exception is the 2021 pandemic cohort, and the gap has narrowed in each of the four years since.

Year by year

Year	All Students	Econ. Disadvantaged	Gap
2019	86.2%	78.3%	7.9pp
2020	88.0%	82.0%	6.0pp
2021	86.8%	79.2%	7.6pp
2022	87.3%	80.1%	7.2pp
2023	87.6%	81.2%	6.4pp
2024	87.7%	81.8%	5.9pp
2025	89.0%	83.7%	5.3pp

The 2021 pandemic cohort did not affect both groups equally. The all-student rate slipped 1.2 points, from 88.0% to 86.8%, while the rate for economically disadvantaged students fell 2.8 points, from 82.0% to 79.2%. That pushed the gap back out from 6.0 points to 7.6, undoing the previous year's narrowing. Every year since has moved the other way.

The Evidence-Based Funding connection

State officials and education advocates have connected these gains to the Evidence-Based Funding formula. EBF restructured how Illinois distributes education dollars, directing new funding toward schools that were farthest from their calculated adequacy levels. According to Advance Illinois, new funding has flowed through the formula since its passage.

The districts that are farthest from adequacy tend to serve the highest concentrations of low-income students. If EBF is working as intended, the narrowing poverty gap is exactly the outcome it was designed to produce. Whether the formula is the cause or a contributing factor is difficult to isolate, but the alignment between the policy's implementation timeline and the trend in the data is striking.

District variation hides in the average

The statewide poverty gap of 5.3 points masks enormous variation at the district level. Of the 409 districts that published both rates for the class of 2025, six had gaps wider than 20 points, topping out at 35.8 points in Lake Zurich^↗. In all six, fewer than 20 economically disadvantaged students graduated, so a single student moves the rate by several points.

Those six do not fit one profile. Two, Lake Zurich and Geneva^↗, are large suburban districts, with 452 and 400 graduates respectively and only 12 and 16 of them economically disadvantaged. The other four are small districts where fewer than 45 students graduated in total.

Among larger districts, Rockford^↗ posted a 4.9-point gap and East St. Louis^↗ a gap of negative 0.6 points, both at or below the state figure. East St. Louis reported every one of its 337 graduates as economically disadvantaged, so its two rates describe essentially the same students. Springfield^↗ runs the other way, at 8.0 points, wider than the state.

What 5.3 points means in practice

Illinois does not publish a separate rate for students who are not economically disadvantaged, so the comparison here is against all students, a group that includes the economically disadvantaged. On that basis, economically disadvantaged students now graduate at 94% of the all-student rate. In 2019 the figure was 91%.

In absolute terms, if 83.7% of economically disadvantaged students graduate, roughly one in six still does not. That is 16 out of every 100 students from low-income families in the four-year cohort who leave without a diploma. Closing the remaining 5.3 points in the class of 2025 alone would have meant about 3,700 more diplomas.

Data source: Illinois State Board of Education. Analysis covers the four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate for public school districts, 2019-2025.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Geneva - EdTribune IL - Illinois Education Data

The Poverty Gap Is Closing: Economically Disadvantaged Students Gained 5.4 Points

Year by year

The Evidence-Based Funding connection

District variation hides in the average

What 5.3 points means in practice