Ohio students reached five-year highs in both English language arts and mathematics during the 2025-26 school year, the state’s newly released school report cards show. Statewide English proficiency rose to 62.2%, while math proficiency reached 56.4%, according to the official results.
The report cards cover traditional districts and schools, community schools, career-technical planning districts, and dropout-recovery programs. Families can review individual results through the state’s report-card portal, rather than treating the statewide averages as a grade for every local system.
The literacy result is notable because 2025-26 was Ohio’s first full school year of classroom instruction grounded in the Science of Reading. English-language arts proficiency increased across all 10 demographic groups measured by the Department of Education and Workforce. Math proficiency improved in nine of those 10 groups, a pattern independently summarized by WYSO.
State officials tied the improvement to a broader literacy strategy launched in 2023, including a coaching network that now includes 140 coaches serving more than 200 schools. The department also reported that 16,900 more children demonstrated kindergarten literacy readiness than a year earlier, an increase of 17.2%. Those figures show movement in the intended direction, but they do not by themselves establish that any single policy caused the gains.
Other statewide measures also improved. The English performance index reached 84.07, up 2.21 points since 2022, while the math index rose 5.7 points to 78.7. More than two-thirds of the Class of 2025 earned at least one of Ohio’s 11 postsecondary-readiness measures. Career-technical proficiency reached 25.4%, compared with 22.3% in 2023, and the share earning an OhioMeansJobs Readiness Seal with 250 hours of work-based learning more than doubled to 8.4%, the state reported.
Attendance remains a central constraint despite progress. Chronic absenteeism fell from 25.1% to 23.9% in one year and has declined for four consecutive years. The department estimates the latest reduction restored 3.7 million hours of learning time. Still, nearly one in four students meeting the state’s chronic-absence definition leaves considerable room for improvement.
The statewide averages also mask sharp local differences. Cleveland Metropolitan School District, for example, remained at 2.5 stars overall even as its graduation rate and college-and-career readiness improved; chronic absenteeism there stayed above 50%, according to Axios Cleveland. Meanwhile, WYSO noted that some districts’ early-literacy star ratings declined after the state changed expectations even though student performance improved.
That distinction matters for parents and policymakers: a star-rating change can reflect both student outcomes and revised benchmarks. The most useful reading of the 2026 report cards is therefore two-level—statewide indicators show broad academic recovery, while each district’s component scores, demographics, attendance and year-over-year trend provide the practical local picture. Families can compare those measures directly in the state portal before drawing conclusions from one overall rating.
