Chicago Tribune

About 375,000 Chicago Public Schools students return to classrooms on Tuesday, all on the same crucial path — the one that leads toward a diploma.

Early Monday, CPS officials released figures that should give those students — and their parents — confidence that they can reach that goal. The district’s five-year graduation rate gained 4 percentage points in 2017, climbing from 73.5 percent to 77.5 percent. In other words, 77.5 percent of students who started high school five years earlier have graduated. The gains happened across the board, from neighborhood schools (up 1.8 percentage points), to charters (up 2.8 points) to Academy for Urban School Leadership schools (up 8.1 percentage points)...