In 2011, Elaine Allensworth took the helm of the UChicago Consortium and poured herself into what has always been at the heart of the UChicago Consortium: the conviction that research and practice belong together. The evidence speaks for itself. As Elaine steps down as our Lewis-Sebring Executive Director, we want to pause and say, simply: thank you. We are so glad she isn't going far. Elaine will continue at the UChicago Consortium as a Research Professor, and we can't wait to see what she does next. We'll let her tell the rest of the story.
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As I end my time as executive director of the UChicago Consortium, after 15 years in this role, leaving with deep gratitude and admiration for the colleagues and collaborators who have shown, repeatedly, that research and practice together can transform what we thought possible for young people and our schools.
During my tenure, I had the privilege of witnessing remarkable change in Chicago’s schools. High school graduation rates rose by more than 25 percentage points, while graduates’ achievement increased—with higher test scores, stronger GPAs, and more students passing AP exams. These gains were driven by the hard work of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) educators, students, and leaders, supported by research on what matters most for high school success and by partners like the Network for College Success, and nonprofits across the city. Working together, the city developed a system-wide focus on educational attainment that has paid off in increases in educational attainment rates year after year. Through our partnership with CPS and the launch of the To&Through Project, Chicago now has accessible data on the key milestones from middle grades through college graduation for every school and community area in the city. All of this work has more than tripled the percentage of ninth graders completing a college credential within 10 years.
We have produced growing evidence that the reports of what students and teachers say about their experiences in schools matters; the conditions they see explain which schools improve and which do not, and efforts to improve these conditions result in significant improvements in student outcomes. Since 2013, Chicago has had incredibly strong participation in the 5Essentials Surveys, hovering between 75-80% except in the COVID-19 years, giving an unusually rich picture of school climate and organizational conditions.
Over the same period, suspension rates fell by more than one-half, and students and teachers reported feeling increasingly safe at school—reflecting district and school efforts informed, in part, by Consortium research. We worked with the district and CTU to provide honest feedback about what was and was not working in teacher evaluation, and saw increases in teaching effectiveness. By the mid-2010s, Chicago’s learning gains were at the 95th percentile of all districts in the country.
A defining feature of the UChicago Consortium’s work has been our willingness to document both successes and disappointments. We evaluated initiatives that substantially moved the needle on student achievement and equity, such as the district’s implementation of Common Core math practices, and provided detailed information on efforts that did not unfold as intended, including the decision to close 48 schools in 2013, with insights now informing districts across the country in a time of shrinking enrollment. By bringing evidence to bear, we have helped move conversations from hearsay and supposition to a clearer understanding of what happened and why.
We have synthesized decades of research on student development into frameworks that help educators and youth-serving nonprofits make sense of vast bodies of evidence in ways that are meaningful for their work, such as Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners, Foundations for Young Adult Success, and Arts Education and Social-Emotional Learning Outcomes Among K-12 Students. In recent years, our Learning and Development group has worked hand-in-hand with CPS and school-based partners to center student voice through the Cultivate Survey and student empowerment practices—the next frontier in transforming schools to better serve young people. Critically, we have made increasing efforts to hear from CPS families and make data and evidence more broadly accessible across the city, including the launch of our Family Playbook series, two years ago.
I am incredibly proud of the work we’ve done with the Latino Policy Forum to illuminate the success of English Learners in Chicago, and to pinpoint the specific areas where students need more support; our work showing the crucial role of school leaders, and how successful leaders do their work; and the insights we produced around CPS’s school choice and enrollment processes, providing evidence to support continuous improvement.
Across all of this, we have seen that real change comes from cumulative knowledge-building over time, and researchers who listen and respond to the needs of policy and practice, engage stakeholders with diverse perspectives, conduct rigorous research without assuming the answers in advance, and stay with questions long enough to build shared understanding.
I am profoundly grateful to the Consortium team—past and present—for their brilliance, integrity, and commitment, and to all our partners who believe in this model of research-practice partnership. The Consortium is well positioned for its next chapter, especially with the strong vision articulated in our Research and Engagement Agenda. I am excited to see where the next generation of Consortium leadership takes this work and how Chicago—and cities across the country—continue to show what is possible when research and practice move forward together. I look forward to supporting this work in the years ahead, as I transition to doing research full-time at the UChicago Consortium.
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Elaine Allensworth is a Research Professor at the UChicago Consortium. For more than 25 years at UChicago, she has conducted research on educational policy and practice. She works with policymakers and practitioners to bridge research and practice, providing advice to researchers across the country about conducting research-practice partnerships, and serving on panels, policy commissions, and working groups at the local, state and national level.
She is recognized as an expert in the areas of students’ educational attainment, school leadership, and school improvement. Her research on the factors that predict whether students will drop out of high school has shifted the conversation from factors that schools cannot control to factors that schools can influence; school districts across the country have adopted early warning indicator systems based on her Freshman OnTrack research.
Her 2025 book, Using Data to Improve Schools, distills her decades of research leadership and synthesizes evidence so that educators and policymakers can focus on the metrics that matter most for student achievement. She is also one of the authors of the book, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, which documents the ways in which organizational structures in schools influence improvements in student achievement.
Elaine has been the principal investigator on research grants from funders such as the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She has received a number of awards from the American Educational Research Association, including the Palmer O. Johnson award Division H awards outstanding publications. She was once a high school Spanish and science teacher.