In a city with both a long history and present reality of segregation and systemic racism, access to high quality education in Chicago has never been equitable. Over the past several years, Chicago’s educators and community leaders have elevated an all-too-delayed dialogue about the systematic barriers facing communities of color, and we hope our annual look at the attainment of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students on five key milestones can contribute to that discourse. Though it is an imperfect and incomplete metric (especially when used to assess individual students), the differences in educational attainment by race/ethnicity, gender, and disability status are reflective of the different learning opportunities and career pathways to which different groups of students have access. Our goal is for readers to come away with a clearer understanding of the current state of educational attainment in CPS and be motivated to take part in conversations and action to dismantle the oppression inherent in our current systems.
Like many reports from the To&Through Project and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium), the annual attainment report is descriptive, meaning that it seeks to answer the how, where, when, and who questions of the problem, rather than the why. This is important: sometimes in education, describing what is happening in careful detail is critical in order to help practitioners and other stakeholders see the effect of their practice. But leaving the why up to the reader also runs the risk that people will intentionally or unintentionally ascribe educational outcomes solely to the choices and capacity of CPS students, families, and communities, disregarding the broader and longstanding impact of racism...