Student-athletes are less likely to skip school than other students, even in the offseason, new research finds, supporting an emerging consensus that connections to activities, teachers and peers are critical to combating the absenteeism crisis.

Interim Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King, who will become the district’s permanent leader in July, has major challenges ahead of her.

The district is facing a projected budget deficit of at least $520 million next school year. At the same time, enrollment is declining, and the chronic absenteeism rate — when kids miss at least 10% of school days — has remained around 40% for the past few years...

At the start of her junior year, Arianna Brandt’s high school counselor urged her to go all out on dual credit — courses taught on her West Side Chicago campus that would earn her free college credit.

If Brandt pushed herself, she could even graduate high school with a two-year associate degree and shorten her path to a four-year college diploma...

School attendance is down, chronic absenteeism is up, and concern for students’ learning is growing. On March 6, 200 cross-sector experts and practitioners who are taking a holistic view of students’ experiences and outcomes in school gathered at an event hosted by the Crown Family School’s Kersten Institute for Urban Education and the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC) to discuss how to address the troubling trend across the city and state.

Key Takeaways:

• In order for data to be used for improvement, there needs to be a shift in adult mindsets and approaches around the use of student experience data.
• Effective strategies exist to support the adult mindset and capacity shifts needed to utilize student experience data for school and classroom improvement.
• It is imperative to engage students as partners in data use and school improvement initiatives.
• Better coordination, communication, and coherence across professional learning and supports are needed to create a more coherent, viable, effecti

Nearly two years after Chicago Public Schools removed police officers from campuses and implemented a new holistic approach to school safety, officials believe that shift could serve as a replicable model for school districts across the country.

Those findings come from a new study from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research and the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital, which examined the CPS process for removing school resource officers in 2024 and replacing them with a new Whole School Safety plan...

Key Learnings:

• CBO leaders characterized the collaborative process used to develop the Whole School Safety Framework as healing and restorative.
• CPS officials and CBO leaders believed that the Whole School Safety Framework helped ground safety plans in individual communities’ perspectives, facilitated power-sharing, and supported the reimagining of safety.
• District officials and CBO leaders believed that the impact of the Whole School Safety Framework should be assessed along multiple dimensions including student and parent engagement, student outcomes, district

When Chicago closed 50 public schools in 2013, school and city officials framed the decision not only as a choice about budget deficits or half-empty buildings but as a way to give kids a “brighter future.”

Like Cleveland’s school board and officials, they argued that students would reap benefits from the tough decision through added resources and programs that would lead to academic gains...