CPS dropping school police officers didn't change whether students or teachers feel safe, study reveals

Rashad Talley, the principal at Wendell Phillips Academy High School, believes safety and discipline practices that are healthy are more about the staff’s relationship with students and not whether the South Side high school has police in the building every day. 

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint whether a [school resource officer] makes that much of a difference, because I could be an SRO and have a great relationship with a kid,” he said. “I don’t think it matters, the title of the person, or the position of the person. It matters, that relationship.”

Removing school resource officers hasn’t led to more disciplinary issues or made students feel less safe, new report finds

As Chicago Public Schools prepares to eliminate resource officer positions districtwide, a new study found removing police from city schools has not led to increased disciplinary issues, nor did it make students and staff feel less safe. 

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research on Wednesday published a new report examining the impacts of removing resource officers from Chicago public high schools...

University of Chicago study finds removal of police in Chicago Public Schools did not significantly affect safety

Removing uniformed police officers from Chicago Public Schools had little effect on students’ and teachers’ perceptions of safety, according to a new report, published Wednesday. 

The study — conducted by a team of researchers at U. of C.’s Consortium on School Research, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital Center for Childhood Resilience — examines the outcome of CPS’ plan to phase out uniformed police officers in schools...

Chicago schools that removed police officers saw slight drop in high-level discipline violations

Chicago high schools that removed police in the last few years saw a slight dip in the most serious types of student disciplinary violations, according to a new study released Wednesday. 

The study, from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, comes as Chicago Public Schools plans to launch a new safety policy for the upcoming school year that will unilaterally remove school resource officers, or SROs, from all campuses...

Samuel Espinal Jr.

Samuel Espinal Jr. is a Research Intern at the UChicago Consortium. He studies philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago. He loves how the two disciplines provide a cohesive overview of concepts and their solutions. Before coming to the UChicago Consortium, Samuel worked at the Citizens Budget Commission, where he served as a Research Intern. Samuel has a strong interest in education, as most of his life was framed by New York City’s inequitable education system. He believes that supporting students with a stable foundation is key to managing their success in the long run.

Understanding and advocating on school discipline

How does your child’s school approach school discipline and school climate? The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research recently released a toolkit called Family Playbook: School Suspensions, Discipline & Restorative Justice. The playbook summarizes research and data on school discipline and includes actions you can take to learn more about how your child’s school approaches discipline and climate in school. 

CPS: Elementary students topped pre-pandemic literacy rate in preliminary standardized test results

With school districts across the country still grappling with learning loss due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago Public Schools announced Thursday that students in grades 3-8 appear to have performed better on English language proficiency tests, on average, than they did in 2018-19, the last full school year before the pandemic disrupted in-person learning. 

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