Key Findings of On the Path to Becoming a Chicago Public School Principal

• The majority of principals cited people skills and emotional intelligence skills, along with organizational and managerial skills, as most important for successful leadership.
• Principals who had first been assistant principals said that role best prepared them to lead their own school.
• Formal principal preparatory programs and peer networks also provided essential skills.

Before Leyla Spells became a registered nurse, one major obstacle stood in her way: the National Council Licensure Examination, a standardized test she needed to pass. Spells had taken the exam three times, failing to answer the minimum number of questions correctly—spending hundreds of dollars each time to retake it.

Nina Ryan is the Assistant Director of R&D for UChicago Impact. In this role, she works on several projects across UChicago Impact, addressing product or service development needs with creative expertise. She also collaborates with the other units of the Urban Education Institute (UEI) as new tools and technologies are identified and developed. Most recently, Nina was a Project Manager on the McKnight Initiative at UEI and the Strategic Analytics Manager for The Success Project at UChicago Impact.

Key Findings

• Learning conditions are important leading indicators of B or better math grades for middle and high school students.
• Learning conditions matter for students across racial and socioeconomic lines, and that when learning conditions improve, so does students’ likelihood of earning a B or better in math.
• Learning conditions tend to get worse over time in the absence of intentional efforts on the part of schools to improve them.

Chicago Public Schools could change when elementary school students can be held back a grade and plans to stop using test scores as a factor. 

The district did not hold back any elementary students during the first two years of the pandemic in a nod to COVID’s academic and mental health toll. Last year, it revised the policy for promoting students to drop a test that schools were no longer required to give...

The recent release of the 2022 NAEP scores, which showed historic learning declines in math and reading two years following the onset of the pandemic, has brought renewed urgency to conversations around learning losses and recovery. Beliefs about these topics shape how policymakers, educators and parents act to support students moving forward. Yet our research shows that common assumptions about whose learning was affected the most and what it will take for students to catch up are, in fact, misconceptions.