Until my recent appointment to the Illinois Senate, I was the secretary of the Illinois State Board of Education. That means I was a member of the board at the time we adopted the Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards. You may have heard about these standards in the news.

The General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, or JCAR, is expected to take up the issue Tuesday...

Sanya was a Research Analyst at the UChicago Consortium on School Research, where she conducted data analysis and created resources for students, teachers, and administrators in CPS. Before coming to the UChicago Consortium, Sanya worked as a research assistant at Beyond Schools Lab, where she helped plan, conduct, and analyze qualitative research on middle school students' understandings of consent in the hopes of creating early sexual assault and harrassment prevention programs.

"Principal Leadership Practices, Organizational Improvement, and Student Achievement" is chapter 13 of Exploring Principal Development and Teacher Outcomes: How Principals Can Strengthen Instruction, Teacher Retention, and Student Achievement, edited by Peter Youngs, Jihyun Kim, and Madeline Mavrogordato .  The full book is available from Routledge.

The annual 5Essentials survey is launching today, giving students, parents, and teachers a unique opportunity to have a voice in improving their schools.

The survey — available at this link now through Feb. 26 — is administered every spring and helps schools better understand areas of strength and weakness in five essential areas critical for school success...

A new commitment to the University of Chicago from James and Paula Crown and their family will support the School of Social Service Administration, which will be renamed the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. This honors the School’s historic legacy and enables an ambitious expansion of its vision to advance a more just and humane society.

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.

Chicago has seen significant growth in its high school graduation and college enrollment rates in recent years — but little headway in the number of students who earn degrees.

Slightly more than 40% of Chicago Public Schools students go to four-year colleges, and only half of them graduate. Completion rates were substantially lower for students attending two-year colleges...

When public school students in Illinois returned to their lessons this year, education was undeniably different. The pandemic has brought to the forefront the racial and economic inequities that have long existed in public education. Students also returned to class following a summer of social unrest over the killings of a number of black people at the hands of police.

Parents are often stymied by the process of picking a good school for their kids. Word-of-mouth recommendations can be misleading. High test scores provide only a limited picture of a school’s effectiveness since they often reflect family income with wealthier students scoring better. Northwestern University economist C.