This post was originally published by Attendance Works on February 24, 2026. Attendance Works partners with schools, districts, states, communities and organizations to ensure that chronic absence is recognized as a serious issue that can be addressed through proactive, supportive strategies.

“It seems like a good time, regardless of the state and its achievement profile, to join in and ensure the resources that support instruction are there to make sure students have access to early literacy,” Davis said.

The new law will require significant training on evidence-based phonics instruction that might be limited somewhat by union contracts, but “it’s not going to be enough to do a one-shot training,” Reville said. Districts and the state will also need to build out data systems to track results, such as fewer students requiring intensive remediation by the 3rd grade...

In 2011, Elaine Allensworth took the helm of the UChicago Consortium and poured herself into what has always been at the heart of the UChicago Consortium: the conviction that research and practice belong together. The evidence speaks for itself. As Elaine steps down as our Lewis-Sebring Executive Director, we want to pause and say, simply: thank you. We are so glad she isn't going far. Elaine will continue at the UChicago Consortium as a Research Professor, and we can't wait to see what she does next. We'll let her tell the rest of the story.

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Key Findings

• Classroom composition significantly affects teacher performance ratings 
  • Teachers received higher ratings when assigned students who had higher prior achievement, attended more regularly, and exhibited fewer behavioral challenges. 
  • A one standard deviation (SD) increase in classroom quality index (based on baseline academic and behaviora

Alicia (She/Her) is a Research Analyst I with the UChicago Consortium. In this role, she supports the career-connected learning project while simultaneously cleaning and updating databases and documentation for data needed for new projects. Having been raised in the Chicago area in a very tight-knit community has driven her to come back and make a positive impact on the same community. She is passionate about learning new quantitative methods to investigate existing educational programs to highlight the positive outcomes or the need for change.

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project confirms what close observers already knew: America’s test scores are slipping. The pandemic worsened the decline, but the slide began years before. In one-third of school districts, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015.

Key Findings:

• Leaders in many schools allocated resources to expand organizational capacity around adoption and implementation of the Skyline ELA curriculum in grades K-2.  
• Through strategic investments across five domains, leaders strengthened organizational capacity to support teachers’ engagement with the Skyline ELA curriculum.

In this video Dr. Heidy Moran, the Principal of Schurz High School in Chicago, shares insights on how the Cultivate Survey and framework was used to center student experience and drive improvement at Schurz.