By helping students improve their GPAs and attendance, elementary and middle school educators can have a powerful impact on students’ long-term success. 

This guide shares a Condensed Elementary On-Track (EOT) metric to help elementary and middle school educators analyze school-wide trends, diagnose adultcentered problems of practice, match 3rd- through 8th-grade students with interventions, and monitor progress over time. The framework and findings are meant for educators: we do not recommend using it and discussing it with students.

Key Findings

• The experience of living in close geographical proximity to homicide varied considerably for students across Chicago. 
• Living in close geographical proximity to homicide negatively affected students’ academic performance. 
• Some schools mitigated typical negative effects of living in proximity to homicide on academic performance.
• Schools that mitigate the negative effects of living in close geographic proximity to homicide on students’ academic outcomes were characterized by strong, positive school climates across a range of measures, includi

LOS ANGELES—In a huge city awash with tiny schools, few are smaller than the Hilda L. Solis Learning Academy. 

The public high school, housed in a former hospital in East Los Angeles, is down to 170 students from the surrounding Latino neighborhoods. On a hallway bulletin board, handwritten hearts display reasons students love the school, including, “how everyone knows each other” and “the fact that school is small.”

In partnership with Chicago Public Schools, the University of Illinois, Lurie Children's Center for Childhood Resilience, and four community-based organizations, we are working to understand how school communities implement CPS's Whole School Safety process and the impacts of removing school resource officers on students and schools.

Chicago Public Schools students’ reading scores are recovering faster since the pandemic than most school districts across the country, according to a new national report. 

The district’s surprising rebound, documented by researchers at Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, also found the state of Illinois led the nation in reading growth between 2022 and 2023 and is one of just four states to return to pre-pandemic achievement levels...

There's a difference between feeling like you belong in a space and that that space belongs to you. Dr. Shanette Porter has studied schools that have created that sense of belonging, and found that not only are strictly academic measures improved (test scores, etc), but other benefits come as well. From increased graduation rates, to decreased disciplinary incidents, to increased attendance, schools that focus on creating a sense of belonging do better for the whole child. Dr. Porter joins us to share some of her findings, as well as a powerful definition of belonging...

Jinqing Xu (Jean) utilizes strong data manipulation, quantitative research, programming, and writing skills to provide ongoing support across Consortium studies, including the English Learner and Teach Chicago projects. She serves as a key member of a team of Consortium researchers, offering data and analytic assistance throughout the project lifecycle. This includes cleaning and documenting data sources, creating large-scale databases, and applying various statistical approaches and causal designs.

A study released this January by research group Opportunity Insights found that standardized test scores — such as SAT and ACT scores — are more predictive of academic success at Ivy Plus colleges than high school grades.

The study — led by Professor and Chair of Economics John Friedman — suggested that ACT and SAT scores “may have more value for admissions processes than previously understood” and comes as the University’s Ad Hoc Committee on Admissions Policies reconsiders Brown’s test-optional admissions, legacy and early decision policies...

Clarice is an AM/PhD student at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Clarice is an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Fellow and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Research Scholar (HPRS). Before beginning her PhD, Clarice worked as an educator for five years in various areas, including teaching preschool-aged children in rural Arkansas through Teach for America and teaching English to middle school students in Madrid, Spain.