Key Findings

• Pre-policy, enrollment rates in any CPS pre-k was higher for students who lived closer to schools with pre-k and had more pre-k classrooms near where they lived.
• Pre-policy, the associations of likelihood of enrollment in full-day pre-k with 1) distance to a school with a full-day pre-k classroom, and 2) number of full-day pre-k classrooms close to home were strongest fo

In the United States, bilingual education in schools has been an afterthought for decades. But demographic changes in the student population, and new research out of Chicago, demand that it occupy a more meaningful role in how we measure success in serving these students, as well as other groups of learners. Today, as a policy analyst with decades of experience, I am encouraging a new approach to accountability that places a value on bilingual skills.

When I first started student teaching at a high school where students were diligent and unfailingly polite, I asked my co-teacher where the tough students were. “Still in ninth grade,” she said. A decade later, I understand her real meaning: It’s not the kids who are tough, it’s the high school system.

It wasn’t supposed to start like this.

The 13- and 14-year-olds who make up the Class of 2024 did not expect to begin their high school careers clustered in Zoom rooms or passing temperature checks and shuffling past masked classmates at a safe distance.

The pandemic has rewritten the script of a traditional rite of passage — the beginning of the end of a long K-12 journey for students growing into young adulthood...

We heard a lot of concern this summer in the education sector about "learning loss," "accelerating learning," and making sure some students do not "fall further behind." Such fears are not new for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students; students with disabilities; or students from low-income communities. These young people have always been subject to scrutiny in a system that keeps them at a disadvantage and then worries over their differences in performance.

With Latino students driving the trend, Chicago Public Schools students have reached a record-high five-year graduation rate of 82.5%, district leaders announced Friday.

The rate got a boost in part from a new method used to calculate the percentage of graduates. Under the old method, it would have been 80.8%...