Dissecting the soaring graduation rate for Black boys in Chicago
hicago students Sabeer Al-Shareef and Shameir Faulkner are looking forward to a crazy few months as they approach high school graduation. In June, they’ll walk across a creaky stage at their historic South Side neighborhood high school and then move on to college in the fall.
These are Chicago success stories, exactly the kind Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson loves to highlight — young black men getting their diplomas and taking the next step...
Arts Education and Social-Emotional Learning Outcomes Among K-12 Students
This project, conducted in partnership with Ingenuity, consists of two components: a review of literature on this topic and an interview-based fieldwork component with educators, administrators, students, and parents in Chicago Public Schools. The authors reviewed more than 200 studies on arts education spanning six decades.
Chicago Network for College Success gets Gates recognition for focus on freshmen
In his blog, Gates advocates the use of data that can catch struggling 9th-graders early, while they still have time to get on a better path to graduation. The importance of 9th grade has long been on Gates' radar. His foundation previously featured the issue in its publication, discussing why that year can be particularly challenging.
After visiting a Chicago high school, Bill Gates says it’s a model for his current education vision
When Bill Gates announced in 2017 that his foundation would begin investing in “networks” of schools, he said he wanted to replicate the success of a particular Chicago organization.
On Tuesday, Gates in a blog post heaped fresh praise on Chicago’s Network for College Success, a group housed at the University of Chicago that works with 17 Chicago high schools. Gates also posted video of his visit to North-Grand High School in Humboldt Park, a school he says uses student data to keep students on track for graduation with the network’s help...
On the right track in Chicago
Chicago was once called the worst school district in the United States. Today, though, high school graduation rates there are rising, as are ACT scores, GPAs, and the number of students enrolled in AP courses. And gains in elementary test scores outpace national averages.
I recently visited Chicago—and a high school that has gone from one of its worst to one of its best—to see what was behind the city’s turnaround...
The opportunities and risks of K-12 student placement algorithms
How students are assigned to schools is changing, especially in urban areas. After decades of using students’ home addresses to determine school assignments, many U.S. cities are now turning to placement algorithms—alongside school choice policies—to determine which students can attend which particular schools. These algorithms, built on the Nobel Prize-winning theory of market design, elicit families’ ranked preferences for schools and use those preferences, along with schools’ priorities, to match students and schools.
How we're learning to improve this school year
The marrying of on-track indicator systems with improvement science has caught the attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.