Alan Quintana’s last year of high school at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy looked a lot more like the second year of college, as he finished an associate degree in web development at Daley College.

Key Findings:  Applications and Offers

For decades, policymakers have been working to address the large differences in test scores between students from different income brackets and racial backgrounds – an issue known as the achievement gap. A 2018 report studying national data found that on average, Black and Latino 12th grade students perform at similar reading levels to White 8th grade students. Further, the income-based achievement gap is twice the size of the racial achievement gap and has increased exponentially in recent decades.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Sometimes, the answers to improving struggling schools are hidden in mountains of data and numbers.

The Cleveland schools want to do a better job at digging those answers out...

Lisa Sall wasthe Director of Outreach and Communications at the UChicago Consortium. She collaborated with researchers and the communications team to engage stakeholders and help the UChicago Consortium amplify its research findings to inform education policy and practice. Lisa has worked in marketing communications for 25 years on both the agency and client sides with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Since 1987, when the federal education secretary called Chicago Public Schools the “worst in the nation,” officials searched for answers.

Some came through a partnership between the Chicago Public School District and the University of Chicago. The Consortium on School Research, founded in 1990, identifies the problems facing the urban school district and assesses how well different initiatives are working...

Family problems, absences and poor grades can drive students to becoming a dropout. But what actually drives many teenagers to quit school, say experts, is a sense that nobody in the building cares about them—and it’s a belief that is often reinforced after they leave.

“When schools don’t follow up with students who leave, it reaffirms the idea that no one cares,” says Jody Manning of the PACER Center, which advocates for youth with disabilities...

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published an interview—David Marchese talking with Melinda Gates—about the enormous power of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for shaping our lives.  Marchese asks Ms. Gates directly about the Gates Foundation’s role in driving today’s neoliberal public education policy. Doesn’t a giant foundation—“Its endowment at $50.7 billion… the largest in the world.”—have an outsized impact on social policy?

After a decade of tax cuts brought by Governor John Kasich and a supermajority Republican Ohio Legislature,  Ohio—still dominated in the House, Senate and Governor’s mansion by Republicans—is considering a new school funding formula intended to address what have been glaring problems for the state’s public schools. The new plan is bipartisan. We all owe enormous thanks to Representatives Robert Cupp and John Patterson for their leadership.