Families have quickly caught on to Chicago Public Schools’ new online high school application system — and most are snagging one of their top-three choices — but it hasn’t improved access to high-quality schools for low-income and African American students.

That’s according to a study released Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which scrutinized the 2017 launch of GoCPS, for students who entered the ninth grade this school year...

A new centralized high school application process was intended to expose Chicago students to more options, but low-income and black students continued to be more likely than others to attend poor-performing high schools, according to a study released on Thursday.

The analysis of data from the first year of the application process, called GoCPS, offers insight into what is preventing low-income black students from accessing highly rated schools...

Dispelling fears that a universal application system for high schools would drive more students to charters, a new study shows enrollment at neighborhood schools is up slightly.

Emily Krone Phillips is the author of the new book The Make-or-Break Year, which chronicles how Chicago Public Schools used the metric Freshman OnTrack to boost graduation rates. Now at the Spencer Foundation, she was previously at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, where the Freshman OnTrack research originated. I recently talked with Emily about dropouts and efforts to help students stay on track. Here's what she had to say...

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

Tala Ali-Hasan is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in public policy and comparative human development at the University of Chicago. She is currently a member of the REACH project at the UChicago Consortium, where she manages and codes teacher interviews. Before working at the UChicago Consortium, she worked at the Thirty Million Words Project as an observational coder for the longitudinal study on child literacy and tutored middle school kids for Maroon Tutor Match.

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.