The City of Chicago and its Board of Education have a long history of perpetuating segregation, starting with an 1863 City ordinance that required Black and White students to attend separate schools. Segregation in Chicago’s public schools only intensified when Chicago’s Black population boomed due to the influx of Black Americans from the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been reinforced in the twenty-first century through strategic policy decisions, privatization, and neglect.

A new research summary of two UChicago Consortium on School Research studies shows that when more full-day pre-K programs were available to families, students were more likely to enroll in full-day programs, and student attendance rates increased.

Using pre-pandemic data (2013–2017), these studies used policy changes in Chicago to examine the relationship between half- vs. full-day pre-K and students’ attendance...

Two new studies from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research have confirmed what working parents already know – that when pre-kindergarten programs offer a full-day option, enrollment and attendance rates at those programs increase, especially among Black and Latinx families. 

The research comes in the midst of widespread labor shortages, with women representing a disproportionate number of those who have dropped out of the workforce since March 2020...

Enrollment and attendance in pre-K — especially among Black and Latino preschoolers — improves when programs operate for a full school day instead of a few hours in the morning or afternoon, a new study shows.

Enrollment more than quadrupled among Black children and tripled among Latino students when the Chicago Public Schools expanded full-day pre-K, according to researchers from the Consortium for School Research at the University of Chicago. The findings also focused on an expansion effort in the city’s North Lawndale community...

In the last two decades, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has gone through a massive expansion of the city’s high school portfolio. In 2002, there were only 76 high schools; in 2018–19, there were 154, and only about one-quarter of ninth-graders attended their assigned neighborhood school.

In the first months of the pandemic, school leaders and state officials made a unified call for grace, an acknowledgment that students and teachers both had more pressing concerns than academic expectations: They relaxed grading policies, canceled end-of-year assessments, or directed teachers not to fail students because of work not completed during shutdowns.

The Consortium is partnering with PERTS to provide diagnostic information to teacher teams (Cultivate) and progress monitoring data to individual teachers (Elevate) to improve students' classroom experiences.

A two-year developmental study in partnership with Teach for America Chicago/NW Indiana to study and support the implementation of UChicago Impact's Cultivate for Coaches survey tool to improve students’ classroom experience.

Key Findings

Study 1: District-wide, more CPS students enrolled in full-day pre-k programs from 2012–13 through 2015–16, while enrollment in half-day pre-k declined.