The assumption sits at the heart of a raging debate about elite high schools in Boston and New York City: that schools like Stuyvesant and Boston Latin offer the very best preparation for college that the public school system can provide.

“Why isn’t every public school in New York City a Brooklyn Tech-caliber school?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently, referring to one of New York City’s test-in high schools. “Every one should be.”

Does the current drive to incorporate social and emotional learning, or SEL, into the K–12 curriculum represent a positive reform that will lead schools to educate the “whole student” and ultimately boost young people’s academic success? Or is it a distracting fad that comes with high opportunity costs?

When decisions about high school acceptances post later today on GoCPS, 16.2 percent of Chicago eighth-graders will get their top pick of the city’s most competitive test-in high schools, a 2 percentage point increase from last year’s 14.4 percent.

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...

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.