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
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...