Chicago Public Schools is poised to make a significant change to the admissions process for its coveted test-in elementary and high schools in an attempt to award more seats to low-income students.

PHILADELPHIA — As America enters a less acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is time to reflect upon what we lost and what we learned. America’s failure to prioritize time in school should be at the top of the list.

Major disruptions to school schedules were perhaps to be expected in the early days of the pandemic. But we allowed them to persist to a troubling degree, even though we know that time in school is not fungible — learning lost now cannot simply be made up later...

Algebra is often regarded as gateway for later academic success. Double-Dose Algebra, introduced in 2003, showed some success in improving post-secondary attainment for students with median math skills. We are currently examining the policy impact on students with very low math skills and impact variation across schools to understand the most effective implementation strategies.

This brief outlines seven lessons that we drew from the insights shared by our focus group participants. The first three lessons address educator practice in the classroom, reflecting dimensions of communication that occur day-to-day. The following four lessons describe school-wide communication efforts that were positively received during remote schooling. We then highlight a central challenge that emerged in our conversations with both educators and caregivers: participants described a desire for additional guidance and support in improving their communication efforts.

Host Karin Sconzert welcomes guest Jenny Nagaoka who discusses research from a 1997 policy in Chicago to make students repeat a grade if they did not score high enough on a standardized test. Is "flunking" 8- and 9-year-olds an effective or cost-efficient way to increase their reading ability? It's a policy under debate in a current bill in the Wisconsin State Legislature. Did it work in Chicago 25 years ago? Should we repeat it here in Wisconsin?

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.