Chicago was once called the worst school district in the United States. Today, though, high school graduation rates there are rising, as are ACT scores, GPAs, and the number of students enrolled in AP courses. And gains in elementary test scores outpace national averages.

I recently visited Chicago—and a high school that has gone from one of its worst to one of its best—to see what was behind the city’s turnaround...

How students are assigned to schools is changing, especially in urban areas. After decades of using students’ home addresses to determine school assignments, many U.S. cities are now turning to placement algorithms—alongside school choice policies—to determine which students can attend which particular schools. These algorithms, built on the Nobel Prize-winning theory of market design, elicit families’ ranked preferences for schools and use those preferences, along with schools’ priorities, to match students and schools.

The marrying of on-track indicator systems with improvement science has caught the attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  

Many parents of public school children take it as an article of faith that their involvement in public education is a good thing. The assumption is that not only will getting involved have a positive impact on our own children, but it will be beneficial for the school in general. But when it comes to the public school system, it turns out that idea isn’t as simple as you might think.

In partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, the UChicago Consortium is using available administrative datasets and data from surveys of college alumni to understand what the college-to-career transition looks like for graduates of Chicago area two-year and four-year institutions, particularly for first-generation, Pell eligible college students. 

This paper engages with some of the more intangible potential returns of liberal education related to the noncognitive development of young adults. It considers the question in a particular historical moment, amid widening socio-economic inequalities, geopolitical instability, and global environmental crises.

Disaggregation sounds like a complicated word with no place in real-world conversations about improving education. But it’s actually an important tool that allows educators to understand how different groups of students fare in schools. Each of the strategies mentioned in our last blog – that allowed Chicago educators to dive deeper into data and pull out student strengths through their commitment to asset framing – were made possible by disaggregation.

“If we have to remove dead weight, we will remove dead weight.” That’s what the assistant principal of Chicago’s Orr High School told me in 1998, when I asked him how he dealt with no-show students. What he meant was, they’d be dropped from the school rolls and handed a list of alternative schools to call.

In an important brief from the National Education Policy Center, William Mathis and Kevin Welner define “portfolio school reform”—a school district governance theory which originated at the Center on Reinventing Public Education: “A key, unifying element is the call for many neighborhood schools to be transformed into privately managed charter schools… The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager.

We are well into the high-pressure digital age and the interconnected global economy, and those realities have affected education and how students learn.

However, some non-technological strategies still prevail as young people navigate their ways out of high school and college and into the workforce...