Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students who began kindergarten as ELs, on average, progressed to eighth grade with academic achievement similar to or better than their peers who began kindergarten proficient in English.  Nearly 80 percent of CPS ELs achieved English proficiency by eighth grade, with the majority (76 percent) becoming proficient by fifth grade.

Chicago’s high school admissions window opened this week. For thousands of students and their families, so began a process marked by anxiety, questions, deadlines, and, yes, educated guesswork. 

If you’re the parent of a CPS middle school student, you’ve already heard the rumor: It’s tougher to get your kids into a public selective enrollment high school than it is to get them into a good college.

It’s a thorny bit of folk wisdom that has been hammered into the collective, worried consciousness of Chicago parents for years. It’s so well known, suburban friends can recite chapter and verse: Boy, are they thankful they decided to leave the city and raise kids where high school is a foregone conclusion, not a rat race! Phew!

Walk by some Chicago schools with plain brick or stone buildings, and you’d barely know they’re places meant for kids.

But at others, you’ll see colorful, artistic touches that make them worthy of being a symbol of pride for a community...

As a new sixth-grade teacher in Chicago Public Schools, I created an “A’s and B’s Because I Tried” Club to recognize every student who achieved a top grade on a project. I had come to my classroom in 2004 the same way most teachers do: with an unwavering belief that students can achieve academically, with the goal of creating a classroom where every student felt valued and with the confidence that, if students tried hard enough, they would succeed.

More of Chicago’s students continue to graduate after five years, with this year’s numbers showing a small uptick, but the rapid pace of increase has slowed.

Almost 79% of Chicago’s seniors graduated in five years this spring, compared with closer to 78% the year prior, the district said Thursday...

Research at the University of Chicago has shown that ninth-grade performance predicts graduation rates better than any other information available. The Consortium on School Research, at the University of Chicago, developed the “Freshman-On-Track” metric to measure a schools’ success by using student evidence-based research data to keep students on track for graduation.

NCAN members and other regular readers of this blog are routinely inundated with new research, white papers, policy briefs, and data points. It is easy to get buried under the relentless advance of academia and policy research wanting to convince you to pay attention to this, then this, then this, and then, finally, that.

But within any field some research stands out and withstands the test of time, and the college access and success space is no different. I started thinking about what some of the top pieces of research are for our field...

Keeping freshmen on track may be the key to moving the needle up on graduation rates, experts say. This fact seems especially relevant for black males. In CPS, the graduation rate of African American males rose from 43% in 2005 to 71% in 2013. The research also found that freshmen who pass all their classes have a 90% chance of graduating from high school, compared to 70% of those who failed a class during 9th grade.