"My dream would be that we, as a board, come up with a statement of clear, shared vision," says school board member Ellen Rosenfeld...

We spend tens of billions of dollars each year on K-12 public education in Illinois. We argue endlessly about how best to invest that money to improve student outcomes, and we despair when those investments don’t produce an adequately literate and numerate student population. But our fixation on budgets and balance sheets may be obscuring something just as essential to learning — and far harder to buy. 

Trust...

Marisa de la Torre, Managing Director and Senior Research Associate at the UChicago Consortium, joins John Williams to talk about a study she co-authored that breaks down how students’ absence rates have changed since the pandemic...

Elaine Allensworth speaks with The Chicago Report about Connection, Trust, and Learning Student Attendance in the Middle and High School Grades Following the COVID-19 Pandemic...

CHICAGO (WLS) -- Absenteeism increased dramatically not only at Chicago Public Schools, but school districts around the country following the COVID-19 pandemic. A new University of Chicago study has some surprising results on what drives attendance. 

Students at the Back of the Yards César Chavez Elementary School show up. The attendance rate at the CPS school is over 96%...

Event overview: 

Student attendance: why it matters and what schools can do about it 
New research insights and perspectives from the field. 

Low attendance and high rates of chronic absenteeism are raising concerns across the country about students’ learning, development, and well-being. 

New research from the UChicago Consortium and IWERC provides important insights on students’ attendance, grades, and test scores—and how they are connected to schools’ culture/climate: 

To help schools better understand where they can have the most impact on increasing student attendance and achievement, the study’s authors said they are planning another phase of research to examine a broad range of school, neighborhood and individual factors affecting absenteeism. 

Middle and high school attendance still matters enormously post-COVID, and schools can do a lot to improve it, according to a new report from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. 

The number of middle school and high school students in Chicago missing an astronomical 18 days or more of school shot up during the pandemic and has remained stubbornly high, but a new study finds that some city schools are more successful than others in getting teens to show up. 

The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research finds students attend more when they feel safe, have friends at their school and have strong relationships with teachers...