The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR) builds the capacity for school reform by conducting research that identifies what matters for student success and school improvement. Since 2004, CCSR has tracked the postsecondary experiences of successive cohorts of Chicago Public Schools graduates and examined the relationship among high school preparation, support, college choice, and postsecondary outcomes. The goal of this research is to help policymakers and practitioners understand what it takes to improve the college outcomes for urban and other at-risk students who now overwhelmingly aspire to college. This second report in the "From High School to the Future" series looks beyond qualifications to examine where students encounter potholes on the road to college. The findings reveal that Chicago students at all levels of qualifications do not successfully navigate the daunting process of enrolling in four-year colleges and too often default to colleges for which they are overqualified. The study relies on qualitative and quantitative data for CPS seniors in 2005: student and teacher surveys, transcripts, college enrollment data reported by the National Student Clearinghouse, and student interviews. Consortium researchers spent nearly two years interviewing and tracking the academic progress of 105 students in three Chicago high schools. The ten case studies included in the "Potholes" study each highlight a student who struggled at a different point in the postsecondary planning process.

From High School to the Future: Potholes on the Road to College

Education & Teaching

Nagaoka, Jenny

Roderick, Melissa

Coca, Vanessa

Moeller, Eliza

Roddie, Karen

Gilliam, Jamiliyah

Patton, Desmond

Schools & Teaching

Consortium On Chicago School Research

The majority of Chicago Public Schools students are not attaining the ACT scores they are aiming for, which they need to qualify for scholarships and college acceptance. In this report, CCSR researchers look at the reasons behind students' low performance and what matters for doing well on this test. CPS students are highly motivated to do well on the ACT, and they are spending extraordinary amounts of time preparing for it. However, the predominant ways in which students are preparing for the ACT are unlikely to help them do well on the test or to be ready for college-level work. Students are training for the ACT in a last-minute sprint focused on test practice, when the ACT requires years of hard work developing college-level skills. This study relies on qualitative and quantitative data for a cohort of students who were CPS juniors in 2005. This includes test scores from eighth to eleventh grade, student transcripts, CCSR surveys, and multiple interviews of students and teachers at three Chicago high schools. The report also incorporated 2007 data on CPS juniors and teacher surveys.

From High School to the Future: ACT Preparation - Too Much, Too Late: Why ACT Scores are Low in Chicago and What It Means for Schools

Allensworth, Elaine

Correa, Macarena

Ponisciak, Steve

Teacher evaluation is arguably the hottest issue in education right now. Because of Race to the Top, many states and districts around the country are designing and implementing new teacher evaluation systems that--for the first time ever--evaluate teachers based on how much their students learn. However, there is limited research on how to build an evaluation system centered on classroom observations that can distinguish between effective and ineffective teaching. This report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research focuses on Chicago, but the lessons learned have significant applicability to districts across the country. The report is one of the first to provide research-based evidence showing that new teacher observation tools, when accompanied by thoughtful evaluation systems and professional development, can effectively measure teacher effectiveness and provide teachers with feedback on the factors that matter for improving student learning. This is especially relevant for those districts that are implementing the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching, including Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, South Dakota, Washington, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh.

Rethinking Teacher Evaluation in Chicago: Lessons Learned from Classroom Observations, Principal-Teacher Conferences, and District Implementation

Luppescu, Stuart

Stoelinga, Sara Ray

Sartain, Lauren

Brown, Eric R.

Kapadia Matsko, Kavita

Miller, Frances K.

Durwood, Claire E.

Jiang, Jennie Y.

Glazer, Danielle

"Teaching Adolescents To Become Learners" summarizes the research on five categories of noncognitive factors that are related to academic performance: academic behaviors, academic perseverance, academic mindsets, learning strategies, and social skills, and proposes a framework for thinking about how these factors interact to affect academic performance, and what the relationship is between noncognitive factors and classroom/school context, as well as the larger socio-cultural context. It examines whether there is substantial evidence that noncognitive factors matter for students' long-term success, clarifying how and why these factors matter, determining if these factors are malleable and responsive to context, determining if they play a role in persistent racial/ethnic or gender gaps in academic achievement, and illuminating how educators might best support the development of important noncognitive factors within their schools and classrooms. The review suggests some promising levers for change at the classroom level, and challenges the notion that hard work and effort are character traits of individual students, instead suggesting that the amount of effort a student puts into academic work can depend, in large part, on instructional and contextual factors in the classroom. In addition, the review also presents challenges for future research on noncognitive factors. This work was supported by Raikes Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

Teaching Adolescents To Become Learners The Role of Noncognitive Factors in Shaping School Performance: A Critical Literature Review

Johnson, David W.

Farrington, Camille A.

Keyes, Tasha Seneca

Beechum, Nicole O.

"From High School to the Future: The Challenge of Senior Year in Chicago Public Schools" finds there is much work to do to shift the focus of senior year in Chicago from finishing graduation requirements to preparing for college or employment. This report shows that the majority of CPS seniors have schedules dominated by makeup courses and electives and other non-core subject areas, and students themselves describe senior year as unchallenging and easier than previous years. Over the past several years, “college and career readiness for all,” has become the mantra of education reform in the United States. The challenges of senior year described in this report, however, demonstrate the magnitude of the problems educators face in creating an educational experience that truly prepares students for life after graduation. This report is designed to inform a discussion of how best to reform senior year, as well as to spark a conversation about the important challenges that precede and follow this pivotal period. The study analyzes the coursetaking patterns of more than 50,000 CPS students in the graduating classes of 2003 to 2009. It looks at the impact of senior year coursetaking on college enrollment and persistence; describes the post-graduation outcomes of CPS graduates with extremely limited access to college; and draws on data from interviews with seniors in three CPS high schools to take an in-depth look at students’ experiences during senior year. While the study finds that the highest-achieving students in CPS are generally participating in a rigorous senior year, “there seems to be no organizing framework and common set of expectations for students who might be college bound but are not the most highly qualified,” said Thomas Kelley-Kemple, report author and senior quantitative analyst at UChicagoCCSR. CPS must also grapple with what senior year should look like for a particularly challenging group of students: the roughly 45 percent of CPS graduates who begin senior year off of the trajectory to attend a four-year college with some level of selectivity. In the fall after graduation, the most common outcome for these students was to be neither working nor in school, the report finds.

From High School to the Future: The Challenge of Senior Year in Chicago Public Schools

Kelley-Kemple, Thomas

Students who attend preschool regularly are significantly more likely than chronically absent preschoolers, those who missed at least 10 percent of the school year, to be ready for kindergarten and to attend school regularly in later grades. The study, which followed 25,000 three- and four-year-olds served by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) school-based preschool programs, finds chronic absenteeism is rampant among preschoolers in Chicago. In 2011-2012, almost half of three-year-olds and more than one-third of four-year-olds were chronically absent. This report examines the extent of preschool absenteeism and the reasons preschool students are absent. It also examines the relationship between preschool absences and students' scores on measures of kindergarten readiness in math, letter recognition, and social-emotional development, as well as assessments of second-grade reading fluency. Ultimately, students who miss more preschool have lower kindergarten readiness scores, and students who are chronically absent in preschool are more likely to be chronically absent in kindergarten and have lower second grade reading scores. However, students who enter preschool with the weakest skills benefit the most from regular attendance.

Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools: Relationships with Learning Outcomes and Reasons for Absences

Moore, Paul

Ehrlich, Stacy B.

Gwynne, Julia

Pareja, Amber Stitziel

Jagesic, Sanja

Sorice, Elizabeth

Amid growing recognition that strong academic skills alone are not enough for young people to become successful adults, this comprehensive report offers wide-ranging evidence to show what young people need to develop from preschool to young adulthood to succeed in college and career, have healthy relationships, be engaged citizens, and make wise choices. It concludes that rich experiences combining action and reflection help children develop a set of critical skills, attitudes, and behaviors. And it suggests that policies should aim to ensure that all children have consistent, supportive relationships and an abundance of these developmental experiences through activities inside and outside of school.

Foundations for Young Adult Success: A Developmental Framework

Heath, Ryan D.

Dickson, Sarah

Turner, Ashley Cureton

Mayo, Ashley

Hayes, Kathleen

Sixteen years ago, high school students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were almost as likely to drop out as they were to graduate; today they are three times as likely to graduate as drop out. What is driving this remarkable increase? A new report from the UChicago Consortium on School Research addresses the extent to which various factors could account for the changes in graduation rates, including changes in student performance and student demographics, increasing numbers of charter and selective enrollment high schools that serve Chicago students, and changes in school practices around improving attendance and course performance. The study uses age cohorts – following students from freshman year in CPS until they turn 19. This allows the cohorts to be comparable over time, regardless of changes in grade promotion criteria. It finds graduation rates have increased by 22 percentage points over the last 16 years, from 52.4 percent among students who turned 19 in 1998, to 74.8 percent in 2014, with the most rapid increase occurring in the last six years. Freshman on-track rates have also risen during the same period, from 48 percent among students who were 19 years old in 1998 to 81 percent for students who will turn 19 in 2017, suggesting graduation rates will continue to rise. While changes in student demographics account for some of the increase in graduation rates, improvements in student performance in high school —compared to similar students who started high school in the past—accounts for most of the change; students are passing more classes and earning more credits in ninth grade. Not only are more students graduating, but they are leaving high school with higher achievement than graduates in prior years.

High School Graduation Rates through Two Decades of District Change: The Influence of Policies, Data Records, and Demographic Shifts

Allensworth, Elaine M.

Healey, Kaleen

Gwynne, Julia A.

Crespin, René

This study—the Consortium’s first in-depth look at charter high schools—examines four key dimensions of charter high schools in Chicago Public Schools (CPS): school organization and policies; incoming skills and characteristics of charter high school enrollees; school transfers; and student performance. It expands the existing research base on charter schools in important ways by moving beyond test scores to look at a range of outcomes, and by examining variation among charter high schools. This study finds differences between charter and non-charter high schools in CPS in terms of students' incoming characteristics, performance in high school, and performance on post-secondary outcomes. It also finds variation on outcomes across charter schools. The study finds charter high schools in Chicago enroll students with higher eighth-grade attendance but similar or lower eighth-grade test scores than non-charter high schools. Once enrolled, students in charter high schools reported more challenging instruction, had higher attendance, and had higher test scores, on average, compared to students in non-charter high schools with similar attendance and test scores in the middle grades. Rates of four-year college enrollment and enrollment in more selective colleges were higher, on average, for students at charter schools than similar students at non-charter high schools. Using the five essentials framework to measure school climate, the study finds, on average, CPS charter high schools looked similar to non-charter, non-selective schools on some dimensions of organizational capacity, such as leadership, but looked quite different on other dimensions, such as preparation for post-secondary. At the same time, the study finds charter high school students were more likely to transfer schools between 9-12th grade than similar students in non-charter high schools. By the beginning of the fourth year of high school, 24.2 percent of students who began high school in a charter school transferred to another school in the district, compared to 17.2 percent of non-charter students. The majority of students who transferred by the beginning of their second year in high school transferred to a CPS non-charter high school. Transfer rates were highest in low-performing or recently-opened charter high schools. The study did not look at the reasons students transferred. Notably, the study also finds substantial variation across charter schools on test scores, college enrollment, and college selectivity. After controlling for differences in students’ incoming skills, experience, and background characteristics, there was far more variation among charter schools on these outcomes, than among non-charter schools.

Chicago's Charter High Schools: Organizational Features, Enrollment, School Transfers, and Student Performance

High-quality, well-implemented early childhood education (ECE) positively affects the learning trajectories of children who start school with lower skills than their peers, according to decades of evidence. Yet studies on ECE programs across the country reveal that too few offer high-quality programming. To date, the ECE field has focused most improvement efforts on classroom materials and interactions. Broadening these efforts to an organization-wide focus could better support quality improvement. The UChicago Consortium and the Ounce of Prevention Fund designed teacher and parent surveys, the “Early Education Essential Organizational Supports Measurement System” (Early Ed Essentials), to help ECE sites diagnose organizational strengths and weaknesses. The current study tested whether the newly-adapted and designed Early Ed Essentials teacher and parent surveys captured reliable and valid information about the organization of ECE programs—information that is also associated with existing indicators of program quality.

Organizing Early Education for Improvement: Testing a New Survey Tool

YOUNG, CHRISTOPHER

Frank, Elizabeth

Pacchiano, Debra M.

Stein, Amanda G.

Wagner, Maureen R.

Park, Sangyoon

Lewandowski, Holly

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