This annual report looks closely at how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students are progressing on the path to and through high school and college. In particular, the report examines three key milestones--high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion--and tracks how rates on these milestones have changed across time. These rates…

In 2018, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) developed an indicator for being "on track" at the end of a high school student's freshman year. As part of the district's overall strategy for improving graduation rates, school administrators currently use the Ninth Grade On-Track indicator as an early marker of progress towards…

This report is an annual look at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students' likelihood of obtaining a college degree within 10 years of beginning high school finds that 18 percent of 2016 ninth-graders are projected to earn a bachelor's degree within six years of high school graduation, a number that has held steady since 2015. The report also finds…

In the United States, a student's educational attainment is associated with nearly every social outcome we care about: income, employment, life-expectancy, and more. For this reason, it is important to understand how students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) perform on key milestones of educational attainment, including high school graduation,…

High school graduation rates in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have shown remarkable improvements over the past 16 years. Students used to be about as likely to drop out as they were to graduate; now they are three times as likely to graduate as to drop out. Moreover, recent large improvements in the percentage of students on-track to graduate…

The Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) vision is that every student graduates from high school prepared for success in college, career, and life. To help the city reach that goal, the To&Through Project is providing data that track the progress of students in Chicago and identify where students are falling off the path to college degree attainment.…

Research for Action (RFA) was commissioned to evaluate changes in student outcomes during the first three years of the Project Leadership and Investment for Transformation (LIFT). This report focuses on two questions: (1) how do LIFT students' behavioral and academic performance compare to those of a matched set of non-LIFT comparison students?;…

The Ingenuity program was designed to "provide Baltimore's brightest middle school students with a free, highly accelerated, and challenging mathematics and science curriculum" (Ingenuity Project, 2014). It started in 1993 at two middle schools, one on the east side of Baltimore and the second on the west, but as of SY 2014-15 the…

There is a very large population of students who struggle with the transition from the middle grades to high school, raising concerns that high school failures are partially a function of poor middle grade preparation. As a result, middle grade practitioners are grappling with questions about what skills students need to succeed in high school,…

In 2007, spurred by University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR) research reports, leadership at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began a new targeted approach to reducing course failure in the ninth grade. The research suggested that the transition between eighth and ninth grade played a critical role in shaping…

This report paints a collective portrait of the Baltimore City Schools dropouts of 2008-09 to summarize some of the commonalities that join their individual stories together. After examining the surface level demographic characteristics of these dropouts, researchers probed more deeply into their behavioral characteristics in the years preceding…