Search

School districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document the interaction between funding policies and fundraising efforts in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We find that adoption of a weighted-student funding policy successfully reallocated more dollars to schools with high shares of students eligible for free/reduced-price (FRL) lunch, creating a policy-induced per-pupil expenditure gap. Further, almost all schools raised external funds over the study period with most dollars raised concentrated in schools serving relatively affluent populations. We estimate that external fundraising offset the policy-induced per- pupil expenditure gap between schools enrolling the lowest and highest shares of FRL-eligible students by 26-39 percent. Other districts have attempted to reallocate fundraised dollars to all schools; such a policy in CPS would have little impact on most schools' budgets.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the backgrounds, experiences, and supports of Chicago Public School (CPS) principals as they prepared for the principalship and to identify where gaps exist so that policymakers and principal preparation programs can better support leadership development. Researchers interviewed 20 early career school principals in CPS between 2020 and 2021 to learn about their backgrounds and the roles they had prior to the principalship, their formal and informal preparation experiences, and the kinds of learning opportunities and skills they wished they had before assuming the role. Findings indicate that it takes a wide range of skills to be a successful principal, including both interpersonal or "people" skills as well as intrapersonal or "emotional intelligence" skills, along with specific organizational leadership and managerial skills. Principals did not learn essential skills in one place or in one setting, but through a variety of on-the-job learning experiences -- in both education and non-education related positions. Principals who previously served as an assistant principal indicated that the role best prepared them to lead their own school. Some indicated feeling underprepared in certain aspects of the job and called for more pre-service supports and mentoring in areas such as school budgeting and navigating central office systems. Districts and principal preparation programs must consider that strong school leadership requires a wide range of skills, making it unlikely that a single program or professional development opportunity can teach all the skills and behaviors good principals need to succeed. A "one-size-fits all" approach to training principals may be insufficient, suggesting a more tailored approach to supporting prospective school leader development would be most beneficial.

The research in this brief takes place within the context of efforts to strengthen the principalship in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Using eight years of data from CPS, 2012-13 to 2019-20, this brief describes Chicago's principals--their demographic characteristics, their backgrounds, their trajectories into the principalship, and how long they stay. The authors focus intentionally on the racial/ethnic diversity of the principalship since CPS is a district that primarily serves Black and brown students. In addition, this brief describes how their previous experiences in schools align with the schools they ultimately lead. The brief concludes by looking at exit rates among principals.

Personnel evaluation systems have historically failed to identify and remediate low-performing teachers. In 2012, Chicago Public Schools implemented an evaluation system that incorporated remediation and dismissal plans for low-rated teachers. Regression discontinuity estimates indicate that the evaluation reform increased the exit of low-rated tenured teachers by 50 percent. The teacher labor supply available to replace low-rated teachers was higher performing on multiple dimensions, and instrumental variables estimates indicate that policy-induced exit of low-rated teachers significantly improved teacher quality in subsequent years. Policy simulations show that the teacher labor supply in Chicago is sufficient to remove significantly more low-performing teachers.

Using rich Texas administrative data, we estimate the impact of middle school principals on post-secondary schooling, employment, and criminal justice outcomes. The results highlight the importance of school leadership, though striking differences emerge in the relative importance of different skill dimensions to different outcomes. The estimates reveal large and highly significant effects of principal value-added to cognitive skills on the productive activities of schooling and work but much weaker effects of value-added to noncognitive skills on these outcomes. In contrast, there is little or no evidence that middle school principals affect the probability a male is arrested and has a guilty disposition by raising cognitive skills but strong evidence that they affect these outcomes through their impacts on noncognitive skills, especially those related to the probability of an out-of-school suspension. In addition, the principal effects on the probability of engagement in the criminal justice system are much larger for Black than for non-Black males, corresponding to race differences in engagement with the criminal justice system.

In 2013, the Chicago Board of Education closed 47 elementary schools, directly 16 affecting 13,000 students and 900 teachers. The closures created employment uncertainty for 17 closed-school teachers, and this paper investigates the labor market consequences for teachers. We employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares the exit rates of closed-school teachers to teachers in schools that only experienced threat of closure. We estimate that the closures resulted in a near doubling of teacher exit among teachers in closed schools, particularly low-performing teachers. We also find that, among closed-school teachers, Black teachers were more likely to return than White teachers. Given the nationwide trend of school closures for budgetary or performance reasons, this paper has implications for strategic retention of effective teachers. [This paper was published in "Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis" (EJ1262513).]

Responding to an Illinois law that took effect in 2010, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created and implemented the REACH (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students) educator evaluation and support system. REACH was piloted in 2012-13. It is still being implemented as of the 2019-20 school year, and will continue to be implemented through June 2024, per the teachers' contract agreed upon in fall 2019. The evaluation system includes classroom observation ratings of teacher practice, as well as up to two student growth measures. The stated goal of REACH is to provide valuable feedback to improve educators' professional practice and increase student learning. As with any professional evaluation system, a secondary use of REACH is to inform personnel decisions, such as classroom assignments, retention, tenure, remediation plans, and dismissal processes. In line with nationwide trends, almost all teachers in CPS received high evaluation ratings prior to REACH, and there was concern that such high levels of teacher performance were not translating into high levels of student learning. There was the potential that a more accurate rating system could make it easier to recognize and retain strong teachers while encouraging low-performing teachers to improve or exit. In light of this context, this brief answers the following research questions: (1) What proportion of teachers received high and low ratings under REACH, and how did that change over time? (2) How many low-rated teachers exited CPS or switched schools under REACH, compared to high-rated teachers?(3) How have classroom assignments within the school changed under REACH? This brief is part of a series of three to extend previous research from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) on early REACH implementation and the REACH evaluation system five years after the 2012-13 rollout. [For "Teacher Evaluation in CPS: What Makes Evaluator Feedback Useful? Research Brief," see ED608091. For "Teacher Evaluation in CPS: Perceptions of REACH Implementation, Five Years In. Research Brief," see ED608094.]

Responding to an Illinois law that took effect in 2010, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created and implemented the REACH (Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students) educator evaluation and support system. REACH was piloted in 2012-13. It is still being implemented as of the 2019-20 school year and will continue to be implemented through June 2024, per the teachers' contract agreed upon in fall 2019. The evaluation system includes classroom observation ratings of teacher practice, as well as up to two student growth measures. This brief addresses the research question: What are teachers' and administrators' perceptions and opinions of REACH after five years of implementation? It draws from teacher and administrator survey reports of whether REACH influenced instructional change and student learning, the intended end goals of the policy. This brief is part of a series of three to extend previous research from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) on early REACH implementation and the REACH evaluation system five years after the 2012-13 rollout. [For "Teacher Evaluation in CPS: What Makes Evaluator Feedback Useful? Research Brief," see ED608091. For "Teacher Evaluation in CPS: REACH Ratings and Teacher Mobility. Research Brief," see ED608092.]

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) offers many options when it comes to high school enrollment. In fact, since the 2015-16 school year, about three out of every four incoming ninth-graders have chosen to attend a high school other than their assigned neighborhood school. Despite the widespread engagement in school choice, the high school application process was complicated. In an effort to simplify and streamline the process, the Chicago Board of Education voted on April 2017 to adopt a common application across all high school choice programs for incoming ninth-grade students with one deadline and a single best offer. The district expected that this common application would make the process simpler, more transparent, and more equitable for students and families. At the time when Chicago passed this measure, similar systems had already been approved and were in use in a number of other urban districts. Beginning in fall 2017, all high school program applications were moved to an online platform known as GoCPS. This new application system eliminated the need to apply school-by-school and program-by-program. In addition, all high school programs had a common deadline for applications and acceptances of offers. Importantly, the selection system alleviated the problem of some students accepting multiple offers to competitive programs while others remained on multiple waitlists with no offers. This report analyzes the first year of GoCPS implementation for students who enrolled in ninth grade in the fall of 2018. [Funding provided by the Consortium Investor Council.]

In the 2015-16 school year, 75 percent of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) ninth-graders opted out of their assigned high school. These students could choose from more than 300 programs at 138 public high schools. Selective enrollment high schools (SEHSs) were among the most high-profile and most sought-out options. SEHSs aim to provide high-achieving students with a challenging academic experience and admit students based on prior academic performance. While many of the SEHSs are consistently ranked as the top schools in Illinois by U.S. News and World Report, criticisms about these schools include concerns that they disproportionately serve affluent students and drain resources from neighborhood schools. This research asks two questions: (1) How does the admission policy in CPS affect the profile of SEHS students in Chicago? and (2) What effects do SEHSs have on students? Results find that applicants tend to prefer the same selective enrollment high schools. CPS uses multiple academic performance metrics and a proxy for students' SES for SEHS admissions, in part to create more diverse selective enrollment high schools. Although the common perception is that SEHSs benefit all students who attend them, the picture is more complicated, particularly for students who live in low-SES neighborhoods.

Across the country, urban school districts are opting to close under-enrolled schools as a way to consolidate resources. Motivated by a reported $1 billion deficit and declining enrollments in depopulating neighborhoods, the Chicago Board of Education voted in May 2013 to close 49 elementary schools and one high school program located in an elementary school--the largest mass school closure to date. In order to accommodate the nearly 12,000 displaced students, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) designated specific "welcoming" schools for each of the closed schools. In this report, the authors provide evidence of the short-term and multi-year impacts of the 2013 CPS school closures on students' academic, behavioral, and other relevant outcomes. Using a mixed methods design, they sought to answer two primary questions: (1) How did staff and students affected by school closings experience the school closings process and subsequent transfer into designated welcoming schools? and (2) What effect did closing schools have on closed and welcoming schools students' mobility, attendance, suspensions, test scores, and core GPAs? In answering these questions, they illuminate the voices and experiences of the staff and students most directly affected by closures across six welcoming schools. [Included are commentaries by Eve L. Ewing and Douglas N. Harris. Additional support for this report was provided by the Consortium Investor Council.]

The pandemic has been an unprecedented disruption to the lives of college students and the operation of higher education institutions. Students' performance during the pandemic was likely influenced by the hardship they personally experienced, how easily they adapted to remote teaching (including technology access), and their professors' ability to support students. Generally, college students who can better adjust to stressors are those with higher perceived levels of social support, a greater connection with campus, and lower levels of psychological distress (Pidgeon et al., 2014), and these factors vary along race and class lines (Turner & Avinson, 2003). Faculty could provide support and flexibility to struggling students, but they had to identify which students needed help. Students' backgrounds likely shaped the frequency and content of their interactions with faculty, as lower-income and first-generation students are less likely to reach out to professors (Barry, et al., 2009; Jack, 2016; Kim & Sax, 2009). To alleviate student stress, many colleges implemented COVID-specific grading policies to allow students increased flexibility in choosing to take courses pass/fail rather than for a letter grade (Cheng, 2020). COVID adjustments also often extended the window during which students could withdraw from a course and were generous in allowing students additional time to convert incompletes into grades. It is not surprising that universities relied on changes to grading policies to reduce the potential negative effects of the pandemic on students' academic performance since these policies are a common recourse for individuals facing difficulties in any given semester. Despite their ubiquity, we know little about student use of various aspects of grading policies or how student uptake of grade flexibility is associated with future success. The pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study grading policies and how students use them. Given the ongoing uncertainty of COVID-19 and the likelihood of future disruptions (illnesses, natural disasters, pandemics, etc.), universities need to have sound policies for grading accommodations that they can implement in the event of crises. Thus, it is important to understand whether and how accommodations like flexible grading policies differentially influence students from varying backgrounds, particularly since the pandemic's hardships have fallen disproportionately on non-white, low-income individuals (Garg, et al., 2020; Karpman et al., 2020). The context of this paper is the University of North Carolina (UNC) System's 16 diverse 4-year public institutions, which enrolled approximately 240,000 undergraduate students in Spring 2020. We answer the following research questions: 1. What were the pandemic-induced changes to university grading policies? How did they compare to pre-pandemic policies? Do they vary across institutions? 2. Did student course performance, take up of pass/fail options, and use of withdrawals in Spring 2020 differ from prior spring semesters? Was there variation by student characteristics? 3. Were faculty more lenient in Spring 2020 relative to past spring semesters? Did deviations from prior grading patterns vary by major/program or university? 4. Did student changes in course performance, reliance on pass/fail, or use of withdrawals in Spring 2020 predict postsecondary enrollment in subsequent semesters? We start by analyzing historical documents and policies available from the UNC System's institutions. Across 16 institutions' policies, we contrast differences and similarities in how universities adjusted how students could use pass/fail options and withdrawals. We then rely on UNC System administrative data to conduct the remaining analyses. The main dataset of interest is student transcripts showing UNC System course enrollment and course outcome (i.e., grade, pass/fail, withdrawal). We are specifically interested in students' course outcomes: letter grade, taking a class pass fail, or withdrawals, as well as university enrollment. We explore heterogeneity in outcomes by student demographic information (gender, race/ethnicity, and home zip code), socio-economic status from financial aid data, and high school test scores and GPA. To investigate differences in course outcomes, we compare the distributions of student grades, pass/fail uptake, and withdrawals in Spring 2018/2019 to the Spring 2020 semester. We also model the association between Spring 2020 and course outcomes with OLS and fixed effects regression approaches that account for student characteristics (or student fixed effects), prior academic performance, and major. Finally, we estimate these models for different groups of students (e.g., Pell eligibility, prior academic performance, race/ethnicity) to explore heterogeneity in course performance and reliance on COVID grading policies. To understand whether faculty members adjusted their grading, we estimate faculty fixed effects regression models. Here, the outcome is the average grade faculty members assign, and we look at how grades in Spring 2020 deviate from grades awarded in Spring 2018/2019. We also explore how variation in faculty grading differs across majors/programs and institutions. Finally, we show how Spring 2020 course outcomes are correlated with re-enrollment in a UNC System university in the following fall. This analysis allows us to see if course grades or the reliance of pass/fail options or withdraws could be used by universities as an early indicator that a student is disengaging from their post-secondary education. Our preliminary results (see supplemental tables) indicate a rise in the distribution of grades in Spring 2020 (regardless of student background or course department). Overall, 47 percent of grades given in Spring 2020 were A's (compared to 44 percent in Spring 2018/2019), and the share of course failures also declined (2.1 percent of courses ended in a failure in Spring 2020 versus 4.3 percent the prior two springs). However, students were about 22 percentage points more likely to take a course pass/fail in Spring 2020. These preliminary findings suggest that students were taking advantage of changes to university grading policies in Spring 2020, and that faculty were generally more lenient in their grading when students did take a course for a grade. Lastly, pass/fail uptake in Spring 2020 was associated with higher likelihood Fall 2020 re-enrollment for all students.

Driven by a combination of concern for historically high suspension rates and substantial disproportionalities in suspension use, a recent wave of education reforms encourages schools to reduce their use of suspensions for student behavior management. Both academic and political discourse has focused on the extensive use of suspension for relatively minor behavioral infractions, with an implicit assumption or explicit articulation that suspension could still be used for severe infractions. This paper tests that assumption, providing evidence that reductions in suspensions for severe infractions may produce positive impacts without harming school safety. Using data from high schools in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), 2007-2014, we examine how declines in school reliance on suspensions for severe infractions are associated with changes in academic performance, attendance, and student reports of school climate for all students in the school. Recognizing the substantial methodological difficulty in obtaining impact estimates, we exploit a series of official and unofficial policy-induced changes to suspension practice, using school and student fixed effects models with extensive controls to reduce potential sources of bias in the estimates. We find the reduction in out-of-school suspension for severe infractions was associated with small but statistically significant increases in student test scores, consequential attendance improvements (beyond the impact of fewer days suspended), and heterogeneity in changes to students' perceptions of school safety. Test score impacts are concentrated in racially diverse schools and those with low baseline suspension use. Attendance impacts are driven by schools predominantly serving African American students (which also had the highest baseline suspension rates); these schools also had large, significant improvements in perceptions of school climate. [This paper was published in "Peabody Journal of Education" v93 n2 2018.]

Years of developmental psychology research links traumatic experiences to long-term student externalizing problems (Bingenheimer et al. 2005; Denese & McEwen, 2012; Osofsky 1999; Pynoos et al. 1987; Raver, Blair & Willoughby, 2013; Shonkoff et al., 2012). A related body of work relates negative life outcomes with exposure to high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods during childhood (Harding 2003; Sampson, Sharkey, and Raudenbush 2008; Wodtke, Harding and Elwert 2011), although randomized housing experiments have yielded mixed evidence (Burdick-Will et al. 2011; Ludwig et al. 2009; Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000). Recent work by Sharkey and co-authors (2010, 2012, 2014) has examined more immediate outcomes of exposure to community violence, finding causally credible evidence that students score lower on both low- and high-stakes assessments for 7-10 days after a violent crime occurs on the block where they live. This study uses a similar approach to examine two dimensions of student behavior in the immediate aftermath of a violent crime on their block: attendance and the incidence of disciplinary infractions. The data for this study combines discipline, attendance, and residence data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) with publicly-available crime data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD). In initial work, the authors find evidence that students are "less" likely to have reported behavioral problems at school in the immediate aftermath of exposure to violent crime in their community of residence. Consistent with prior work suggesting younger children are more responsive to community violence, the impact is concentrated among younger children. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]

A substantial body of descriptive work documents large correlations between suspension and a variety of negative future outcomes, both for suspended students and for students who are never suspended but attend schools with high suspension rates (Balfanz, Byrnes, & Fox, 2015; Davis and Jordan, 1994; Dawson, 1991; Fabelo et al., 2011). Furthermore, numerous recent studies document substantial inequality in the ways suspension policy impacts students by race/ethnicity, gender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) orientation, special needs, home language, and socioeconomic status. (Fabelo et al., 2011; Himmelstein & Brückner, 2010; Losen & Gillepsie, 2012; Losen & Martinez, 2013; Losen, Hewitt, & Toldson, 2014; Osher et al., 2010; Porowski, O'Conner, & Aikaterini, 2014; Stevens et al., 2015). However, while the correlational evidence is suggestive, the existing literature has made little progress in producing causally credible estimates of the impact of suspension policy due to the endogeneity of punishment, risk of reverse causation, and data limitations. This paper seeks to expand the understanding of the causal impact of suspension policy on individual students and schools overall. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]

In an era of expansive school choice, families and students make many comparisons when they consider schools. Policies encourage families to seek out options where average test scores are high or where value-added indicators are strong. When students choose schools with high-performing peers, they often may be at a lower place in the achievement distribution in their cohort than if they had attended their neighborhood school. The purpose of this study is to understand how a student's place in the achievement distribution of incoming ninth graders affects his/her outcomes. If high schools assign students to classes or tracks based on prior test scores, then students might have very different high school experiences based on their own achievement but also the achievement level of their ninth-grade peers. In this study, the authors specifically answer the following questions: (1) What is the relationship between a student's place in the achievement distribution of his/her high school cohort of ninth graders (i.e., incoming class rank) and high school and college academic outcomes? (2) Does the effect of incoming class rank vary for different types of students? At schools with varying levels of performance? This study uses data on four cohorts of students enrolling as first-time ninth graders in Chicago public high schools from fall 2008 to fall 2011, totaling 72,613 students. The sample is limited to students who attended CPS in eighth grade and enrolled in CPS for ninth grade. The authors use administrative data from CPS, a survey measure of student self-reports of study habits in middle school, and college-going information from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). Student data are linked across administrative data sets and years using a unique student-level identifier. Being at the top of the class appears to have benefits in terms of test score gains and slightly higher grades, as well as a higher likelihood of enrolling in and persisting in college. There were small negative attendance and high school graduation effects. Two tables are appended.