And yet, CPS’s focus on on-track achieved all of this,” said report author Melissa Roderick, Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a senior director at UChicago CCSR. “On its face this did not seem like an initiative that would produce a system shift in performance, redefine approaches to school dropout, and call into question the conventional wisdom that urban neighborhood high schools could not make radical improvements. This analysis was done on 20 “early mover schools” that showed large gains in on-track rates as early as the 2007-09 school years, allowing for enough time to have elapsed to analyze how the increase in on-track rates affected graduation rates. The first report, Preventable Failure: Improvements in Long-Term Outcomes when High Schools Focused on the Ninth Grade Year, shows that improvements in ninth grade on-track rates were sustained in tenth and eleventh grade and followed by a large increase in graduation rates. Since that time, the CPS on-track rate has risen 25 percentage points, from 57 to 82 percent. The goal was to match the intervention to the specific needs of the student and prevent the dramatic decline in grades and attendance that most CPS students experience when they transition to high school. The diversity of strategies was notable-from calls home when students missed a class to algebra tutoring to homework help. ![]() The district initiative promoted the use of data to monitor students’ level of dropout risk throughout the ninth-grade year, allowing teachers to intervene before students fell too far behind. The effort was a response to research from UChicago CCSR showing that students who end their ninth-grade year on track are almost four times more likely to graduate from high school than those who are off track. ![]() Freshmen are considered on track if they have enough credits to be promoted to tenth grade and have earned no more than one semester F in a core course. ![]() In 2007, CPS launched a major effort, centered on keeping more ninth-graders on track to graduation. This suggests that the recent dramatic improvement in the percentage of Chicago ninth-graders who are “on track” to graduate should continue to propel system-wide graduation rates in Chicago Public Schools (CPS).Ī second report released today by UChicago CCSR helps explain why ninth grade is such a key leverage point for reducing dropouts. New UChicago CCSR Research: Ninth Grade is the Key to Solving the Dropout CrisisĮfforts to improve the academic performance of ninth-graders drove large improvements in graduation rates three years later in a diverse set of 20 Chicago public high schools, according to a report released Thursday, Apby the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR).
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