As we enter the new school year, the To&Through Project is highlighting five Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools and five community areas that have significantly improved their CPS graduates’ access to college, according to data reported on our To&Through Milestones Tool.

We celebrate Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools and communities greatly increasing college access for their CPS graduates, and we recap the annual To&Through Middle Grades Network Summer Institute. We also introduce new team members and list upcoming Data Collaboratives.

As the To&Through Project team has been working through our summer reading lists, we curated a collection of articles and books that have stuck with us the past couple of months. We hope you find them as thought-provoking as we did.

Read our Chicago Data Stories series and an op-ed from the To&Through Middle Grades Network team. Learn about our open staff positions and upcoming events.

The To&Through Middle Grades Network (MGN) conducted empathy interviews with educators at MGN schools to capture their pandemic reflection. We stuck to open-ended questions about their experiences—mostly, we just held space for our teachers, counselors, and school leaders to talk, cry, and laugh. What we heard leaves us both concerned about the profound levels of exhaustion educators have experienced and moved by their deep commitment to students, families, and each other. 

Our recent findings on the attainment of students who began as English Learners at CPS shows that they are graduating from high school and enrolling in college at a rate on par with the district average. One co-author reflects on the finding as a cause for celebration — and a cause for maintaining the momentum around improving services and supports for English Learners in CPS. 

Chicago has a rich ecosystem of community-based organizations striving to raise educational attainment rates for students from their community areas. The expansion of high school choices outside of students’ communities over the past two decades has complicated their work.

Learn about the recently announced second cohort of the To&Through Middle Grades Network as well as new student activity resources for middle grades educators. We also overview our new research finding summaries, which provide learnings — and questions — from our reports via bite-sized reads, and we overview our annually published Data Insights and the To&Through Milestones Tool's recent data update.

Over the past two decades, students from Chicago’s Black communities experienced more dispersion — students going to different high schools — and more charter school enrollment than majority White, Latinx, Asian-American/Pacific-Islander, and mixed-race communities. Read more about this new research finding and its implications.

Regardless of how you define legacy admissions or the particulars of how it works, one thing remains clear: it is an institutionalized form of unearned advantage for students who are already starting out way ahead of the game.