To&Through Project Blog

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.

If the most recent available rates of attainment for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students were to hold constant over the next decade, only 27 out of every 100 current CPS ninth graders would complete a college credential within 10 years (by the time they are about 25 years old).

This number, also called the Post-secondary Attainment Index (PAI), does not have to be true. Read about the five Data Insights we’re watching in 2022 to understand whether the city is making meaningful progress towards creating the systems needed to ensure that the current PAI for CPS does not become reality.

Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) mission is to provide high-quality education for every student, regardless of their zip code, that prepares them for college success. Yet it’s been difficult to determine the extent to which a CPS student’s zip code might still matter in whether they graduate from high school and college — until now.

Read our winter newsletter to learn about how we're connecting our research to student perspectives and practice, upcoming application deadlines for the second cohort of the To&Through Middle Grades Network, a new college match and scholarship search tool, and more.

Last spring, we released a study on Chicago Public Schools (CPS) graduates’ post-secondary pathways. The study revealed that the normative view of college — being continuously enrolled at one institution and graduating with a bachelor’s degree — is not typical for many CPS graduates. These findings inspired us at to seek out students who have made these transitions to understand more about their experiences.

Nancy is a Latinx, first-generation college student from Brighton Park. She immediately enrolled in a four-year college after high school graduation, transferred to a two-year college, and is currently enrolled in another four-year college. Read her story.

Arthur is a Black college student who attended a high school on the Southwest Side of Chicago. He immediately enrolled in a four-year college after high school graduation and has since transferred to two-year colleges as well as an online bachelor’s degree program. Read his story.

Amayrani is a Latinx, first-generation college student who graduated from a selective enrollment public high school and immediately enrolled in a two-year college. She took two semesters off during the pandemic. Read her story.