New insights into differences in educational opportunity between Chicago's community areas
This research examines how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students’ educational attainment looks by their community area — as opposed to the more common comparison by high school, which can obscure geographic inequities in students' outcomes. The study found that the expansion of school choice in CPS has resulted in a district where fewer than one in four CPS freshmen enrolled in their assigned neighborhood high school in 2019.
To provide new insights into the district's progress in addressing geographic inequities, study analyzes the variation in CPS students' high school and college attainment between Chicago's community areas, and compares this variation to that among high schools in the district. The accompanying To&Through Community Milestones Tool enables the public to dive even deeper into the data, providing an interactive interface to explore rates of attainment for CPS students living in each of Chicago's 77 community areas.