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COLLEGE CENTERS CPS has opened College and Career Resource Centers in 64 high schools and plans to open centers in 16 more. The centers are run by counselors and staff from the Department of Postsecondary Education and Student Development, and are equipped with computers, printers and hard copies of college resource materials. Students can drop in during the school day or after school two or three days a week to search for information on colleges, careers, scholarships and financial aid; or to seek help from counselors.

Research confirms the early signs that students are on their way to dropping out of school: They are older than their peers; they are failing classes; and they are increasingly absent.

Now, CPS is trying to figure out what it can do to get these students to change course.

Three years ago, the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago discovered a troubling pattern: Very few graduates accepted first teaching jobs in poor, underachieving schools in African-American communities, and very few were being trained in those schools.

The college's graduates were most likely to accept teaching positions in schools with the same racial or ethnic mix as the schools where they had done their student teaching.

Poor, minority schools are under-represented among the schools that host student teachers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), an institution that provides nearly a third of the district's new teachers. In 2005, only one-fifth of the college's student-teaching sites consisted of high-poverty, segregated, low-performing schools. "Without sustained practice in these schools, teacher candidates will be less inclined to seek or accept jobs in these communities," according to a UIC data brief.

Every spring, thousands of children in urban districts from New York and Boston to Oakland and Seattle turn in lists of schools that they hope to attend in the fall. Those lists are then fed into a computer program that, in a single whirl, churns out school assignments for each child.

In those districts, schools get a crystal-clear picture in the spring of who will be enrolling in the fall—something that would be a boon for Chicago principals, budget planners and class schedulers as they set up shop over the summer.

The dust seems to have settled on the Curie High local school council following last year's tumultuous and very public battle over the decision not to renew a popular principal's contract.

But things could heat up.