Current Issue

School closings

As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.

high schools

August 18, 2011

The test-score disconnect got a bit wider in 2011, with elementary scores continuing to rise while high school scores dipped.

August 08, 2011

It is one thing to tell young children still captive to the demands of their parents that they must go to school in early August. But its whole other thing to pull teenagers into school at a time when days are still long and the beach is still enticing. That was the task for the staff at some of the city’s most struggling high schools.

July 14, 2011

When the 2011 Illinois school report cards come out in October, a major change kicks in on how the state calculates and reports high school graduation rates. New federal guidelines set up a single, uniform standard that all states must follow when calculating graduation rates.

June 28, 2011

Eight Chicago public high schools are each in line to get $5.6 million in federal money to use over the next three years for transformation work from within.

June 20, 2011

Facing a strong undercurrent of tension between traditional schools that feel threatened by new ones, Chicago High School for the Arts is once again at the center of a controversy over space.

May 19, 2011

School watchers may have noticed something missing from the list of school actions proposed by CPS officials this year: No schools were selected for the turnaround program, in which the district fires virtually the entire staff at a school and replaces them with new teachers and administrators.

March 21, 2011

In the month that Tyese Sims has been principal of Orr High, she has dropped 44 students from the rolls, she acknowledges. But one community group is accusing her of turning away as many as 150.

February 04, 2011

As a current student of South Shore High’s School of Leadership, I have been impacted greatly by the board's decision to not allow us into the "new" South Shore school.

December 06, 2010

As he does almost every year, Jack Wuest of the Alternative Schools Network brought out lawmakers, state officials and advocates to rev them up to focus more resources on the often-invisible young people he champions.

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