Synopsis
"From High School to the Future: The Challenge of Senior Year in Chicago Public Schools" finds there is much work to do to shift the focus of senior year in Chicago from finishing graduation requirements to preparing for college or employment. This report shows that the majority of CPS seniors have schedules dominated by makeup courses and electives and other non-core subject areas, and students themselves describe senior year as unchallenging and easier than previous years. Over the past several years, “college and career readiness for all,” has become the mantra of education reform in the United States. The challenges of senior year described in this report, however, demonstrate the magnitude of the problems educators face in creating an educational experience that truly prepares students for life after graduation. This report is designed to inform a discussion of how best to reform senior year, as well as to spark a conversation about the important challenges that precede and follow this pivotal period. The study analyzes the coursetaking patterns of more than 50,000 CPS students in the graduating classes of 2003 to 2009. It looks at the impact of senior year coursetaking on college enrollment and persistence; describes the post-graduation outcomes of CPS graduates with extremely limited access to college; and draws on data from interviews with seniors in three CPS high schools to take an in-depth look at students’ experiences during senior year. While the study finds that the highest-achieving students in CPS are generally participating in a rigorous senior year, “there seems to be no organizing framework and common set of expectations for students who might be college bound but are not the most highly qualified,” said Thomas Kelley-Kemple, report author and senior quantitative analyst at UChicagoCCSR. CPS must also grapple with what senior year should look like for a particularly challenging group of students: the roughly 45 percent of CPS graduates who begin senior year off of the trajectory to attend a four-year college with some level of selectivity. In the fall after graduation, the most common outcome for these students was to be neither working nor in school, the report finds.
About the Author
MELISSA RODERICK, PHD, is the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at SSA and a co-director at UChicago CCSR where she leads the organization's postsecondary research. Professor Roderick is also the co-director of the Network for College Success, a network of high schools focused on developing high-quality leadership and student performance in Chicago's high schools. VANESSA COCA is a second year doctoral student in the Sociology of Education program at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She is also a Research Assistant at the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. ELIZA MOELLER is the Lead Qualitative Analyst for the Chicago Postsecondary Transition Project, which is based at the School of Social Service Administration and is a sponsored project of UChicago CCSR. She also heads the project's Data Practice Collaborative. THOMAS KELLEY-KEMPLE is a research analyst with the Postsecondary Transition Project which is based at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and is a sponsored project of UChicago CCSR. His current work focuses on senior year coursetaking in CPS High Schools and its effect on college attainment and retention. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR) builds the capacity for school reform by conducting research that identifies what matters for student success and school improvement. Created in 1990 after the passage of the Chicago School Reform Act that decentralized governance of the city's public schools, UChicago CCSR conducts research of high technical quality that can inform and assess policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools. UChicago CCSR studies also have informed broader national movements in public education. UChicago CCSR encourages the use of research in policy action and improvement of practice but does not argue for particular policies or programs. Rather, UChicago CCSR helps to build capacity for school reform by identifying what matters for student success and school improvement, creating critical indicators to chart progress, and conducting theory-driven evaluation to identify how programs and policies are working.
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