The State of Chicago Public Schools｜Spring 2025
Kids First Chicago’s new annual review explores how Chicago Public Schools students are doing academically and socially-emotionally. We examine key indicators—including student proficiency, growth, on-track rates, absenteeism, post-secondary outcomes, and parent engagement—to highlight what’s changed from 2018 to 2024. Dive into our five-part interactive series to understand how CPS students and families are progressing, and where additional attention may be needed.
Methodology, Data Sources & Acknowledgments
All descriptive statistics were generated from the following sources:
- Illinois Report Card data, 2018-2024. Of note is that we utilized the ISBE total number of schools within CPS, not the CPS-defined total.
- 5Essentials Survey data, 2018-2024.
- Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey data, Chicago, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023.
All data were gathered, cleaned, and harmonized across years using the sources listed above. A Linear Mixed Effects model (LME) was used to understand the relationship between academic outcomes and two predictor variables (chronic absenteeism and parent involvement). These variables were chosen due to 1) organizational interest, 2) current relevance in the education space, and 3) observed moderate correlation with outcome variables. The model formula defines fixed effects as the aforementioned predictor variables, and school (group variable) and year as random effects. Predictor variables were standardized according to z = (x - μ) / σ. All fixed effects variables correlated significantly with outcomes variables (p < 0.05). Of note, there was a great deal of variance explained by the school variable, meaning that 1) the specific school had a significant impact on the outcome, and thus 2) that further investigation of school-level factors is necessary to understand this variance, as well as what aspects of a school may be associated with the observed influence (e.g., geographic location, funding adequacy, etc.).
This report is powered by analysis conducted by Micaelan Valesky Gasperich and Dr. Chris Poulos. Kids First Chicago also acknowledges the valuable insights of our external partners, who provided guidance throughout the development of this analysis.
Comments and Questions?
Please get in touch with Kids First Chicago's Data Scientist Micaelan Valesky Gasperich or Chief of Policy Hal Woods for more information. For media inquiries, please contact Kristin Pollock.