CPS student scores show equivalent of 6 years of learning in 5 years

November 02, 2017
Chicago Sun Times

By Lauren FitzPatrick

Chicago Public Schools students have made the fastest academic progress of the 100 largest school districts in the country, with all racial groups making similar improvements.

That’s according to a new analysis by Stanford University researcher Sean F. Reardon, who told a gathering of Chicago’s educational brain trust Thursday that test scores for the average Chicago student went up by about six grades in the five years between third and eighth grade.

At each grade level, CPS students’ scores also rose faster from 2009 to 2014 than the rest of the nation’s on average, about two-thirds of a grade level locally versus about one-sixth. And the results generally held across racial and ethnic groups, with Hispanic students making even faster progress, said Reardon, using the Center for Education Policy’s database of hundreds of millions of standardized test scores for every third- through eighth-grader in the country.

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A comparison of Chicago public school students’ standardized test scores in 2009-2014 with those of public students across the U.S. reveals two striking patterns. First, Chicago students’ scores improved dramatically more, on average, between third and eighth grade than those of the average student in the U.S. This is true for students of all racial/ethnic groups. The average Chicago student’s test scores improved by roughly 6 grade-level equivalents in the 5 years from third to eighth grade. Second, at each grade level in grades three through eight, Chicago students’ scores improved more from 2009 to 2014 than did the average scores of all students in the U.S. Test scores rose in Chicago by roughly two-thirds of a grade level from 2009 to 2014, compared to an increase of one-sixth of a grade level nationally. Again, this was equally true for black, Hispanic, and white students. These patterns do not appear to result from increasingly test-aligned instruction or from changing city demographics and enrollment patterns.

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