Chicago Public Schools tout ‘historic’ graduation rates in the 2022-2023 school year as a measure of their success despite test score declines.
(Chalkboard News) – Chicago Public Schools (CPS) last week announced that its “historic” graduation rate in the 2022-2023 school year was the highest it has ever been, despite students achieving some of the lowest test scores on record.
The disparity between rising graduation rates and falling academic achievement is a nationwide phenomenon in the wake of school closures and relaxed graduation standards as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an event last week with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the district touted graduation rates as a measure of its success.
The nation’s highest education official said the district was raising the bar, but test scores paint a different picture.
“I applaud Chicago Public Schools, CEO Martinez, and the dedicated educators for their relentless efforts to raise the bar for academic achievement and create new systems of support for students’ social and emotional wellbeing,” Cardona said, according to a statement.
Martinez and Johnson said students were graduating at a higher rate and taking advantage of the district’s initiatives for college or career readiness.
The district said the graduation rate was 59% in 2013.
The Chicago Public Schools Office of Inspector General said in a January report that the district’s unreliable documentation of students who had stopped attending schools as transfers, called “leave codes,” impacts its graduation rates.
“The OIG’s findings call into question the reliability of transfer and dropout data that CPS uses in calculating key metrics such as attendance and graduation rates,” the watchdog agency’s 2022 report found.
“Leave code misuse distorts a student’s official record as well as districtwide data and metrics that rely on this data, including attendance and graduation rates,” the report concluded. “Every time the OIG or another entity reports on a new case of leave code misuse, it perpetuates the belief that CPS metrics are unreliable and reinforces the idea that this problem is intractable.”
The percentage of Chicago’s students who have met or exceeded standardized testing benchmarks intended to indicate success after graduating high school, however, has declined despite the rising graduation rates, according to the Illinois Report Card from the Illinois Board of Education.
The website shows that in 2017, 24.7% of CPS students met or exceeded the SAT’s college readiness benchmark for mathematics. In 2023, when CPS saw its highest graduation rate ever, only 19.1% of students met or exceeded the math benchmark.
Students also declined in the English Language Arts category; 27.8% of CPS students in 2017 met or exceeded that benchmark. But in 2023, only 22.3% of students met the standard.
Almost 78% of students in 2023 received English test scores that partially met or were approaching the college readiness benchmark.
The disparity between rising graduation rates with lower academic achievement led one researcher to describe the high school degrees handed out during the pandemic as “COVID credentials,” a special designation to show they have not received the same quality of instruction as those whose education was not disrupted by remote learning.
Students who graduated in 2023 were freshmen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Originally published by Chalkboard News. Republished with permission.
For more School Reform News.
