50% X 33% X 35% = Total Systemic Failure

The Consortium on Chicago School Research issued a comprehensive and important report last week studying how Chicago Public School students succeed or fail in finishing high school, going to college, and earning a bachelor's degree.

On a basic level, the results could not be worse. Literally. Only about half of all students who enter CPS graduate from high school on time. Of those, only about one-third immediately enroll at four-year colleges and universities. Of those, only 35% earn a B.A. within six years. Multiply those three numbers together and you get the B.A. attainment rate for Chicago high school freshmen cited by the Chicago press here and here: 6%.

For black students, particularly men, the results were even worse: only 22% of black male college entrants graduated in six years, which combined with low high school graduation and college entrance drives their overall B.A. attainment rate measured from the beginning of high school forward to near 3%.

Think of it this way: if you sat down and deliberately created an education system designed to prevent disadvantaged students from getting through college, the difference between that system and the one we've got would pretty much be within the statistical margin of error.

There's also some great data showing how some colleges and universities are much more successful than others in helping CPS graduates earn degrees, even after controlling for students' high school academic characteristics. For example, while over 70% of CPS students with a 3.5 high school GPA graduated from Loyola University Chicago, less than 50% of similar students graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. And less than 20% of 3.5 GPA students graduated from Northeastern Illinois University.

When asked to account for low graduation rates, colleges and universities tend to put the onus on financial aid, high school preparation, student motivation--pretty much everything except themselves. These data show that what institutions do matters too, and some are far better destinations for Chicago students than others.

To their credit, CPS leaders avoided the defensiveness and denial that often accompanies critical education reports and vowed to use the results as guide for improvement. Here's one suggestion: give every CPS guidance counselor a copy of the chart with the institution-by-institution graduation rates broken down by GPA (it's on page 81 of the report) and suggest that they steer their brightest students away from places like Urbana Champaign and Northern Illinois.