Academic Success
CPS envisions a rigorous, joyful, and equitable learning experience for every student, centered on the instructional core. This includes high-quality, culturally-responsive curriculum, meaningful assessments, student-focused instruction, accelerated best practices, and academic interventions.
Black Student Success Plan
CPS remains committed to addressing long-standing racial inequities in Chicago. The development and integration of a Black Student Success Plan aims to eliminate opportunity gaps, improving both daily learning experiences and life outcomes for Black students. This holistic approach to supporting students addresses a wide range of factors impacting Black students’ experience in school, including culturally-responsive curriculum, hiring and retaining educators of color, addressing disparities in mental health and discipline, equitable resource allocation, and meaningful family engagement.
In SY25, the District plans to finalize and share the Black Student Success Plan, which will include specific short-term and long-term goals, as well as implementation strategies. To ensure accountability and transparency, the Plan will also establish standards for reporting progress and impact to stakeholders and the community. The District is seeking philanthropic support to help launch, communicate, evaluate, and continuously improve the Black Student Success Plan.
Academic Instructional Core and Enrichment Opportunities
Challenging, culturally-responsive curricula and enrichment opportunities that promote daily growth are foundational to students’ academic learning experiences. Over the past five years, CPS has made remarkable strides in providing its students with a high-quality public education that prepares them for success. Philanthropic partners play an important role in supporting student success in areas like arts education (music, dance, theater, visual arts), STEM, and computer science.
According to a national study conducted by Harvard and Stanford Universities, CPS students in grades 3 – 8 ranked first among large urban school districts in reading gains since the pandemic. CPS students made up more than two-thirds of a year of instruction from 2022 to 2023 alone. CPS students ranked in the top third when compared to similar districts in math gains throughout the same time period. And combined, CPS ranked third out of large urban districts across the country.
In order to build on this growth and succeed in creating a joyful learning environment for all students, it is critical to develop culturally-relevant resources and extended-day programming that makes learning accessible, while also engaging families and communities in the learning process.
The District aims not only to provide every student with high-quality, grade-level aligned, culturally-responsive instructional materials, but also focus on student-centered instruction that enhances connectedness, belonging, and well-being. Additionally, CPS is committed to ensuring that 100% of schools have the resource capacity to hire full-time arts education teachers.
To support these goals, CPS will look to identify partners to support the implementation of the Arts Education Plan 2.0: Cultivating Creativity, resource early childhood classrooms with age-appropriate STEM materials, as well as underwrite costs of enrichment programs like summer computer science and math camps and robotics clubs.
Looking ahead, the District and CFF will rely on partners to help support the continued adoption of academic interventions such as the Tutor Corps, which trained hundreds of Chicagoans to serve as literacy and math tutors at high-need schools on the South and West Sides of Chicago. This program demonstrated success over the pandemic and post-pandemic years, and is credited as a reason for the District’s recent high rankings in academic achievement.
Modernization of Technology
For students to thrive, they must have modern technology and systems, from devices for students to use in classrooms to the software and programs that support their learning.
During the Covid-19 pandemic remote learning, CPS collaborated with government agencies and philanthropic partners to help narrow the digital divide for students and reach a 1:1 student to device ratio. In order to maintain this level of access, CPS is seeking funds to help update, replace, and maintain devices for student use. Technology can also enhance teaching and learning by expanding educator capacity and customizing student learning experiences. CPS’ vision is to harness SkAI, a cutting edge AI for CPS’ universally available digital curriculum, Skyline. With philanthropic support, CPS aims to collaborate with educators, school leaders, content experts, and ed tech partners to build an AI architecture that can support the District’s in-house curriculum design team capacity as they create and modify high-quality, culturally-responsive curricular content and assessments.
Accountability Redesign
For CPS, school accountability means holding schools and the District responsible for student learning through systems that provide information on school performance and quality. In April 2023, CPS adopted a new policy for evaluating school performance, built from the ground up, engaging over 20,000 stakeholders and forming a diverse advisory group to reimagine their approach to accountability. The Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency Policy (CIDT) sets out a systematic means for measuring school performance and identifying schools in need of support. This new approach focuses on the conditions, supports, and resources needed for a school to provide students with high-quality learning experiences. It expects the District to be responsive to the needs of school communities and involve communities in deciding what resources and support are needed from the District to improve a school’s conditions.
A key piece of this work is seeking alignment within and across the early grades, which is critical for improved student outcomes and student and family experiences. CPS aims to ensure that every student begins third grade a confident, empowered, and supported learner with a strong foundation of academic and social-emotional skills to accelerate their path to life-long success.
Philanthropic support has been critical to the redesign process, and continued support for the next phases—including communication, stakeholder engagement, technical assistance and professional learning—will be beneficial as the District rolls out the new Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency policy.
