April 21, 2006
BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter
Chicago public high school freshmen are battling daunting odds: Only 6.5 percent of their predecessors have been earning four-year college degrees by their mid-20s.
For black and Latino male ninth-graders, the numbers are even more alarming. Only about 3 percent wind up graduating from four-year colleges within six years.
So says new research from the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research, which looked at the high school graduating classes of 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2003.
"Six percent is really appalling," said Jenny Nagaoka, one of the study's authors. "The question . . . is how do we make that better."
The researchers cautioned that many of the kids they studied were not exposed to a batch of recent reforms intended to improve graduation rates, including smaller high schools, stiffer graduation requirements and a new department focused on post-high school plans.
Still, schools CEO Arne Duncan did not dispute the 6.5 percent number; he just wants to improve it.
"It affirms my absolute belief that we need dramatic change," he said.
Gender gap
According to the analysis, titled "From High School to the Future," nearly 80 percent of CPS seniors say they want at least a bachelor's degree, but most graduates don't have the grades to get into even somewhat selective four-year colleges -- much less graduate from one.
This is especially true among boys, and in particular African-American and Latino male graduates, about 50 percent of whom had high school averages of no more than C -- or 2.0 -- compared with 27 percent of all female CPS grads.
"Clearly, high schools are not engaging boys in ways to get them the grades they need,'' said consortium co-director Melissa Roderick, the study's principal investigator.
Low grade-point averages relegate kids to two-year or "nonselective" colleges, many of which have poor graduation rates, the study found.
Once in such colleges, kids' poor skills and work ethic catch up with them, often leading to worse graduation rates than the average students in those colleges.
Grades over ACTs
One key finding was that, for CPS grads, GPAs were more predictive of four-year college access and completion than ACT scores.
A half-point increase in GPA was linked to as much as a 20 percentage-point jump in the odds of a student graduating from a four-year college.
And, the analysis found, only 11 percent of the huge chunk of CPS graduates with C averages or worse earned bachelor's degrees.
For Roderick, Nagaoka and co-author Elaine Allensworth, the study offers two important conclusions:
Grades matter more than the test scores that now drive city, state and federal accountability systems. And kids need more help selecting colleges with better graduation records.
"The difference between a D and an F is going to class," Roderick said. "The difference between a D and a C is minimally doing homework. But the difference between a B and a C and a B and an A is really working, doing the studying.''
The 6 percent view
University of Illinois at Chicago senior Mary Olowo said she saw widespread apathy about grades when she attended Chicago's Amundsen High.
"C was a perfectly acceptable grade to most students," said Olowo, a 2001 grad. "A lot of time, even when homework was easy, they wouldn't do it."
Olowo attributed the study's jarring gender gap to boys who struggle with the lure of gangs and the perception that it's "cool'' to cut class.
Although she graduated with a 3.7 GPA and took an AP literature class, Olowo said she had to take a remedial reading course at UIC because her writing was not up to snuff. She's back on track, though, and expects to graduate on time this May from UIC, the most popular destination of CPS graduates.
"I guess I'm one of the 6 percent," Olowo said.
A missing economic piece
Mather High School Principal John Butterfield said the study seems to ignore the economic reality that 85 percent of CPS kids come from low-income homes and find it difficult to afford any college, let alone selective four-year schools. "If kids can't afford anything, where do they go?" he asked.
Gage Park Principal Wilfredo Ortiz cited another obstacle: "Last year, my No. 1 and No. 2 students were undocumented, so they couldn't get any financial aid."
At Northeastern, finances affect graduation timelines, said Provost Lawrence Frank. Many kids study part time while working to earn money for school. Others stop for a while to work and start up again. Yet others run into financial problems at other colleges and wind up transferring in to Northeastern.
Nagaoka cautioned that some kids in the study -- which excluded special education students -- were only sophomores in high school when Mayor Daley won control of the city's public schools in 1995.
Plus, the research is impacted by the National School Clearinghouse's ability to track CPS grads into college, which consortium researchers estimate could be as much as 5 percent off. And the study doesn't cover kids who started in two-year colleges -- about 20 percent of CPS graduates -- and then moved on to four-year ones.
Still, even with the maximum possible adjustment for those caveats, researchers said the 6.5 percent number would not rise to more than 10 percent.
Contributing: Dave Newbart
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