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This was buried in a CPS email, foremost, does anyone have insight on how to attend the call tonight Thursday March 10?
And then feel free to read on and discuss these changes:
As part of our District’s ongoing commitment to equity, we are committed to giving every child a fair opportunity to earn admission to our District’s selective enrollment schools. We’ve already made significant progress on making these schools more equitable and more diverse:- Every CPS 8th-grader had the opportunity to take a high school admissions test in 2021
- Last school year, we increased the percentage of seats allocated to our District’s diverse learners and subsequently, we nearly doubled the number of selective enrollment offers going to these students.
We will be engaging parents and community members over the coming weeks and months to look at how we can make the selective enrollment admissions process more equitable. As part of our efforts to inform the public of these changes and solicit feedback, we are launching a microsite to share policy information and provide families and interested stakeholders the opportunity to take a short poll and submit questions to CPS leadership. Additionally, the District will host information sessions with parents including a webinar on Thursday, March 10, from 6 – 7 p.m. Click here to RSVP for this event.
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This looks like an attempt to reduce the share of Tiers 4 and 3 students from 60+% to 50% at the most desirable SE schools/programs. Given the numbers, it would be hard to mount a counter-argument, even if a racial balancing intention can be proved.
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I recently was able to obtain Kindergarten offer data (which I’ll probably share once I’ve cleaned it up and analyzed it myself) for the 2021, 2020, and 2019 school years. I can tell you right now that the 30% rank + equal distribution among tiers is NOT happening in practice. For example, presuming the data is accurate, McPherson has made ZERO offers to Tier 1 students in ANY round…ever. For the 2021 school year, 46.66% of first round offers went to Tier 4 students. Tier 1 students received only 5% Skinner North’s first round offers.
There are also some school that aren’t making nearly as many offers as others. In 2021, Carnegie made only 9 first round offers, Beasley made 12, and McDade made 19. Even though CPS says that scores under 75/75 for classical and 115 for gifted may not receive offers (source here — see bottom of page 48), there were plenty of first round offers made below that threshold. For example: <span style=”font-weight: 400;”>65/68 to McDade, 63/65 to Poe, 106 to Beasley, 110 to Carnegie, 113 to Lenart, and 109 to Morton. So obviously in some cases CPS is willing to make offers for scores that are under the testing cutoff they have, but I have to wonder if they’re only making that kind of exception at school with smaller applicant pools and/or lower average applicant scores. If CPS is enforcing its “no score below 75/75 or 115” policy at schools like Bell, Edison, the Skinners, Decatur, Pritzker, etc., then they can have their “equal distribution among tiers” policy on paper, but in reality they’re still overloading their more competitive schools with Tier 3 & 4 students.</span>
So…if you’re worried about how this shift will play out for SEES admissions because you live in Tier 3 or 4 and are worried your child will miss out on an offer because of this potential new policy, I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing. If my understanding of the data is right, any tier-related policy change will be meaningless and ineffective unless they also change the “scores under 75th percentile or 115 may not be considered potential candidates” thing. Personally, I don’t think they intend to do that. And honestly, given that the reality of the current process seems to be more inequitable than it’s presented to be, I feel like Tier 3 & 4 parents should maybe cool it with their indignity here.
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** clarification/correction: For the 2021 school year, 46.66% of Skinner North’s first round offers went to Tier 4 students.
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Interestingly, 46.66% of first round offers went to Tier 4 students is very consistent with the current system. 30% + 17.8% is the max cap for Tier 4. This only means that the majority of the 30% rank students are in Tier 4 for Skinner.
The minimum scoring requirements have nothing to do with Tier system. Even removing the 30% rank seats won’t change that.
If you insist that 25% of the kids must come from Tier 1 or Tier 2, then you must abolish the minimum scoring threshold for the elementary schools. With the current CPS CEO, this might actually happen. But then again, it has nothing to do with the 30% rank seat.
For academic centers and SEHS, the new quota of 25% for each Tier will simply force these top schools to separate students into regular vs AP classes. This will reduce the class offering for SEHS with smaller student bodies. I predict the national ranking of Payton and Northside will drop like a rock. Maybe then everyone will be happy.
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Right, my point is that CPS is publicly saying “we’re equally distributing seats among all four tiers!!” but because of the less-well-publicized minimum score cutoff (that is inconsistently enforced), that’s actually not true. They’re NOT equally distributing the remaining 70% of seats equally among all four tiers. And which Tier is disproportionately impacted? Tier 1.
“If you insist that 25% of the kids must come from Tier 1 or Tier 2, then you must abolish the minimum scoring threshold for the elementary schools. With the current CPS CEO, this might actually happen. But then again, it has nothing to do with the 30% rank seat.”
Exactly, so I don’t know why I’m seeing people (and in particular Tier 3 & 4 parents) getting so upset about this proposed change (at least as it pertains to SEES admissions). The proposed change does NOT mention anything about abolishing the minimum scoring threshold. Therefore, I predict that there will continue to be a disproportionate number of offers made to Tier 4 students, and Tier 1 students will continue to be given fewer offers than the percentage that is allegedly reserved for them. Hooray?
Anyway, if anyone’s interested, here’s a table that shows the percentage of Kindergarten offers made to each Tier in 2021.
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The proposed change does NOT mention anything about abolishing the minimum scoring threshold.
I think that is the key to understanding potential impact and rarely see it mentioned by CPS and I think only a few parents are aware that it exists.
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Thanks, Petra.
Can you please advise if you received any feedback on the cut off scores for all the schools?
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I was able to figure that out, yes! Classical was trickier because there are both reading and math scores (and they’re not always very close to one another), so I just picked the lowest combined score for each tier as my “cut score”. Here’s the link to all cut scores for the past three years!
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Hey Petra,
This is good information, greatly appreciate the feedback.
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Is this for all offers made, or only first round offers? Do you also have the percentage of offers to each tier, at school level?
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This is only for first round offers. I do have info for all rounds, just haven’t gotten a chance to look through that too thoroughly yet — I’ll share when I do, probably in the next day or two!
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Of the 3000-4000 students applying to SEES, how many are from tiers 1 and 2? I would love to see those numbers.
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I agree, I think that would be interesting to know. IF those numbers turn out to be significantly lower than Tier 3 and 4 numbers, I don’t think that means that the current system is fine and that Tier 3 & 4 students should continue to get a majority of the available seats, however. Maybe instead CPS needs to look at changing its entry year to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade and doing universal testing of its students. I wonder if there might need to be adjustments made to the hours, before/aftercare options, and locations of SEES, too — it’s definitely also possible that families may be getting offers and declining them if the logistics are too difficult.
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Does anyone have quick data on where/which Tiers SEES schools are located in? These schools are supposed to be magnet, but the bus option pre-covid was not ideal (pick-ups at 6:45am at neighborhood school). Given the loss of many bus routes this year due to covid walk-outs, I have to imagine that this makes the bus even less of an option for people. Given these logistical transportation challenges, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect 25% of kids at a school located in Tier 1 or 2 will be from Tier 4, nor is it realistic to expect 25% of kids at a school located in Tier 3 or 4 will be from Tier 1. Seems like the better option is ensuring more access to schools across all tiers and locating schools strategically in neighborhoods that could feasibly draw from all tiers. Maybe they’re doing this?
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Exactly. Because of Chicago’s residential geography, balancing the tiers or races within individual schools is impossible without prohibitively larger funding in bus services to expand and improve them. The previous CPS leadership, which was mostly African American, strove to build up Selective Enrollment equity at the district level by opening new programs in lower-tier communities. They knew that most students couldn’t and shouldn’t commute too far between home and school.
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Of the schools that have K entry, only NTA and Pritzker have consistently distributed their non-rank seats essentially equally across all four tiers over the past three years. Both these schools also always make offers to a full class size-worth of students. Pritzker usually makes 35 offers in the first round, and NTA makes 28 offers. Morton just opened their RGC this year, and they actually made the majority of their offers to Tier 1 & 2 students, BUT…1) they only made 11 first round offers, 2) 2/3 of their rank seats were offered to Tier 1 (vs. 0% of rank seats offered to Tier 4).
A lot of the SEES on the south side don’t typically make as many offers as those on the north side. Bronzeville Classical is making progress (they appear to have 2 classes per grade level — went from making 36 first round offers in 2019 to 57 last year), but Beasley, Carnegie, Poe, and McDade often seem to make a lot fewer offers than other (northside) schools. For example, Beasley made 12 1st round offers in 2021, Carnegie made 9 in 2021, McDade made 7 in 2020, Poe made 11 in 2019, etc. I think Morton is really the only SEES on the west side, and like I already mentioned, they just opened this year, and only made 11 first round offers.
I can’t tell if the numbers indicate that there’s a shortage of Tier 1 applicants or if there’s a shortage of Tier 1 applicants with “qualifying” scores, or if something else is going on. I wish there was data available about how many total SEES applicants there are from each tier.
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Selective enrollment admissions are centrally processed by OAE. Schools can’t decide if they want more or fewer students from one tier or another. All is up to the applicant pool each of them receives. Some schools have more even distributions among the tiers mainly because they are located close to both Tier 1/2 and Tier 3/4 neighborhoods. And these tend to be gifted centers, probably because their test is not as easy to prep as classical schools’.
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Oh, I’m not suggesting that the schools themselves are responsible for the uneven distribution — sorry if it read that way! I can see how my phrasing may have made it sound like I thought that. I’m aware it’s OAE that’s actually making the offers.
I definitely think NTA and Pritzker’s locations probably result in them receiving more Tier 1/2 applicants than, say, Decatur or McPherson, hence a more even distribution. It may absolutely be the case that the size of the applicant pool is what’s limiting Tier 1 students from getting offers. Regardless, there seems to be a pattern of 1) south & west side SEES under-offering/under-enrolling, 2) Tier 1 students receiving less than 1/4 of the seats that are meant to be equally distributed among the four tiers. One possible explanation for this is that there simply aren’t enough Tier 1 applicants. A second possible explanation is that there are enough Tier 1 applicants, but not enough of them are earning scores above 115 for gifted or 75th percentile for Classical. Either way, I think it highlights inequity in the process, and CPS should be working to address that. I do NOT think that either of the changes that CPS is currently proposing will do that.
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