Trends in tier scores at CPS Selective Enrollment High Schools
November 21, 2022
In 2009, the federal court supervision that required the Chicago Public Schools to work towards racial and ethnic desegregation of the district schools ended. The district then developed a policy to maintain social, economic, and racial and ethnic diversity at some of the magnet and selective enrollment high schools that the district had set up for desegregation.
The “Tiers” policy basically scores Chicago census tracts in how economically well-off the inhabitants are. The tracts are then divided into tiers such that each tier contain the same number of school-age children. Tier 1 has the tracts with the poorest households and Tier 4 has the wealthiest households. (More details).
For the selective enrollment high schools, the top academically-scoring students, within a tier, that apply to a school are admitted. Some seats are set aside for the top scoring students, regardless of their Tier.
These charts show how the average score, minimum score, and maximum score, per Tier has changed for the students admitted to the these high schools since the policy was put into place in 2010.
Since 2010, CPS has changed the way that the academic scores were calculated three times: in 2015 and in both 2021 and 2022. The scores of the incoming students are not directly comparable across these changes. (h/t to @chris430218 for letting me know that the score calculation changed from 2021 to 2022.)
The data for this was compiled by Denali Dasgupta and Forest Gregg.