Shelby Mahaffie

This report looks closely at how CPS students are progressing on the path to and through high school and college. In particular, we examine five key milestones: Freshman OnTrack, high school graduation, college enrollment, college persistence, and college completion, and track how rates on these milestones have changed across time.

For many students, sophomore year can be a forgotten year, a time sandwiched between high school's more momentous milestones. As a result, sophomore year lacks a clear identity, but is also well positioned to be a time of intentional development for high school students. The purpose of this report is to help build an organizing purpose for sophomore year by developing a research-based organizing set of indicators for sophomore educators. Using Freshman OnTrack and more nuanced definitions of freshman success, sophomore educators can better target intervention and support from the beginning of sophomore year; and using similar sophomore success indicators, they can monitor and support students during sophomore year.

This report builds on prior Consortium research on GPA loss across the transition from eighth to ninth grade. It explores how CPS students' grades declined during the transition to high school in more detail, and considers how both eighth- and ninth-grade grades have changed since the original report was written. It examines GPA declines in arts and PE/health grades, in addition to grades in the core subject areas, and breaks down these declines by race/ethnicity, gender, and eighth-grade achievement, and looks at how these patterns vary across schools. It also explores the relationships between failures in ninth-grade core and non-core courses, credit accumulation, and high school graduation.