Invasion of the Little People

Published in Chicago Journal
July 17, 2003

by Dan Weissmann

The Little People are back. And they’ve got some good news and some bad news for us about our schools.

No, these aren’t the little people who greeted Dorothy when she went over the rainbow. These Little People are from Hyde Park, and they made their first appearance several years ago in a set of reports about dropout and graduation rates from the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.

That report used colorful charts where paper-doll-shaped cutouts represented students—red paper dolls for dropouts, blue ones for graduates. The researchers took to calling the charts the “little people reports,” and now that they’re updating the research, the name has become official.

I’ll get into what the results indicate for our neighborhood schools, but first, some general explanations are in order.

Like the original Little People, the new reports paint a clear picture of some unpleasant findings: more kids drop out of Chicago’s public schools than official numbers would lead you to believe. A lot more.

The official numbers make the picture look rosy by leaving some kids out. The most misleading number is the official dropout rate: according to the Illinois State Board of Education, Chicago’s annual dropout rate has varied between 14 percent and 17 percent for the last ten years, which doesn’t sound so bad.

Except that it doesn’t count kids who drop out over the summer.

And even the state seems to admit that’s a lot of kids, since it also acknowledges that last year, the city’s schools only graduated 69 percent of the kids who had enrolled four years before. Suddenly, we’re up to 31 percent of kids not graduating.

But even those numbers only count the kids who show up at high school to begin with. The Consortium’s researchers dug deeper, counting all the little people from the time they finished 8th grade. In this case, they looked at the kids who finished 8th grade in 1997, tracking them for five years, to see what happened to kids who might fall a year behind somewhere. Only 41 percent of kids in the city finished high school here within five years. The majority leave, one way or another.

Not everybody drops out. Of the kids who left 8th grade in 1997, almost a quarter simply “left” the school system, a designation that covers a variety of sins. Some went to Winnetka. Some went to prison.

And, previous studies have shown, some probably dropped out, their true stories fallen prey to “clerical error”: a kid leaves school to go work at Taco Bell, the school clerk writes on their exit form that they went to Mexico, and suddenly there’s one less dropout, one more kid simply “leaving the system.”

The Little People charts are striking because they illustrate how the dropout process works. By the end of their first year in high school, a lot of kids are behind; they’ve failed a couple of classes, and they don’t have enough credits to become proper sophomores the next year. Those tend to be the kids who don’t make it.

In the Consortium’s reports, the kids who are off-track are shown as peach-colored Little People. And however many peach-colored Little People there are at the end of year one, there are about that many red-colored Little People—dropouts—at the end of the line.

That’s it: If you fall behind in your first year, chances are, you won’t make it to the end. “Kids who are on-track at the end of the first year are five times more likely to graduate within four years,” says Shazia Miller, a Consortium spokesperson and one of the authors of the Little People reports.

There is some good news across the city on this front. The number of kids who make it to the end of freshman year with enough credits to be a sophomore in the fall—is on the rise. Of kids who finished 8th grade in 1997, only 43% started their sophomore year on-track. Among kids who finished 8th grade in 2001, 50% were on-track a year later.

The Consortium has published separate reports for every school in the city, so folks can see how their own schools are doing and try to focus their efforts to help serve kids.

I’ve looked at the reports for ten neighborhood elementary schools in the Near South and Near West sides. (I left out schools that didn’t draw primarily from the neighborhood—like magnets and charters—and schools that didn’t go all the way up through 8th grade.) The news was mostly not very good, but there were some bright spots.

First the bad news: Seven out of ten local schools showed even worse results than the city as a whole. At Dett, Grant, Jefferson, King, Gladstone, Smyth, and Herbert, fewer than 41 percent of the 8th grade class of 1997 had Chicago high school diplomas by 2002. Kids from Grant and Smyth had the worst luck, with just 26 percent graduating within five years.

Or maybe the tough-luck prize belongs to some of Gladstone’s 1997 grads: They started out ahead of the pack, with 65 percent on-track to graduate at the end of their freshman year, but then, somehow, a lot of them lost ground. Four years later, only 32 percent had managed to graduate.

Gladstone principal Gary Moriello doesn’t make much of the findings. “Well, that’s pretty good statistics,” he says, “but it may not be something you can easily address. Some of these may be very hard-core cases—more of the gang-banging, or drugs or dysfunctional families or whatever.”

Or maybe they wound up at some not-so-great high schools. The Gladstone kids with the worst luck were the ones who went to nearby Spalding High School. The Consortium’s report shows that eight members of the Gladstone class of ’97 went there, and five years later, only one had graduated.

More Gladstone kids went to Spalding that year than to any other school, and Moriello says that’s not an accident: his staff tended to encourage students who needed a little extra nurturing to choose Spalding, where he knew members of the staff. For a long time, Spalding had served only kids with disabilities, so he figured kids might get more individual attention there.

But that plan doesn’t seem to have worked so well. Moriello expresses no regret. “Let’s remember that these were kids who were less mature,” he says. But he acknowledges that it’s not a success story. “Twelve-point-five percent [one kid in eight] is a pretty low number,” he admits.

The folks who created these reports might be disappointed by Moriello’s attitude. Shazia Miller of the Consortium says, “I want those schools to go to places like Spalding and say, ‘Hello—only one of my kids graduated? What is up?’”

So, good news anyone? A few schools beat the odds—Suder, South Loop, and Washington Irving. Irving had the best numbers, with 52 percent of its students graduating within five years. (I know, that shouldn’t be good news, but it is.)

And again, its instructive to look at the schools these kids went to: the biggest number went to Best Practices High School, a small school started in the mid-1990s by a group of committed teachers. Kids don’t have to have fancy grades to get in, but the school graduates about 60 percent of the kids who enter—a high number for Chicago public schools without entrance requirements.

And again, where these kids got sent to high school is not an accident. Assistant Principal Dennis Dandeles says that every year the school makes a big push to “help the students get into the high schools of their dreams.” Last year, he became the point person on that effort.

He organizes a special high school fair at Irving, where recent grads come back to talk about their experiences at the high schools they’ve gone on to. Then the school hosts an “application night,” where families come in to get extra help making final choices and filling out forms.

He’s proud of the number that go to selective-enrollment programs at schools like Curie, Lane Tech, and Whitney Young, but he works to get a good fit for every student. Hardly any wind up going to the neighborhood high school, Crane, where the graduation rate is below the city average. (Gladstone, meanwhile, has continued sending kids to Crane and to Spalding, the Consortium reports show.)

Finally, there’s another piece of good news: kids from most of the schools in the neighborhood have followed the city-wide trend, with ever-increasing numbers of them finishing their freshman year on-track to graduate. A majority of neighborhood schools are still below the citywide average on this score, but even they are ahead of where they started.

And according to Dandeles, Washington Irving sent six kids each to Lane and to Curie this year, where their kids have historically done well.

You can see the Little People for yourself at the Consortium’s web site: http://www.consortium-chicago.org/littlepeople/selectschool.html