The Expansion of High School Choice in Chicago Public Schools

Lisa Barrow and Lauren Sartain ()

Economic Perspectives, 2017, issue 5, 2-29

Abstract: Public school choice in Chicago has been in existence for more than 30 years and has noticeably expanded over the past 15 years. In 1987, United States Secretary of Education William Bennett labeled Chicago?s public schools the ?worst in the nation.? At that time, reportedly one-half of Chicago?s 64 high schools ranked in the bottom 1 percent on the ACT among schools that administered the test.1 Bennett further said Chicago parents should consider private school options, arguing that increased competition from private schools would improve the performance of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Since then, private school enrollment in Chicago among 15 year olds has actually fallen?from 22.3 percent in 1990 to 11.9 percent in 2015.2 At the same time, the quality of CPS schools has generally improved. Average ACT scores have risen, while dropout rates have declined (Allensworth et al., 2016).

Keywords: Chicago Public School; demographics; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/ec ... 017/ep2017-5-pdf.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhep:00026

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Perspectives from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().