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CPS First-Day Attendance May Be Exaggerated
Produced by Linda Lutton on Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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Attendance figures released by Chicago Public Schools may be misleading. CPS is touting a record high attendance rate for the first day of school. But they’re counting kids who’ve been in class for weeks.
The district ran a citywide back-to school campaign this year, as it has in the past. And it says over 94 percent of its students showed up to school on September 8.
But spokeswoman Monique Bond admits that count includes 80,000 students in year-round schools who’ve been in class since early August. And the attendance figure leaves out kids still trickling into the system.
WOESTEHOFF: It’s a very fishy number.
Julie Woestehoff is the head of the parent advocacy group PURE.
WOESTEHOFF: It really looks like just an annual pat on the back that really has nothing to do with the quality of school.
When asked for the actual number of students who attended school on September 8 rather than the percentage, CPS responded: “The data in the release is what we have at this time.”
Some numbers Chicago is not touting: high school test scores. Those were posted quietly on an obscure district web page. High school scores in Chicago remain flat.
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Meredith, Chicago // Thursday, September 17, 2009 @ 10:11 AM
While I am often very critical of CPS, this report is over critical. The high school scores were not posted on an "obsure district web page". They were infact posted on the site where all of their data is loctaed. CPS goes above the required NCLB postings and shares a great deal of data with the public.
We spend lots of time picking at little details of a very large system. It would be nice if we let them have their feel good story once in a while and not berate them for other details.
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Chris, Logan Square // Thursday, September 17, 2009 @ 12:29 PM
Ms. Woestehoff perhaps is not aware of the importance of the initial attendance figures. It is not a "pat on the back," it is how the federal monies that CPS receives is calculated. If many students don't show up, then the money available is decreased, which would certainly affect the "quality of school" that Ms. Woestehoff is concerned about.
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Mike Klonsky, DePaul // Thursday, September 17, 2009 @ 7:58 PM
Mr. Huberman can have his "feel good story" Meredith, but he should try and make it somewhat believable. What isn't being said here is that the .4% increase in day-one attendance over last year is only a percentage jump--not an actual increase. It's a percentage of a much smaller number of students. Overall enrollment at CPS is down to about 408,000 this year, down by about 7,000 students from last year (of course, by the end of October it will be down much further). So CPS actually had thousands more kids attending day-one last year (despite an organized boycott by Rev. Meeks). That loss of thousands of students from the CPS rolls amounts to a huge net loss in state funding. So let's keep the celebrating to a minimum and have soda pop instead of the good bubbly.
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Margaret Wilson, West Rogers Park // Sunday, September 20, 2009 @ 2:25 PM
I think that it would be better if Chicago posted two sets of figures--one for students who are in year-round schools and one for those who started Sept. 8th. If the percentage was for total students enrolled in Chicago then including the year-round students made sense. Otherwise the attendance would have looked lower then it actually was. To get an accurate figure, you would need to subtract the year-round students and then do a percentage of the remaining students. I would be curious as to what percentage of Chicago public school students are now in year-round schools?
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