CHAPTER 10

As Freshman OnTrack survived one upheaval after another and district leaders moved from one priority and crisis to the next one, Roderick and the Consortium researchers marveled at the steadily rising FOT rates. “Why is this happening? What does this mean? Is it real?” Roderick asked in meeting after meeting with her staff. “I’ve never seen a system shift of this magnitude before.” In 2012–13, the year of the teachers strike and Brizard’s resignation, the Freshman OnTrack rate had reached 82 percent, a 25 percentage-point increase from the 2006–07 school year. That increase represented 6,900 additional students annually who ended freshman year in good standing.

Roderick was hopeful that the life trajectory for these 6,900 students had truly changed for the better, but she was also wary. For years in Chicago, Roderick and her Consortium colleagues had played the role of policy spoilers. It was the Consortium’s research that in 1995 had called CPS’s high schools “institutional failures.” It was Roderick’s research that had revealed the flaws in Vallas’s signature “Ending Social Promotion” initiative; and it was her research that had prompted a notorious 2006 front-page Chicago Tribune headline that decried, “Of 100 Chicago Public School Freshmen, Six Will Get a College Degree” (a headline that Roderick despised, despite the attention it drew to her work and the Consortium; she felt it was demoralizing to schools and didn’t provide any information that would build their capacity to improve). And so, as Freshman OnTrack rates improved year over year, she celebrated but also worried: What if the system was being gamed? What if teachers were simply handing out D’s rather than F’s? What if more freshmen were passing ninth grade, only to fall off-track in subsequent years and drop out? In short, what if Freshman OnTrack hadn’t really worked at all, despite those impressive numbers?

By the end of the 2013 school year, enough time had elapsed to allow Roderick to test these concerns empirically. A group of twenty schools had begun making substantial progress on Freshman OnTrack in the school years ending in 2008 or 2009. Those early cohorts of freshmen had now reached the age when they should have graduated, allowing Roderick to examine whether graduation rates had in fact improved when Freshman OnTrack rates improved.

Roderick first analyzed the data for the three “primary mover” schools: Hancock, Kirby’s Kenwood, and Steinmetz College Prep, on the city’s Northwest Side. Each had experienced improvements of at least 10 percentage points in the 2008 school year compared with the averages of their previous three years. Roderick found the initial gains were sustained when those freshmen became sophomores in 2009 and juniors in 2010. In 2011, after the cohort completed their senior year, graduation rates improved at all three schools, with increases ranging from 8 to 20 percentage points. Among the seventeen “secondary movers,” Freshman OnTrack rates increased by an average of 11 percentage points in 2009, compared with the baseline cohorts; in 2012, graduation rates at these schools jumped by an average of 13 percentage points. Crucially, at those those schools there hadn’t been any major demographic shifts or changes in the ninth graders’ prior academic achievement that might have accounted for the gains.

The results of the analysis prompted Roderick to start telling everyone who would listen that “Chicago had solved its dropout problem.” They indicated that Freshman OnTrack was indeed a crucial lever for moving graduation rates, just as the researchers had predicted a decade earlier. They also addressed some of the concerns that popped up periodically that had suggested that the system was being gamed. The fact that the improvement had carried through to the students’ sophomore and junior years seemed to belie those concerns. Since schools weren’t being held accountable for the performance of their sophomores or juniors, it was unlikely that the freshman year gains would have held up in subsequent years if the schools had been artificially inflating their Freshman OnTrack rates.

To double-check, Roderick also ran an analysis of how freshman year grades had shifted. She figured she would find a big increase in the number of D’s that students had earned if teachers had been simply passing students along. She didn’t. Instead, she found a significant decline in the percentage of students with F or D averages, from 33 percent to 22 percent. At the same time, the percentage of students with B’s or better—a key marker for college readiness—improved from 28 to 37 percent. “There is little evidence, on average, that the increase in on-track rates in these schools was driven by simply focusing on turning F’s into D’s or on trying to move students at the margins,” the researchers wrote.

The finding that really got to her—the one that reliably made her voice break, no matter how many times she repeated it—was the statistics on African American and Latino boys, who had made the greatest gains of any subgroup of students. The Freshman OnTrack rates of African American males had improved by 28 percentage points, from 43 percent in 2005 to 71 percent in 2013. Latino males had made the second-highest gains, improving 25 percentage points, to 77 percent. When she thought about the additional 6,900 students annually who were finishing freshman year with significantly better odds of breaking the cycle of poverty, she thought about all the people and all the work that had contributed to those gains. She thought about her Fall River research and her early days at the University of Chicago, the pioneering research at the Consortium, the founding principals of the Network for College Success, all the district administrators who had helped operationalize the work, and many dozens of other people. But most of all she thought about Malik, a black teen from the South Side, and Alex, a Latino teen from the West Side. And she wished she could tell them that they had helped to change an entire system, and that because of them, another generation of black and Latino boys from those neighborhoods would not have to experience the anonymity and neglect that they had experienced as freshmen.

Roderick was eager for the findings be known nationally, but she was even more concerned about getting the word out locally. She was anxious, as she always was when there was turnover at the top of the district, that the new CEO might not grasp the significance of Freshman OnTrack and would do something—probably unintentionally—to undermine efforts to support freshmen. Roderick knew that even new policies that on their face had nothing to do with freshmen or graduation could have unintended consequences, and so she was determined that the new CEO, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, hear about her findings and think carefully about how any new initiatives might directly, or indirectly, impact the work.

Already, high schools were grappling with the unintended consequences of Mayor Emanuel’s signature initiative—the introduction of a longer school day across CPS high schools and elementary schools. Emanuel had campaigned in 2011 on a promise to lengthen Chicago’s school day, which was among the shortest in the nation. He had also vowed to make the longer day a more well-rounded one, reintroducing art, music, recess, and other “extras” that had been cut as schools scrambled to maximize instructional time, particularly in tested subject areas like math and reading. In 2012, Emanuel rolled out the longer day, which added an hour and fifteen minutes to the elementary day, and half an hour to the high school day.

Like so many large-scale, top-down initiatives before it, the longer school day contained the germ of a good idea, but it was insensitive to the realities on the ground. The mandate to reintroduce recess, for example, caused huge logistical challenges for schools without playgrounds or a safe outdoor space for children to run in. Nor was the one-size-fits-all mandate particularly sensitive to the diversity of schools in the system. Parents in wealthy neighborhoods complained that their kids were already overprogrammed. Parents in crime-ridden neighborhoods, meanwhile, complained that the longer school day prevented their children from safely participating in after-school activities, which now took place at a later hour and required them to return to their neighborhoods after dark.

The biggest stumbling block to successful implementation was funding. With the district facing a $1 billion budget shortfall, schools simply could not afford to hire additional staff or pay teachers extra for the extended day. This had become one of the sticking points in the 2012 strike. To resolve the issue, CTU and the Emanuel administration had agreed to a plan to reengineer the workday. Teachers who had been required to arrive at school at least half an hour before students arrived were now contractually obligated to arrive and leave at the same time as students. This significantly cut down on the common planning time and teacher collaboration that had previously occurred before students were in the building. Thus, the longer school day effectively cut down on a key component of Freshman OnTrack and school improvement generally. “It was one of those times when people could just get some stuf done together, and that disappeared,” Sarah Duncan from NCS said. “It was just one of those crazy things. The list goes on and on.”

To stave off further upheaval, Roderick was keen to present her preliminary findings on the twenty early movers to Byrd-Bennett. In December 2012, shortly after Byrd-Bennett took office, she got her chance. The meeting had been brokered by two of the early Freshman OnTrack devotees who had since risen to leadership roles in the district, Kirby of Kenwood and Craven, the former area officer whose area had competed with Area 21. Roderick presented the research and then brought along Pitcher from NCS to speak to the crucial role that networks and cross-school collaboration played in the gains.

Byrd-Bennett was receptive to the research, but she did not draw the conclusions from it that Roderick had hoped. Though she did end up making Freshman OnTrack a large part of the new accountability system her administration rolled out in August 2013—a move that was crucial to keeping the district focused on the metric—she also latched on to the idea of extending Freshman OnTrack to all grades, a move Roderick opposed. Reasoning that what had worked so well in high school would translate to the earlier grades, Byrd-Bennett decided to hold elementary schools accountable for an on-track metric that the district had developed based on attendance. Roderick was dismissive of this new elementary metric, which did not have a strong research basis behind it. There was a substantial research base showing ninth grade offered a unique intervention point for students, but there was scant evidence to support the idea that an elementary on-track indicator would work as a lever for graduation in the same way that Freshman OnTrack had. Freshman OnTrack began with a documented problem (widespread freshman course failure) and slowly evolved into a solution through collective problem solving. Elementary on-track began as a solution imposed on a never clearly articulated problem.

Taking a page from her predecessors’ playbooks, Byrd-Bennett also moved to put her signature on the network structure, another move Roderick opposed. Byrd-Bennett was eager to end the practice of having separate elementary and high school networks, arguing that combining the two would allow for better coordination between the lower and upper grades. The rationale made little sense in Chicago, where traditional feeder patterns between elementary and high schools no longer existed. Under the plan, networks would go from groups of schools working on common problems to groups of schools that had little or nothing in common. In October 2013, CPS announced the new network structure, which reduced the number of networks from nineteen to thirteen and shifted them to a preK–12 configuration.

Under Byrd-Bennett, the networks lost their common focus. “She came in right after the teacher strike, and things were just really disjointed under her,” Craven, a network chief, recalled. “She removed a lot of the people who were there under Ron and Jean-Claude. She changed the network structure again. And so it just felt like people were out there doing their own thing.”

In many ways, the challenges under Byrd-Bennett were a retread of earlier challenges under Vallas, Duncan, Huberman, and Brizard. Shifting priorities. One-size-fits-all mandates. Policies stacked one on top of another, with little consideration given to how they fit together. In each case, Freshman OnTrack had overcome these challenges. But after Roderick began touting her findings publicly in early 2014, Freshman OnTrack had to face another challenge.

The mayor loved it.

In other circumstances, this might have proved to be a boon. But in this case, it proved to be more of a liability, as the mayor was already struggling with a credibility problem stemming from the way his administration had handled a highly controversial mass school closure of forty-nine elementary schools. The mayor’s support, therefore, left Freshman OnTrack wide open to ad hominem attacks.

The mass closure had been the single largest school closure in the nation’s history. Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett had insisted that the move was necessary to “right-size” a district with a gaping budget hole and declining enrollment. They targeted schools that were under-enrolled and low-performing, and vowed to send students to higher-performing schools. The closures were concentrated in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, primarily affecting African American students who were already among the district’s most vulnerable and who had already been “reformed upon” the most.

Parents and community members were devastated by the loss of important neighborhood institutions and fearful of sending their children to unfamiliar schools. Many students would have to attend a school farther away from their homes. Some would have to cross gang lines to get to school. All of them would lose established relationships with teachers and classmates.

The public also became increasingly skeptical of the numbers the Emanuel administration proffered to explain the closings. Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education, a nonprofit grassroots advocacy group, pointed out that the formula relied on large class sizes (assuming every homeroom should have thirty students) and also failed to account for the fact that schools across the district utilized space differently. Self-contained special education classrooms, for example, were required to have lower teacher-to-student ratios and might therefore contribute to the appearance of underutilization.

“For months, CPS and the City have told Chicagoans that our district has too many underutilized schools requiring it to be ‘right sized.’ In recent weeks however, numerous sources have refuted the key arguments and data that have been used to bolster the school closing strategy. As parents and taxpayers, we deserve facts and an open, honest discussion,” Wendy Katten, a CPS parent and founder of Raise Your Hand, wrote in an open letter to Byrd-Bennett that was published in an article by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post.

Facts were hard to come by—at least in their entirety. Though the Emanuel administration had marshaled a barrage of data to support the closing plan, those data tended to be incomplete and onesided. For instance, administrators generally omitted the fact that a primary factor contributing to the underutilization of schools was the board’s decision to open new schools—many of them charter schools—in depopulating areas. The total number of CPS schools increased from 597 schools in 2000 to 681 schools in 2013. The district was set to open 13 new schools in the fall.

District officials also appeared to be dealing in strategically culled facts in their pledge to send all displaced students to schools that performed at higher levels than the ones they had previously attended. The schools that the district had targeted for closure were among the lowest-performing schools in the district, and a key justification for the closings was that it would benefit student achievement. The pledge to send students to higher-performing schools was a response to previous research from the Consortium, which found that in earlier rounds of closings, displaced students were generally shuffled from one low-performing school to another. As a result, student achievement remained flat after the closings. But the researchers had also found that the small portion (6 percent) of students who had transferred to substantially higher-performing schools (those in the top quartile in the district) did make significant academic progress. Citing this research, the Emanuel administration vowed to send students to higher-performing schools, arguing that the closures were not just about the district’s footprint but also about school quality.

The challenge to fulfilling that promise was that there was a dearth of high-performing schools that were both geographically close to the closing schools and had enough open seats to accommodate an influx of new students. Of the fifty-five designated receiving schools, just six were in the top quartile in achievement, the threshold the Consortium had identified as leading to improving test scores.

Still, the administration was able to claim it had fulfilled its pledge to send students to higher-performing schools by pointing to the total points each school had earned on its arcane rating system. Each receiving school had had the same or more total points on the district’s school performance policy during the 2011–12 school (two years prior to closing) compared with its respective closed school. The point differential “varied substantially,” from zero points, in one instance, to 64 points. On average, the differential was 21 percentage points. However, it was exceedingly difficult to tell what, if anything, that point differential meant in terms of quality. The performance policy in place at the time awarded points based on school test scores, student growth on test scores, test score trends, and attendance. But even the district didn’t think those criteria were the best measures of school effectiveness. In the 2014–15 school year, CPS scrapped the performance policy and replaced it with a new one.

CTU president Karen Lewis, who led the charge against the closings, took every opportunity to hammer away at the numbers the administration had put forth. “We do not have a utilization crisis. What we have is a credibility crisis,” she said at a press conference at Mahalia Jackson Elementary School, one of the schools slated for closure. “CPS continues to peddle half-truths, lies and misinformation in order to justify its campaign to wipe out our schools and carry out this corporate-driven school reform nonsense.”

Lewis, who had gained widespread local and national attention during the 2012 teachers strike, was emerging as Emanuel’s chief political opponent and a viable candidate to run against him in the 2015 mayoral election. As Lewis was gaining prominence, Emanuel’s education record was rapidly becoming a political liability. In a Chicago Tribune public opinion poll taken shortly after the school closure vote in May 2013, 60 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Emanuel’s handling of the school system.

So it was no surprise that Emanuel seized upon Roderick’s Freshman OnTrack findings as a glimmer of good education news. The new Freshman OnTrack research offered Emanuel a conveniently timed opportunity to remind voters that there were in fact good things happening in classrooms across Chicago.

With a phalanx of news cameras trained on him, Emanuel opened an April 2014 press conference to announce Roderick’s Freshman OnTrack findings by recalling former federal secretary of education William Bennett’s declaration that Chicago was the single worst school system in the country. “Today, I’d like to give him a one-way ticket back to the city of Chicago to take a look at what’s happened in our city. Because we aren’t the worst, we’re the biggest turnaround. We’re on our way. And not just as a city—all these kids now, because of being on-track for high school, they’re on track to a life of possibility.”

From that point on, Freshman OnTrack was increasingly associated with Emanuel. An Economist article in June 2014 which praised him for the tough calls he was making to address the city’s colossal unfunded pension liability and for his education track record specifically cited Freshman OnTrack. “He closed 50 schools last year: largely bad, half-empty ones in depopulated neighbourhoods…. Many parents were deeply upset about the closures. In some poor, black neighbourhoods, teaching was one of the few middle-class jobs.” The article went on to assert, “Yet there are signs that, overall, the city’s schools are on the right track.” To support the claim, the article showed a graph of rising Freshman OnTrack rates between 2002 and 2013. The graph was labeled “Brighter.”

In August 2014, Lewis filed the official paperwork to run for mayor. As the 2015 mayoral race grew closer, Emanuel repeatedly invoked Freshman OnTrack to buttress his education track record, which had otherwise become a liability. “He frequently cites the city’s improved high school graduation rate under his watch, mentioning a statistic that projects 80 percent of high school freshmen being on track to graduate,” a Chicago Tribune article noted.

That is not to say the mayor’s support for Freshman OnTrack or his focus on graduation rates was purely politically motivated. “The mayor cared about the school system having a great reputation because that’s what will keep the middle class in the city and draw in business. So did the mayor care about big headlines? Yes. And to be frank, those can be a distraction if you don’t focus on the real ingredients of the meal,” Brizard argued. “But the mayor also cared about those other ingredients. He cared about the smaller levers like Freshman OnTrack.” To an extent, his support was useful for keeping practitioners focused on the metric and for attracting investments from private and public sources that might be allocated to help freshmen transition to high school, conduct additional research on Freshman OnTrack, or support the Network for College Success.

But no matter how genuine his support, any education number used to buttress an election campaign becomes more susceptible to manipulation. Critics of high-stakes accountability and testing in education often cite Campbell’s Law, put forth by social scientist Donald T. Campbell in a paper first published in 1976, which states that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Though the indicator had been used in the district for years, political pressure to keep the numbers moving in the right direction increased under Byrd-Bennett, even as support for the work decreased with the shift to K–12 networks. “The last year and a half in the district? It was just a cluster,” Dozier said in a 2015 interview. “Nothing really happened besides compliance. Nobody was talking about the work. They were just talking about, ‘You need to get these numbers.’ But it wasn’t done in a strategic way. We weren’t reading anything. We weren’t getting any coaching. At one point in the year, our kids were at 60 percent on-track at the end of the quarter. I get a phone call from the network, ‘I need you to pick up your on-track rate.’ Um, yes. But is there any coaching behind that? Are we going to get together and talk with people? At the same time, we had NCS really talking about the work. We were lucky we had that, but lots of people didn’t. A lot of it depended on the chief. Ours was an elementary chief. She had no idea how to move it. She just said, ‘Move it. Get it up.’”

There were whispers that some schools were responding to the pressure to move the metric in ways that did not truly benefit students. One of the strengths of Freshman OnTrack was that it was malleable, meaning that it was easier to influence than some other metrics, such as standardized test scores. This malleability was what made it so attractive to educators who recognized that improving Freshman OnTrack rates could create momentum for school improvement generally. But the metric’s strength could also be its weakness. Its malleability also made it vulnerable to manipulation by principals or other administrators who wanted to game their ratings.

From the beginning of the Freshman OnTrack movement in Chicago, there were periodic complaints that teachers were under pressure to change grades upward or to pass students who had not really earned it. It could be difficult to determine when this type of pressure crossed the line and became unethical. Hancock teachers frequently complained about Glynn’s crusade to reduce failure rates. Likewise, the CTU filed a grievance against Kirby because as network chief she required teachers in her network to show evidence of having created an intervention plan for students before issuing a failing grade. Kirby—like Glynn—was unapologetic about creating obstacles to issuing F’s. She argued that life offered plenty of safety nets for middle-class and wealthy kids. “When you go to elite schools, they won’t let you fail,” she said. “Why don’t kids in public schools, poor kids, deserve a chance?”

But some schools’ practices went well beyond simply giving students a few extra chances. During Byrd-Bennett’s tenure, at least four high schools engaged in attendance data fraud, artificially inflating their attendance rates, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Board of Education. Like Freshman OnTrack, attendance figured into a school’s performance rating. It also affected the amount of funding schools received. Two of the principals told the inspector general that pressure from their network chief contributed to their decision to engage in these practices.

The practices uncovered at the four schools cast doubt on all the district’s data. “Given the number of times we’ve reported on problems with attendance data and transfer data, the office does have broad concerns about the accuracy of the information reported system-wide,” inspector general Nicholas Schuler said. Though the attendance figures were not directly tied to Freshman OnTrack rates, it was easy to draw a line between the two. Three of the four schools cited in the OIG report had also made significant gains in their Freshman OnTrack rates around the time they were manipulating their attendance numbers.

Indeed, the Inspector General investigation was prompted in part by an article about Chicago’s improving Freshman OnTrack rates that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. Reporter Kate Grossman described an attendance recovery program at one of the schools that the inspector general later deemed fraudulent. “It’s all data-driven and whatever they can do—lie, fudge, and steal—they’ll do to get the numbers up,” Marilyn Parker, a Manley teacher, told Grossman. Manley, Sean Stalling’s old school, which had been one of the first schools to closely track freshman performance, was one of the four schools cited in the report. Under Stalling, the school had never managed to keep more than 55 percent of its freshmen on-track, due in part to high rates of absenteeism. But between the 2012 and 2013 school years, Manley’s Freshman OnTrack rate soared from 50 percent to 92 percent. The inspector general recommended firing the Manley principal, who at the time of the report was running a district elementary school.

Much-touted district-wide graduation rates were also coming under scrutiny. Reporters began to question the district’s practice of counting students who earned a diploma from one of the district’s “alternative schools” as graduates. Students generally transferred to these schools when they were far behind in credits. The schools were advertised as more intimate environments where students could make up classes quickly, but neither the state nor the Consortium counted the holders of alternative diplomas as graduates, because the credential was not equivalent to a traditional high school diploma. For years CPS had not counted these students as graduates, either, but beginning in 2007 the district had changed its formula. “The end result of this numbers game is that the graduation rate tends to hide the fact that a good number of students who start as freshmen at a school, don’t wind up walking across the stage to get their diploma at the same school—but nevertheless get counted as one of that school’s graduates,” one article explained.

“Emanuel touts graduation rate” was the headline of another article questioning the legitimacy of the city’s graduation rates, this one jointly reported by the Better Business Bureau and Chicago’s local public radio affiliate. The article reported that between 2011 and 2014, at least 2,200 students from twenty-two high schools were incorrectly coded as transfer students rather than as dropouts. Transfers are factored out of the district’s graduation rate formula, so the misclassification artificially inflated the graduation rate. “This is not the first time Emanuel’s administration has come under fire for doctoring figures,” the article noted.

In April 2015, Emanuel was elected to his second term as mayor, surviving a formidable challenge from Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County commissioner who ran to the left of him and hammered away on education issues. Garcia had been recruited to the race by Karen Lewis, who had discontinued her campaign after being diagnosed with brain cancer the previous fall. Though he lacked Lewis’s name recognition, Garcia managed to force a runoff in the five-way February mayoral election, “a rare humbling experience for [Emanuel,] a longtime Washington insider not known for humility.”

Throughout the campaign Garcia had attacked Emanuel’s education record, particularly his decision to close schools and redirect money to “elite private schools founded by his big campaign contributors.” (Garcia’s education rhetoric was often imprecise and bombastic. He was actually referring to public charter schools, not “elite private schools.”) Though Garcia’s campaign ultimately came up short, his attacks on Emanuel’s education record seemed to resonate, at least among those most invested in public education in the city. Garcia was backed by the majority of voters with children in CPS, according to a survey of voters leaving the polls on Election Day.

Then, shortly after Emanuel was elected to his second term, the city was battered by an education scandal that further eroded whatever trust in the system remained. Amidst a federal probe, Barbara Byrd-Bennett pleaded guilty to a single felony count of wire fraud for directing a $20.5 million no-bid contract to her former employer, SUPES Academy, in exchange for a promise of $2.3 million in future payments. SUPES Academy had provided professional development sessions for principals and other administrators, who had publicly complained the training was a colossal waste of time. “I have tuition to pay and casinos to visit (:,” Byrd-Bennett allegedly wrote in one email discussing the kickback scheme, a phrase that immediately entered Chicago political lore, alongside Abner Mikva’s “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

That very same month, responding to reports of incorrectly labeled transfers, the district opted to restate its graduation figures going back to 2011. Rates were adjusted downward between 2 and 3 percentage points for the 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 school years. The restatement also led to an adjustment of the district’s Freshman OnTrack rates for those years. The recalculation did not change the overall picture of rising graduation rates, but by then few people were inclined to give the district the benefit of the doubt.

Indeed, the kickback scheme and the graduation rate adjustment had been lumped together in the public imagination, part and parcel of the type of corruption Chicagoans had come to accept as the natural order of things, like cooler-by-the-lake temperatures and potholes on city streets. Calling for an independent audit of all district finances and operations in the wake of Byrd-Bennett’s indictment, Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote, “Rahm wants some $500 million from tax-strapped Illinois taxpayers to fill a fiscal hole. But the Democratic Boss of Illinois, House Speaker Michael Madigan, is said to not trust CPS numbers…. Boss Madigan is no fool. And he has good reason not to trust CPS numbers. CPS inflated its five-year graduation rate—happy numbers released during Emanuel’s re-election campaign—only to revise them downward earlier this month. The number was dropped to 66.3 percent for the 2013–14 school year. A failing grade.”

Yet Chicago schools were not, in fact, failing, even if it did make for a snappy line in a newspaper column. The clear thrust of most of the articles about the city’s graduation rates was that the numbers had been politicized and therefore could not be trusted. But politics cut both ways, and the truth of the story was more nuanced than reporters or the Emanuel administration let on. To be sure, reporters had uncovered shady accounting at some high schools. And the district’s 2007 decision to count graduates of alternative schools as graduates (a decision made under Daley, not Emanuel) was a less conservative—and arguably also less accurate—way of calculating graduation rates than the method the state and Consortium used. Neither, however, invalidated the fact that Freshman OnTrack rates and graduation rates had risen dramatically. What should have been a story about educators and administrators coming together to improve the lives of students instead became a “gotcha” story intended to discredit the mayor, who, truth be told, really didn’t have much to do with rising graduation rates in the first place, except that he liked to talk about them.

In 2016, the Consortium released a comprehensive review of graduation rate trends in Chicago over the previous two decades that placed the emphasis back where it belonged—on schools. The research had been designed to test every assumption about graduation rates in the city. It found that rising Freshman OnTrack rates had indeed led to rising graduation rates, just as Roderick’s more descriptive 2014 study had found. It also demonstrated that the improvements in high schools were real and not simply a numbers game.

“Even the most conservatively estimated rates, where all transfer students and students at alternative schools are counted as non-graduates, show large improvements in the percentage of students earning a diploma, especially in the last six years. Data coding issues could account for some of the improvements in graduation rates between 2005 and 2008, but not in subsequent years. This does not mean that data records are completely accurate in recent years—just that they could not account for the improvements in graduation rates in the most recent years,” the researchers found.

Elaine Allensworth, the report’s lead author and one of the original on-track researchers, had been at the forefront of the local and national movements to improve how states and districts tracked graduation rates. There was no one more passionate about the importance of accurate graduation data. She appreciated the impulse that had led reporters to delve into the district’s graduation-rate data. But she was also angry that the focus on gaming the system had cast doubt on the real progress being made in the district, particularly since her research found that graduation rates were up at the same time that other indicators, such as test scores, attendance, and college-going, were also improving. It was a truly remarkable confluence—more students were graduating, and at the same time, graduates were more qualified than in the past. “I feel like this should be a time when we’re celebrating because our schools have improved so much,” she said.

Discounting or denying progress can be every bit as problematic as overstating it. If the Freshman OnTrack numbers were a sham and the graduation rate improvements they were helping to fuel were a scheme, then the district needed an entirely new high school strategy, and this did not seem to be the case. Failure to acknowledge real improvement when it happens contributes to the relentless policy churn that plagues education, as well as contributing to the pervasive pessimism that greets new initiatives. In this case, it also fueled the perception that Chicago schools were unfixable and unworthy of public or private investment, particularly among those already predisposed to think real progress in city schools was not possible.

“Th simple fact is that when you look objectively at the state of Chicago Public Schools, many of them are inadequate. Many of them are woeful, and some are just tragic. Many of them are basically almost crumbling prisons. They’re not a place a young person should be educated,” Illinois Republican governor Bruce Rauner told a downstate audience in June 2016. Rauner and Emanuel were locked in a battle over funding for Chicago’s schools. Rauner was arguing that downstate tax dollars shouldn’t be diverted to shore up Chicago’s education budget, given the city’s poor education track record.

Emanuel retorted that Rauner “may have a stereotype that plays to his political philosophy, but those are not the results.” He then referred Rauner and the media to Allensworth’s report on improving graduation rates. “Now, I know you’re gonna try to play a political game and some rhetoric. [But] I ask all of you to do the responsible thing and put the data out about what the results are. It’s a University of Chicago report that talks about graduation rates, college attendance that are hitting remarkable highs.”

Yes, they were.

Researching and reporting are both by their nature skeptical activities. The reporter’s motto is “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Research begins as well with the “null hypothesis,” that a proposition is not true until proven true. Politics, of course, breeds skepticism, even cynicism. And education, when done right, imbues students with healthy skepticism and the critical thinking skills to distinguish between what they believe to be true and what is verifiably true.

And yet the movement that occurred in Chicago to support freshmen hinged not on skepticism, but on belief. Data-based belief, but belief nonetheless. Belief that the dropout crisis was something that could be solved. Belief in the research that showed ninth grade was the make-or-break year for high school graduation. Belief that careful monitoring and support in ninth grade could set students on entirely new trajectories. Belief that, with the right coaching and support, Chicago teachers could be sophisticated problem solvers. Belief that employing trust, collaboration, and personalization—qualities that are tough to measure or quantify—could result in measurable, quantifiable change. Belief that schools could learn from one another. Belief that such a simple idea as supporting students in their transition to high school could spark such widespread system change.

Roderick, for her part, was still astonished by that one. “I’ve been arguing against silver bullets my whole career—but this is one,” Roderick marveled. “Failure is horrible; it’s overwhelming for every kind of kid. But a kid who passes is off to a good start in high school. And it turns out, if you keep children in front of teachers they actually learn.”

As Roderick pointed out, Freshman OnTrack was about belief in kids: the belief that it was possible to keep most kids on-track for graduation and lives of opportunity. Ultimately, all of this belief trickled down to the students, who were the ones who most required belief. The belief that they belonged in school. The belief that school could get them where they wanted in life. The belief that they could succeed. Those beliefs, if established freshman year, could propel students through to graduation.

In a speech to her graduating class, Hancock student Fatima Salgado articulated the role that belief had played in getting her fellow students onto that stage to accept their diplomas. Salgado, a 2012 graduate of Hancock, had begun her high school career at a neighboring high school. Then she failed math. She was devastated. Her parents were devastated. “In my culture, you can’t fail a class. You have to become a doctor. You have to become the first sibling to graduate from college. It put a lot of pressure on me to make sure I had straight A’s. My parents were like, ‘Why can’t you do this?’ It made me feel so guilty.”

The school hadn’t provided her with much support, despite her pleas for extra help. They advised her to drop down a level in math. “That made me feel, kind of, like it was not a solution, it was just another label put on me that said, ‘[Y]ou can’t do it.’ It was not said in those words, but that’s how I understood it.” The whole experience turned her off of math—and school generally. “I had PTSD in math, in a figure of speaking. I felt like I was set up for failure basically.”

At the end of the year, her mom transferred her to Hancock, where the vibe was entirely different. When she struggled, there was a whole cadre of teachers who reminded her that she could do it—even if she could not do it yet. “They taught me there might be more than one way to teach or learn something. I had thought that unless you were a super brainiac, you couldn’t succeed in math. I learned that’s actually not the case.” She graduated from Hancock with a 4.0 grade average.

At the graduation ceremony in June 2012, Salgado addressed her classmates, about two hundred in all. They were freshmen during Pam Glynn’s tumultuous first year at Hancock. Roughly 72 percent of them had ended freshman year on-track to graduate, and 64 percent of them ended up graduating, up from 56 percent in the previous class.

At the graduation ceremony, Salgado, who had taught herself English by listening to cartoons on television, who had struggled throughout elementary school to understand what her teachers and classmates were saying in English, who had failed high school math, issued a rousing pep talk to her fellow graduates:

Is it really that difficult to find in ourselves the motivation and perseverance to keep fighting for a brighter future? All it takes is to believe that it is possible—that it is possible for us to achieve our goal, our dream. Our past is crucial for our future. We must use our past experiences to transform ourselves into an intellectual, responsible man or intellectual, responsible woman…..

I believe that a person who endures unexpected challenges and hardship, yet emerges with an undefeated smile and a modest character, is a great leader. We must believe that we can be like those leaders and surpass what life gives us. Believing in ourselves is the greatest challenge. But believing in ourselves can also be our greatest accomplishment.