Elementary School Dropout Analysis

During the 1990s, thousands of teenagers dropped out of the Chicago public schools before reaching ninth grade, and most of them were African American. The dropout rate rose from nine to 16 of every 1,000 students between 1991 and 1999.

In the analysis below, The Chicago Reporter used data from the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an independent nonprofit that assesses school reform. The consortium obtained Chicago Public Schools records and tracked every student enrolled in sixth, seventh and eighth grade between 1991 and 1999. Researchers compared the fall enrollments for these grades from year to year to determine which students remained in the Chicago school system, transferred to other districts or simply left the rolls. The last group includes students whose schools categorized them as “dropout,” “lost,” “cannot locate” or “did not arrive.” All such children are defined as dropouts by the Illinois School Code, the state law that governs primary and secondary education.