Chicago Public Schools unveiled a new five-year strategic plan Monday that sets out to increase the number of students attending schools in their neighborhood and redefine what it means to be a successful student.

The plan did not call for specific changes to selective enrollment, magnet, or charter schools, a possibility signaled in December when the board first announced its . But the plan does seek to bolster resources for neighborhood schools “with an intentional focus on disinvested communities.”

Roughly 44% of elementary school students enrolled at a school other than the one they were zoned for in the 2022-23 school year, while about 75% of high schoolers did the same,

Twenty years ago, when Chicago started expanding magnet, selective, and charter schools, just about a quarter of elementary school students enrolled in schools outside of their attendance area and 46% of high schoolers did the same.

The plan outlines priorities and specific goals to reach by 2029 in three different areas — students, schools, and communities — but did not signal policy changes. Officials, however, left the possibility open for future changes as a result of the plan.

“I don’t think this document is intended to indicate new policies,” Chicago Board of Education Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland told reporters. “As engagement continues around the different topics and areas there, if a policy change is seen as necessary, then perhaps that will be the case.”

The board will vote on the plan on Wednesday at a special meeting.

Under the plan, the district set the following goals to reach by 2029:

• Increase the percentage of students who attend a school in their neighborhood or community area. The district said it does not have a specific percentage it wants to reach, and that this is not just limited to a student’s zoned school.
• Increase the number of students in grades 3-8 who pass the state’s reading and math exams by 20%.
• Reduce chronic absenteeism – when a student misses 10 or more days of school – by 15%.
• Reduce teacher vacancies by 25% in schools that serve majorities of Black and Hispanic students.
• Increase funding for improving school facilities by $250 million.
• Increase internet bandwidth by 400% at elementary schools and by 900% at high schools to prevent outages and slow internet connections.
• Ensure that all schools will have a “robust” behavioral health team.
• Decrease class sizes, with priority on schools with higher needs.
• Ensure that all schools have the capacity to hire arts, P.E., and other “special instruction” staff.
• Increase the percentage of students enrolled in at least one district after-school program by 8 percentage points, from 42% currently to 50%.
• Transition 25% of personnel who come from the private sector, such as custodians and bus drivers, to district employees.

District wants to redefine student success

The plan also outlines specific priorities for certain groups of students. For example, the district said it wants to improve achievement and opportunities for Black students, who are disproportionately less likely to read and do math on grade level compared to their peers and are disciplined at higher rates; ensure students learn more than one language by the time they graduate and boost support for English learners; and improve quality of education and instruction for both students with disabilities and kids in pre-K through second grade.

District officials and school board leaders also want more emphasis on how students experience school.

Officials said the district will continue to track things like graduation rate and student growth and proficiency on subjects for their grade level. But it will also consider other factors when considering student and school success, such as how well schools are supporting students who are chronically absent, how many students are participating in early college and career credit programs, and if schools are providing “high quality curriculum,” according to CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova.

The district has also set an explicit goal to improve the number of schools rated strongly as “supportive environments” on the annual survey, which comes from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and is supposed to measure a school’s culture and climate.

“Social-emotional learning, student well-being, it’s not an add-on,” Todd-Breland said. “If it’s not deeply integrated into everything that we do, then learning cannot happen.”

The district also included priorities to increase funding for all of its schools.

Todd-Breland said board meetings will soon be restructured so they monitor the plan’s goals, “so that every month when you come to a board meeting, you’re going to find out something new about how the strategic plan is being monitored and how things are moving.”

But it’s unclear if that meeting structure will remain come January when the school board grows from 7 appointed members to 21 members, on Nov. 5.

Strategic plan comes amid change, tensions at CPS

Martinez and his administration unveiled the plan eight months after the signaling the district’s intent to curtail a choice system that leaders said has undermined many neighborhood schools and bred inequities in the experience of students in different parts of the city.

That resolution was in keeping with campaign promises by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer, who called the district’s system “a Hunger Games scenario” in which families scramble to flee their neighborhood campuses for spots in coveted test-in and lottery programs across the city. Chicago’s selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools are , and district leaders have spent the intervening months reassuring state lawmakers, parents, and others that they won’t close or severely weaken these choices.

Asked why the plan revealed Monday did not include explicit policy changes for choice schools, Todd-Breland said the board heard from people who valued schools beyond their neighborhood options, including selective enrollment and charter schools.

“What felt more important, and what continues to be the more important thing … is that the lever of change in Chicago Public Schools is to invest in neighborhood schools and our communities furthest from opportunity to make sure there are pathways that families are confident in and have high quality education provided in them from pre-K through high school in their neighborhood,” Todd-Breland said.

Still, the strategic plan says academic gaps among students and challenges have worsened because of “our current competitive enrollment policies and previous accountability policy, which pitted schools against each other and sorted students based on academic performance in an under-resourced system, reinforcing cycles of inequity.”

Martinez is putting out the plan just as reports emerged that Johnson might be following disagreements with City Hall over and with the Chicago Teachers Union. Those reports raise questions about the district’s ability to see the new blueprint through, after a run of frequent CEO comings-and-goings that have destabilized CPS.

In a statement, CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said the “best parts” of the plan mirror the union’s current contract proposals with the district and that, at the bargaining table, Martinez is “out of step” with his own district.

“If the district actually led with this plan, then we’d have the partner we’re looking for to deliver for our students,” Davis Gates said.

Efforts to reinvigorate Chicago’s neighborhood schools date back to the tenure of Martinez’s predecessor, Janice Jackson, who served for three and a half years. She launched “equity grants” to give campuses with shrinking enrollment a funding boost as well as a program in which schools applied for dollars to start specialized programming, such as arts or STEM, in a bid to lure families seeking distinctive learning options. also emphasized improving how the district serves its Black students, especially Black boys.

After the school board’s December resolution, Martinez’ administration disclosed few details about the development of a new strategic plan, with officials saying they wanted to first hear from community members at . Officials said Monday that nearly 14,000 people “engaged” with the plan by providing feedback or attending community meetings.

But for some, the wait for more details on the plan produced anxiety about the future of school choice in Chicago. Families in the district’s selective enrollment and magnet programs worried those schools would be diminished – a claim CPS officials repeatedly denied and is not a part of the strategic plan released Monday. On some campuses, those worries spiked as the district unveiled in the spring that district leaders said would steer more dollars to campuses with the highest needs and correct for historical inequities in how Chicago distributed resources. At some selective schools, officials and parents said newly tight budgets made it hard to staff specialized programs.

The plan released Monday calls for the district to monitor both the strengths and weaknesses of the new funding formula.

In the spring, state lawmakers introduced if Chicago moved to close any of its selective and magnet programs. The bill didn’t gain traction during the legislative session, but it elicited reassurance from Johnson and district leaders that there were no plans to shutter these schools.

Anxiety has also run high among charter operators and families, who felt that the December resolution was taking clear aim at their schools. Last week, charter officials and parents to demand more clarity on the plan and a promise that it won’t undermine the city’s charters, which serve roughly a fifth of its students.

The plan calls for revisiting the district’s renewal process for charter schools in a couple of years, but provides no additional details.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. 

However, what would it look like to create a partnership across state lines that is grounded in a community’s history and needs while also incorporating knowledge and support from another region?

That partnership now exists between two organizations – one based in Connecticut and the other in Indiana – to drive an important goal: growing the number of high-quality public charter schools for Connecticut students and families. 

This goal isn’t new for Connecticut. In fact, the state’s charter school law is nearly three decades old, and there are a number of dedicated advocates and organizations who work hard to grow and strengthen public school options for Connecticut families. 

This new partnership, between Latinos for Educational Advocacy and Diversity (LEAD) from Connecticut and The Mind Trust from Indianapolis, was created to add to the growing coalition of community members and leaders who want to see more high-quality public school options in the Constitution State.

LEAD’s work is focused on programs that empower the community, like English as a Second Language classes, youth services, health and financial literacy programs, and more. Its team is passionate about meeting families where they are to give them the resources they need to create a bright future, and LEAD was founded in part to support grassroots advocacy efforts in expanding charter school options — something its leaders continue to hear is needed from the families they work with. 

There is no time to waste in moving the needle on expanding access to high-quality schools. According to a report from the Connecticut Charter Schools Association, during the 2023-2024 school year, more than 5,000 Connecticut students were waiting to enroll in a charter school. Additionally, in the 2022-2023 school year, 95% of all charter schools out-performed schools that serve the same student population in English Language Arts (ELA) and math on the SBAC, Connecticut’s annual state standardized assessment. 

The need and desire for change is growing each year. When LEAD looked at how other states have expanded access, its leaders saw how innovation and strategic investment in proven models and leaders could work. That led the organization to Indiana and The Mind Trust. 

The Mind Trust believes there are three essential elements to a great school: autonomy, accountability, and a leader with the talent to bring a vision of educational excellence to life. Since 2006, the organization has supported the launch of 15 education nonprofit organizations and more than 50 public charter and innovation network schools in Indianapolis that will serve more than 21,000 students when they are at full scale. 

When it first started its charter school growth work in Indianapolis, The Mind Trust set out with the belief that to increase the number of public charter schools in the city it should both build up existing local talent and attract new talent to the city from other regions. Over the years, the resulting initiatives have received over 4,000 applications from education entrepreneurs across 48 states and 36 countries. 

Indianapolis is now proudly home to locally grown networks that have been founded by some of the most qualified and effective school leaders in the country. As a result, researchers from Stanford University, the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Washington have all found that Indianapolis charter schools lead their students to significantly more academic progress than local traditional public schools.

In 2022, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that Indianapolis charter school students achieved 64 more days of learning in reading and 116 days in math, compared to their district school peers. Black students at Indianapolis charter schools had even more significant gains, with 86 more days of learning reading and 144 days in math relative to their district peers. 

In 2023, the University of Arkansas found that Indianapolis, by far, is home to the most cost-effective charter sector in the country for both reading and math. Indianapolis’ charter sector has the largest ROI advantage out of any city in the study. For every dollar invested in Indy charter students’ education, they can expect to earn an average of $4.75 more than their traditional public school peers throughout their lifetime.

Through the new partnership, LEAD and The Mind Trust will work together to create a new locally designed fellowship that will give experienced school leaders the time and resources needed to launch new public charter schools in Connecticut. 

The development of this fellowship must be done alongside families, educators, advocates and community members who have a shared vision for better public education in Connecticut. Leaders at both organizations are committed to listening to and working closely with the community to design this initiative, select fellows, and ensure its outcomes are in line with what is best for Connecticut students and families. 

LEAD and The Mind Trust look forward to collaborating with the vibrant education community in Connecticut. Working together, we can all reimagine what is possible through partnership, innovation, and an unstoppable drive to do what is best for students and families. 

Brandon Brown is CEO of The Mind Trust, an education nonprofit focused on transforming K-12 education in Indianapolis and beyond. 

Lucas Pimentel is the CEO of Latinos for Educational Advocacy and Diversity (LEAD), a nonprofit that works to expand educational options and civic engagement in the state of Connecticut. 

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.