With Chicago students’ academics improving across the board, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools announced they achieved a 4-point gain in the graduation rate, with 77.5 percent of students earning a diploma. This is CPS’ highest graduation rate on record and the highest year-over-year improvement in memory. The graduation rate has steadily risen over the past six years, growing from 56.9 percent in 2011 to 77.5 percent – a 36 percent increase. In 2011, just over half of CPS students earned a high school diploma. As CPS continues to close in on the national graduation rate of 83 percent, more than three-fourths of CPS students earned diplomas, with 20,525 graduates in 2017.

From 1999 to 2011, CPS students’ average annual improvement in the graduation rate was less than one percentage point. Since taking office, the graduation rate has grown more than 3.6 points on average – triple the national rate of improvement. This achievement in the graduation rate is the latest achievement for Chicago students, who continue to set a nationally recognized pace for progress.

• Earlier this summer, CPS announced that for the first time, more than 60 percent of CPS elementary students are reading at or above the national average and more than 55 percent are beating the national average in math, reaching all-time highs for the district in the 2016-17 school year.
• Earlier this week, CPS announced that the rate for freshmen on-track to graduate is the highest measure on record at 88.7 percent, up more than 28 percent since 2011. The increase is driven by African-American and Hispanic students, who considerably narrowed the achievement gap in the past year and is a key, predictive indicator for future graduation rates. The district’s graduation rate also aligns closely with the highly predictive freshmen on-track rate, which was introduced in 2007 and is a nationally recognized practice for guiding individual schools to improve their graduation rates. The freshmen on-track rate was 79.8 percent for this group of students who graduated in 2017.