Summary
Clients: Chicago Public Schools
Collaborator: Project One Ten
Project: CCA supported Chicago Public Schools’ effort to build a district-wide Middle Grades Success Strategy to shape how CPS supports its more than 68,000 middle-grades students and bridges the pivotal transition from elementary school to high school.
Outcome: A community-informed set of recommendations to strengthen the middle-grades experience across Chicago Public Schools, organized around four focus areas the district identified: academics, agency, career and future thinking, and relationships. Grounded in a district-wide community engagement effort (including surveys and live sessions with students, families, educators, and principals), our team delivered an engagement strategy, analysis of stakeholder feedback, and a refined set of recommendations for the district’s working group to advance toward Board of Education approval.
Opportunity
Middle school is a make-or-break stretch when students form their identities and habits that set a trajectory toward high school and beyond. Chicago Public Schools serves more than 68,000 students in grades 6–8, and improving their experience is a priority of the district’s Together We Rise strategic plan, which CCA supported. A CPS working group drafted a framework around four focus areas (academics, agency, career and future thinking, and relationships), but to turn that framework into a strategy, CPS needed to hear directly from its community of students, families, teachers, and principals.
68,000+
middle-grades students
260
voices heard across 18 schools
Action
CCA structured and analyzed a district-wide engagement effort across three phases, working alongside Project One Ten, which led the community sessions.
“Our middle-grades students are at a pivotal moment, and the Civic Consulting Alliance team, along with Project One Ten, the University of Chicago To&Through Project, and Success Bound made sure our strategy was shaped by the people who know them: students, families, and educators. We now have recommendations we can stand behind because our community helped build them.”
Prepare: CCA co-designed the engagement strategy by identifying target audiences, building live-session and survey materials, and mapping the logistics and outreach needed to gather stakeholder input across the district.
Engage: CCA interviewed principals and supported an engagement approach led by collaborators Project One Ten, the University of Chicago To&Through Project, and Success Bound. The mixed methods engagement approach led by the project collaborators included stakeholder focus groups, bright spot observations, and a survey, gathering feedback from students, counselors, teachers, and central office staff.
Synthesize: CCA analyzed feedback by stakeholder group using the four focus areas and research, surfaced areas of consensus and bright spots from individual schools, and facilitated three working-group sessions to refine the district’s recommendations.
Impact
“I feel so seen.”
By grounding the Middle Grades Success Strategy in the voices of students, families, and educators across the district, the work gives CPS a broadly supported foundation for targeting investments where they will have the most impact.
Chicago Public Schools came away with an understanding of what its students and families most need from the middle-grades experience, and a refined set of recommendations, shaped by the working group, and grounded in research. Now CPS has an operational engagement plan and materials, a synthesis of stakeholder feedback, and a final set of working-group recommendations aligned to the district’s four focus areas, including a shared “portrait of a thriving middle schooler.”
