CPS officials hope trio of events will encourage kids to come back next year

This story merely repackages a press release from CPS.

The real story is that--according to a number of south suburban districts--CPS stops accepting students registering sometime in the spring (April, I think).

Students who fail to register by April (homeless and semi-homeless) are discouraged from being allowed to register. Mostly they go to suburban school districts or drop out.

So, the CPS claims in the article about increased first day attendance are bogus. What CPS has done is removed students from the pool who are likely to miss the first day of school.

It's not that these families and students no longer exist. It's just that CPS has cynically push them out of the school system.

Carl, that's fascinating. And what's neat is that Adrian will probably see your comment and look into it for some follow up.

I was recently reading about the lengths that universities like Clemson are going to in order to pad their U.S. News stats for public consumption. It's intriguing to consider that CPS might be doing the same thing to meet internal benchmarks.

Got any links to back it up?

I was at a meeting of the south suburban school superintendents in 2007 where a couple were complaining loudly to Charles Flowers, the Regional Superintendent of Education on this matter.

It's a little bit of unclean story in that some of the complainers (district superintendents) are probably engaging in tactics to thwart semi-homeless students from attending schools in their districts.

It's widely assumed that students from transient, highly mobile families do poorly on tests and cause behavior problems. So districts do what they can to exclude these students.

The districts that are complaining about CPS, I suspect, would do the same thing if they thought they could get away with it.

Flowers' office would be the logical place to start asking, but he's not returning phone calls b/c of his ongoing legal/media issues.