Shazia Rafiulla Miller and Robert M. Gladden, Consortium on Chicago School Research
June 2002
The Consortium on Chicago School Research continues to issue valuable reports on various developments in K-12 education in the Windy City. In the ongoing series called ???The State of Chicago Public High Schools: 1993 to 2000,??? the latest entry is this 55-page report on special-ed enrollments in Chicago???s ???neighborhood??? high schools, which ballooned during the 1990???s. The reason, say the authors, is that Chicago school reform, while positive in many ways for the city???s children, also served to concentrate more special-needs adolescents in eleven high schools. According to the data reported here, those schools??? special-ed enrollments swelled from 16% of their students in 1993-94 to 30% in 1999-2000. There are many implications here, some of them teased out by the authors, implications for special ed and ???regular ed??? alike. You can get this report (and two others in its series, one dealing with high school student performance, the other with enrollments) by surfing to http://www.consortium-chicago.org/publications/p54.html.
