Sophomore Promise: Designing Early Warning Indicators for Sophomore Educators

• In Event: Advances and New Considerations in On-Track Indicator Systems

Abstract

Over the past decade, freshman success teams at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have relied on key indicators including Freshman OnTrack to understand their progress and to target interventions to the freshmen who could benefit from them most. In this paper, we identify freshman and sophomore indicators that could support the work of sophomore educators. We use CPS administrative data to explore the power of several measures of freshman and sophomore performance to predict key high school outcomes, including high school graduation, immediate college enrollment, and access to selective colleges. We propose an indicator system for sophomore educators that includes sophomore outcome categories and updated freshman outcomes categories, and we explore CPS students’ performance on these metrics over time.

Authors

• Shelby Mahaffie, UChicago Consortium on School Research

• Alex Seeskin, University of Chicago