“Student Led Solutions to the Dropout Crisis: A Report by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education”

VOYCE has launched a landmark collaboration with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to create a youth-designed pilot project aimed at relieving the city’s high school dropout crisis.

CPS CEO Arne Duncan announced the initiative before an audience of education experts and community leaders this morning at the Spertus Institute in downtown Chicago.

“CPS recognizes that students have an important role to play in their education,” said Duncan. “This pilot project is the first step in a potential series of innovative programs to engage students in transforming Chicago’s public high schools.”

At the gathering, VOYCE also released Student-Led Solutions to the Nation’s Dropout Crisis, a report with findings and recommendations from the perspective of CPS students.

The VOYCE collaborative believes the engagement of CPS students, themselves, is vital in helping resolve high dropout and low college-enrollment rates that continue to plague Chicago public high schools.

Supported with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Communities for Public Education Reform, the group’s student leaders undertook a year-long study of the reasons for these problems and potential solutions that included a statistically significant survey of 1,325 CPS students, in-depth interviews with 208 additional students, 110 teachers, and 65 parents, and site visits to successful schools in six states.

During the youth-led process, student leaders and researchers envisioned improved schools and learning environments, developed survey questions based on their own educational experiences, identified appropriate data collection methods, performed ethnographic mapping of school communities, made site visits to successful school in Illinois and across the country, reviewed relevant literature, and collated all data and responses to identify common themes and perspectives.

“This process of engaging youth in their own educational futures is what VOYCE is all about,” said Maria DeGillo, a CPS student at Truman Middle College. “Our goal is for CPS to eventually adopt the full spectrum of our student-led initiatives.”

“Student Led Solutions to the Dropout Crisis: A Report by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education”
Download Report (PDF)