Chicago’s public schools leave a public paper trail — twentieth-day enrollment counts, per-school progress files, budget lines — and this page is the front door to our analyses of it. We are an independent publication, affiliated with no school district or government. Each analysis below reads the district’s own files, names and dates each source, and explains every figure — and none of them names, ranks, or grades an individual school beyond what the district’s own records state.
Every figure computed from CPS’s own published files · updated August 18, 2026How many students are there — and where?
All 21 of CPS’s twentieth-day enrollment files, joined on the district’s own school IDs and mapped by community area: 420,925 students in the 2005–06 file, 316,224 in the 2025–26 file — the count taken in fall 2025 — with 63 of the 77 community areas below their fall-2012 count while the Loop’s schools nearly doubled. Chicago’s Public Schools Counted 316,224 Students Last Fall — 104,701 Fewer Than 20 Years Earlier. The Loop’s Schools Nearly Doubled.
Are the schools themselves getting smaller?
The same twentieth-day files read at the school grain: district-run schools enrolling fewer than 250 students more than doubled in ten falls while the school count barely moved, and the median district-run school shrank from 498 students to 396 — with charters counted separately throughout. 115 of Chicago’s 517 District-Run Schools Enrolled Fewer Than 250 Students Last Fall. In Fall 2016, 56 Did.
What does the district’s own report card say?
The SY2425 School Progress file across 649 schools, read exactly as recorded: chronic truancy at 37.6 percent for the median school and 62.6 percent at the median high school, 51 percent of schools in the culture survey’s top two levels — and rating columns that are mostly empty, including a growth rating no school carries. CPS’s Own Progress File: Chronic Truancy Is 37.6 Percent at the Median School — and the Rating Columns Are Mostly Empty
How this hub works
Each analysis linked above reads a public file the district itself publishes, states its counting rules, and discloses what the file cannot say, so each figure travels with its stated limits. Enrollment counts are the district’s twentieth-day snapshots, not year-round averages; progress-report figures are the district’s own instrument, reported as distributions with no school named; and where a file’s column is empty or constant, that is reported as a fact about the file. New schools analyses are added here as they publish. This page takes no position on where anyone should enroll.