CPS’s Own Progress File: Chronic Truancy Is 37.6 Percent at the Median School — and the Rating Columns Are Mostly Empty

What the file is

The dataset carries one row per school — 649 rows, 649 distinct school IDs — with the district’s own survey ratings, truancy and mobility percentages, SAT columns, and school classifications. By CPS’s own type labels, 397 schools are typed Neighborhood, 112 Charter, 43 Magnet, and the rest spread across eleven smaller categories; by level, 471 are elementary, 170 high schools, and 8 middle schools. The file also carries suspension and discipline columns; this page reads none of them into rankings, by choice.

The truancy column

• Median school37.6%
• Middle half of schools28.1–49.0%
• Median elementary school34.2%
• Median high school62.6%
• Range across 615 schools3.7–95.1%

Chronic truancy is a school-level column the file fills for 615 of the 649 schools, and one that actually varies. The distribution is wide — a quarter of schools sit below 28.1 percent, a quarter above 49.0 — and the elementary-versus-high-school gap is the sharpest split on this page: the median high school’s chronic truancy, 62.6 percent, runs nearly twice the median elementary school’s 34.2. These are the file’s own percentages, reported as distributions; no school is singled out here.

The culture survey

• Well Organized164
• Organized169
• Moderately Organized86
• Partially Organized123
• Not Yet Organized91
• Not Enough Data(two capitalizations, counted together)14

The culture-and-climate rating is the most complete rating field in the file: 647 of 649 schools carry a value — 633 across the five organization levels and 14 marked Not Enough Data. Of the file’s 649 schools, 333 — 51 percent — sit in the top two levels, Well Organized or Organized. Ninety-one schools carry the scale’s lowest label, Not Yet Organized. The labels are CPS’s own, printed exactly as the file spells them.

The columns that are mostly empty

A progress report implies grades, and here the file thins out. The student-growth rating column rates no one: 611 of 649 rows read NO DATA AVAILABLE and the other 38 are blank. The student-attainment column is rated for 159 schools — and of those, 102 read FAR BELOW EXPECTATIONS and 39 BELOW EXPECTATIONS, against 8 MET, 3 ABOVE, and 7 FAR ABOVE. Which schools carry an attainment rating and which read NO DATA AVAILABLE, the file does not explain, so the 159 cannot be read as representative of the district’s schools. And two columns whose names promise school-level figures carry one value instead: every row’s student-attendance figure is 88.3 percent and every row’s teacher-attendance figure is 94.0. What that single repeated value represents, the file does not say; what the column demonstrably does not do is distinguish one school from another, and this page uses it for nothing.

The SAT column

Among the 170 high schools, 150 carry a grade-11 SAT composite in the test’s 400–1600 range (18 carry out-of-range values, excluded here, and the rest carry none). The median high school’s composite is 820. The file carries its own comparison value, 933, repeated on every row — and 22 of the 150 high schools score above it. School-level scores are reported here only as a distribution.

Known limits

This page reads the district’s instrument and adds nothing to it: the ratings are CPS’s, the truancy and SAT figures are the file’s, and the emptiness of the growth and attainment columns is reported as a fact about the file — whether those ratings exist elsewhere in district systems, the file does not say. No school is named and none is ranked; the file’s discipline columns are left unread by choice. Charter and district-run schools sit in one file here, typed as CPS types them. These are administrative records of one school year, SY2425, retrieved August 18, 2026, and this page takes no position on where anyone should enroll.

• Source Chicago Public Schools – School Progress Reports SY2425 (twrw-chuq, Chicago data portal), 649 rows retrieved August 18, 2026.
• Counting One row is one school (649 distinct school IDs, checked). Rating mixes use the file’s exact labels, with the two capitalizations of Not Enough Data counted together and blanks reported. Truancy figures are the file’s percentages, summarized as medians, quartiles, and ranges — never school by school. SAT figures use high schools whose composite falls in the test’s 400–1600 range; 18 out-of-range values are excluded and counted. The attendance columns were tested and found constant across all rows; they are reported as constant and not used as school data. Percentages are computed from raw counts.

Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 18, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.

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