Data analysis by Cherry Salazar and Thomas Wilburn
Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest news on Chicago Public Schools.
At the start of her junior year, Arianna Brandt’s high school counselor urged her to go all out on dual credit — courses taught on her West Side Chicago campus that would earn her free college credit.
If Brandt pushed herself, she could even graduate high school with a two-year associate degree and shorten her path to a four-year college diploma.
Brandt felt daunted at first. But she quickly became one of the school’s dual credit “superstars,” in the words of a teacher, giving her new confidence that she belonged on a university campus.
Brandt’s school, Michele Clark High, has bet big on dual credit. At one point, it took the unusual step of enrolling each sophomore in these classes generally geared toward juniors and seniors. That has put the campus at the forefront of a broader push quietly unfolding districtwide: Chicago Public School students took more than 13,000 dual credit classes last year, more than double the number pre-pandemic.
That massive growth in dual credit participation has won praise for sending students to college better prepared and helping them avoid crippling debt — a boon especially for low-income students of color like the ones Clark serves —with early data showing progress.
But the expansion hasn’t always gone smoothly. Schools like Clark have had to course-correct on signing up younger students en masse. And on some campuses, sharp increases in dual credit participation have not yet translated into gains in college enrollment and persistence, a Chalkbeat analysis showed.
At the community colleges supervising the classes, the program’s rapid growth has led some faculty to worry about watered-down curriculums and pressure to enroll less-prepared students, offering them credits that selective colleges might not accept.
“My biggest fear is that you expand this in the name of equity, and students get college credit, but they are not prepared when they get to college,” said Troy Swanson, the policy chair at the Cook County College Teachers Union.
A lot is riding on getting dual credit right: Over the past decade, CPS has sharply increased the portion of students who graduate and enroll in college. But college completion rates haven’t improved significantly, leaving more students with debt and no credential.
District leaders and some experts believe that giving students a head start on college while they are still in high school could finally shift this dynamic.
“The district’s dual credit work is promising and clearly popular with students and families,” said Dominique McKoy, the executive director of the To&Through Project at the University of Chicago, whose Consortium on School Research is working on a study of dual credit in CPS, “but we are still learning about the best ways that dual credit can fuel stronger postsecondary outcomes.”
Chicago schools pushed to enroll more students in dual credit
On a recent morning, Brandt sat in a dual credit computer science class at Clark. Another student, a sophomore, mentioned she had dropped a dual credit Spanish class because of a scheduling conflict.
Robert Lee, the instructor, homed in: She’d missed a chance to earn high school and college credit in one go — and possibly hurt her odds of eventually getting an associate degree from Malcolm X College, which oversees Clark’s dual credit courses. It’s part of the City Colleges of Chicago community college network, which accounts for the bulk of the district’s dual credit courses.
“You have to play the numbers game those next two years,” he said. “Two for one — always keep that in mind! More bang for your buck!”
Then he pointed to Brandt, who has more than a year’s worth of credits and a courseload of seven college-credit courses this year.
Brandt recalls taking the dual credit plunge and finding the classes as accessible as her regular high school classes, with one key difference: Teachers were stricter about turning in work on time, stressing that would be the expectation at college.
She’d once planned to take a gap year after high school — to work and save up for community college. But now, she’s eyeing four-year universities right after graduation.
“In college,” she said, “I’ll be able to focus on my major, and I’ll be a step ahead.”
When principal Charles Anderson arrived at Clark a decade ago, he found the “early college” school wasn’t doing enough to give students a head start on college. He set out to rectify that.
The school, which serves predominantly Black students from low-income families, started sending some students to take courses at Malcolm X — what CPS calls dual enrollment. But transportation and scheduling issues limited participation. Then, Anderson realized Clark’s own teachers — if they had master’s degrees — could qualify to teach City Colleges classes right at the school as dual credit.
It was a game-changer: A growing number of students started earning 15 or more college credits, a semester’s worth. As the goal of sending students off with associate degrees became an all-consuming focus, the school pushed students to consider college-level classes sooner, starting the summer after their freshman year.
Meanwhile, a number of factors were driving dual credit growth districtwide. Under a sweeping 2020 agreement called the Chicago Roadmap, the district and City Colleges worked closely to expand dual credit and dual enrollment.
For City Colleges, where 10% of students are now dual credit students, that has been an important piece of bouncing back from a COVID-era drop in overall enrollment. In recent years, the partners have taken steps to make it easier to take dual credit, such as allowing seniors with a 3.0 GPA to bypass a required placement test.
CPS also has a three-year, $4.4 million contract with a Washington-based company called Equal Opportunity Schools to help identify students who would be good candidates for college-level coursework but were overlooked.
The district set an ambitious goal of graduating 70% of its students with some kind of postsecondary credential by 2029. Schools such as Brooks College Preparatory Academy started administering the dual credit placement exam to all sophomores.
Dual credit has risen sharply nationwide, with high school students now making up a fifth of community college students overall. Research has shown these classes improve the odds of going and staying in college — especially for students of color and low-income students, who remain underrepresented in dual credit nationally.
But these programs are also drawing growing scrutiny, including from some teachers who remain partial to the national Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate college-credit programs, which they consider more rigorous.
To CPS and City Colleges, the rise of dual credit in the district is an unadulterated success story. Thanks to the program, a record 211 CPS seniors earned associate degrees last year, and more than 1,000 completed 15 or more college credits, saving their families an estimated $10 million.
The lack of racial disparities in dual credit in CPS is notable compared with national data, says Amy Williams, the executive director of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, which supports dual enrollment programs. Meanwhile, in the district’s AP and IB courses, white students are still significantly overrepresented and Black students underrepresented.
A Chalkbeat analysis of school-level dual credit participation data shows a mixed picture. Participation of students with disabilities is growing, but still about 3% of them take these courses. Participation has also remained relatively stagnant at district charter schools, which have not promoted dual credit as aggressively.
There are also pockets of limited access in district-run high schools, particularly in the city’s small South and West Side campuses; in more than a dozen, no students participate and in others, fewer than 5% do. Megan Hougard, the chief of college and career success, said CPS is trying to expand access in small schools by using its Virtual Academy to offer online classes.
Still, it’s undeniable that dual credit is gaining momentum. At Clark last year, 12 students graduated with associate degrees from City Colleges. They were a tight-knit group — some fellow members of the school’s football and track teams — who burned through the school’s dual credit courses largely in lockstep. When they ran out of classes at the high school, Anderson lined up a minibus to take them to the Malcolm X campus during their senior year.
Anthony Spivey, last year’s valedictorian, started at St. Ambrose University as a junior this past fall after the private college in Iowa accepted all of his credits. After taking three classes with Lee, the computer science teacher at Clark, and earning 23 industry certifications, he also knew exactly what he wanted to study: cybersecurity. He could start taking classes in his major right away.
“I felt I was more than prepared to take on a big college workload,” he said.
But fast growth of dual credit has also brought hurdles and skepticism.
Some faculty and teachers question pass rates and rigor
Last school year, Anderson, the Clark principal, set out on a bold experiment: The school would make sure that every sophomore was enrolled in at least one dual credit course. The school’s dual credit participation rate skyrocketed to 90%.
It turned out to be too much, too soon.
In recent years, the school’s dual credit course pass rates had remained high even as participation grew. About 42% of students took at least one class and all passed in 2023-24 — a rate Anderson credits to an “everyone’s your study buddy” culture of supporting dual credit students. But by the end of last year, after many sophomores struggled, the pass rate plummeted to 60%.
“What we learned was that there still need to be some prerequisites — some preparation to help students get there,” Anderson said. “We doused them too quickly.”
Brandt ran into challenges too. Last spring, she signed up for a different kind of City Colleges class: a self-paced online statistics course, with no live virtual classes. She struggled with the material and missed interacting with other students. She passed the class after a high school math teacher stepped in to help. But this past winter, Brandt, a straight A student, failed a self-paced online English course.
Anderson says self-paced courses help students better understand how they learn and keep them on track to earn associate degrees. Some experts and even CPS officials say these classes tend to be a poor fit for most high school students, who often need more structure and engagement with faculty and peers. Yet almost 2,000 CPS students enrolled in them last year.
Experts caution that failed college credit classes can be a red flag to college admissions officials and can send the wrong message to students questioning if college is for them.
The fast growth of dual credit and dual enrollment worries some leaders in the union representing City Colleges faculty and some rank-and-file professors, who nationally tend to be the most skeptical voices on the issue.
Swanson, of the Cook County College Teachers Union, said he appreciates the benefits of dual credit. But he worries the system and CPS are too bent on boosting participation, putting students who are too young and unprepared into classes that might not be rigorous enough.
He says the growth of dual credit is threatening some introductory courses at community colleges with extinction because students already took them in high school.
College faculty are tasked with overseeing dual credit courses, but they can only monitor them so much while carrying their own campus course loads, Swanson said.
“To get AP credit, you have to take a test,” he said. “In dual credit, if the teacher says that you get the credit, you get the credit. There’s no standard mark of success.”
Todd Lakin, a Spanish instructor at Malcolm X, said he’s had a positive experience overseeing dual credit courses at Whitney Young Magnet High School and the charter Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy. But he said he pulled out of supervising a class at another high school, which he declined to name because he did not want to single out the campus for what he believes is a systemic issue. He said the curriculum was not at a college-level pace, and some students were not receiving the support they needed to get the most out of the class.
“Dual credit expanded too quickly, and the academic integrity of the courses can be called into question,” he said. “We are doing students a disservice.”
Some faculty have questioned CPS’s high dual credit pass rates, particularly perfect rates in some years at schools such as Clark. Data obtained by Chalkbeat shows 94% of CPS students passed dual credit English 101 last year, compared with 64% of students who took the course on City Colleges campuses. About 87% passed Math 140 in CPS compared with 66% at City Colleges. The district’s overall dual credit pass rate has hovered above 90% in recent years, though it dipped to 87% last year amid a big jump in participation.
Experts such as Williams say key differences between high school and college classrooms may help explain higher pass rates: High school classes tend to meet more frequently, class sizes can be smaller, and most teachers receive training in how to support a wide range of learners.
Daphne Whitington, an English teacher at Julian High School on the city’s Far South Side, which offers both dual credit and AP, said some colleagues believe the school should be preparing students for selective colleges more likely to accept AP courses. One of Whittington’s students, who had taken numerous dual credit and AP courses, last year got a full ride at the University of Southern California. The university gave her credit for all of her AP courses — and none of her 18 dual credit and dual enrollment credits.
But Whitington said both types of classes made the student a stronger applicant and prepared her for college. Dual credit has also helped round out the small school’s relatively limited selection of AP.
“College is daunting for our kids,” Whitington said. “But being exposed to that coursework in high school is a great bridge for them.”
It’s challenging to size up the impact the growth of dual credit is having so far. A Chalkbeat analysis did not find that campuses that boosted dual credit participation also consistently saw higher college enrollment and persistence. At Clark, for instance, as participation grew in the past three years, college enrollment remained relatively flat at about half of graduates, and persistence dipped.
But City Colleges leaders note CPS students who take dual credit and then enroll on their campuses do better than peers who did not take these courses. About 65% stayed past the first year, compared with 54% of other CPS students. Among the class of 2021, 55% of dual credit takers earned an associate degree in four years, compared with fewer than a third of other CPS grads.
It can be hard to say whether dual credit is sending more students to college or attracting already college-bound students. Still, CPS data shows 83% of students who took dual credit went to college compared with about 65% who did not take these classes. Roughly 82% of dual credit takers in the class of 2022 stayed in college past the first year, about 10 percentage points more than their peers.
Officials stress because of the time lag in college outcomes, they don’t yet capture the real payoff of the recent rise in dual credit participation.
They say efforts to strengthen the program are ongoing: The system is looking into how to provide more access to tutoring and other help to students taking self-paced online courses, particularly in math, where City Colleges acknowledges students have traditionally not done well. Recently, faculty and teachers met with CPS and City Colleges officials to talk about how to strengthen English course rigor.
Hougard, the CPS postsecondary chief, dismisses concerns about rigor, saying some of the same worries came up amid a push to offer algebra to more middle schoolers — an effort that has successfully increased participation without hurting pass rates.
At Clark, school leaders pulled back from enrolling all sophomores in dual credit. They are focusing on offering students more support, including by encouraging them to band together and help each other as the 12 associate degree graduates from last year did.
Aware of college faculty skepticism, Anderson, Clark’s principal, sent Brandt and other students to meet with professors, in hopes of showing they were not that different from the college’s own freshmen.
Brandt, who wants to study business and athletic training, has already gotten 11 college acceptance letters, and is deciding between Chicago State and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
Meanwhile, determined to earn an associate degree before she graduates high school in May, she is taking four more self-paced online classes and retaking English 101.
Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.
Mila Koumpilova 2026-03-29 11:00:00
Source link