A History of CPS Enrollment 1999-2014 (Rough Draft)

It is difficult to do data work on CPS data.  Schools move, close, open, split, co-locate, turnaround, change names.

I’m posting this spreadsheet here to take advantage of the “many eyes” of those interested in CPS data.**  I haven’t been able to verify every data cell yet. So use with caution.

**Changes to a school’s location or governance can be followed by sorting on “Unit Number”. The most recent location/governance will be indicated by CPS actual unit number (e.g. Phillips HS AUSL 1510) Previous locations or governance for that same school will be on a separate line using a variation on the unit number. (e.g Phillips HS 1510.1 is the next most recent record of that school, and so on.)

However.

There are some school action decisions taking place this week in Chicago related to the expansion of charter schools. The decisions are being justified as placing charter schools in areas of “overcrowding”. And that is, of course, interesting to us at CPS Apples 2 Apples.

Each of these schools and school branches since 1999 in this dataset can be traced back to an address and a community area. We are trying to track each closing, each opening, each re-location and all of the enrollments attached to specific neighborhoods and addresses.

This is going to take some time, of course. If any coders and interaction designers would like to try their hand at visualizing this data, we would like to invite them to do so. Because it isn’t completely verified, this is data for dialogue, not diagnosis.

Data for community involvement and for dialogue is important in the Open Gov community as long as we all realize the limitations of drawing conclusions from rough drafts of data.  Questions about the history of Chicago Public School actions, not conclusions, is what we’re after.

Please post any comments and/or corrections to the dataset in the comments below, and we’ll be posting revisions in the future.