Chicago Child-Parent Centers

The Chicago Child-Parent Centers (CPCs) provide comprehensive educational support and family support to economically disadvantaged children and their parents. The guiding principle of the program is that by providing a school-based, stable learning environment during preschool and during kindergarten through third grade, in which parents are active and consistent participants in their child's education, scholastic success will follow. The program requires parental participation and emphasizes a child-centered, individualized approach to social and cognitive development. Currently, the Chicago Public Schools operate 23 Federal Title I CPC sites; 18 feature services from preschool through kindergarten, and 5 have services in preschool only. Title I stopped supporting the elementary-school portion of the program about a decade ago. Currently, children may begin the CPC program in preschool only.

The goal of this program is to provide comprehensive educational support and family support to economically disadvantaged children and their parents.

Evaluations of the CPC program use information from the Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS), which followed 1,539 low-income minority students (95 percent of whom are African-American, and 5 of whom are Hispanic) who were scheduled to be in the graduating class of kindergartners in 26 public elementary schools in Chicago in the spring of 1986. Among them were 1,150 children who were enrolled in 20 CPCs that had both preschool and kindergarten programs, and those students served as the "treatment" group. The comparison group consisted of 389 children who were students at six randomly selected schools participating in a full-day kindergarten program for low-income students. The evaluations demonstrated sizeable and significant gains in several outcome areas over 15 years of follow-up.