Do CPS Schools Switch You To IB DP Classes Against Your Requested Courses? What I Learned As A Parent
The hallway at Lincoln Park High smelled like overheated lockers and new backpacks last August, when my 11th grader leaned against his locker and tilted his phone toward me. His eyebrows were pulled tight, the way they get when he’s trying not to be upset in public. “None of these are the classes I asked for,” he said. “They put me in full IB DP.”
He’d tested into the school’s IB program when he applied as a freshman, but we’d checked every box we could find that said he only wanted IB certificate courses, not the full two-year diploma program. He wants to study animation in college, so he’d prioritized AP Studio Art, a film production elective, and AP Biology over the full suite of IB DP required classes that would take up all his elective slots. We’d submitted his course requests back in March, clicked the confirm button, and didn’t think twice about it.
We waited 45 minutes to see his counselor, Ms. Lopez. Her desk was stacked three high with change of schedule forms, a half-empty iced coffee sweating on the corner. She pulled up his file, nodded like she’d seen this a dozen times already. “We had 18 extra seats in this year’s DP cohort,” she said, not defensive, just tired. “Any kid who’s eligible gets bumped up if we have extra space in DP and not enough in other sections. It fills slots, and it’s good for the school’s numbers.”
I talked to three other parents from our neighborhood parent group that night, two at Lincoln Park and one at Walter Payton, all had the exact same thing happen that week. All had requested non-full-DP schedules, all got switched to full IB DP against their written requests. This wasn’t a one-off clerical error, it was a pattern I’d never heard anyone talk about before.
I’d heard rumblings of this before, but I didn’t believe it would happen to us. Turns out, CPS ties a lot of school performance metrics to full IB DP enrollment. Selective enrollment schools get higher ratings when more of their students are enrolled in full DP, and that higher rating translates to more funding and higher demand for the next year. It’s not a secret plot, it’s just how the incentives line up. When there’s an empty seat in a DP class and a full section of AP Art, it’s easier for overworked admin to bump an eligible kid into DP than it is to hire another art teacher or rearrange entire sections.
What I didn’t expect was how manageable it was to fix, once I knew what to do. I now tell every CPS parent I talk to three concrete things to avoid this issue, all things I learned the hard way that year.
First, document your request before schedules are even built. When you submit course requests online at the end of the previous school year, save a screenshot of your selections, specifically noting if you declined full IB DP. Then send a brief email to your kid’s counselor and the school’s IB coordinator that says, “This email confirms that [Student Name], CPS ID number XXX, has requested a non-full-DP schedule for 11th grade, per their submitted course selection. We’ve attached a screenshot of the request for your records.” This takes five minutes, and it gives you a paper trail most families don’t have. I didn’t do this the year my son got switched, which left us playing catch-up from day one.
Second, if you do get a wrong schedule, don’t just send an email and wait. Counselors get hundreds of emails the first week of school, and most go unread for weeks. Show up in person, before school or during your kid’s lunch period, bring your printed documentation and a list of the specific classes you want, with section numbers copied from the student portal. It’s way harder to brush off a parent standing in front of you with all the paperwork already filled out than an unread email.
Third, don’t panic if they say they can’t change it right away. The IB coordinator we met with told us straight up that the district’s official fall enrollment count is two weeks into the school year. Most schools need to keep DP numbers high for that count, so they won’t process switches until after count day. We kept my son in the DP classes for two weeks, he did the first readings and assignments so he wouldn’t fall behind if we couldn’t switch, and the day after count day, they moved him into all his requested classes. It’s not an ideal system, but knowing that unwritten rule kept us from fighting a useless battle the first two weeks.
A friend of mine whose kid goes to Whitney Young didn’t check their schedule until the first day of school, and didn’t follow up in person. By the time they got a meeting, it was mid-September, and all the sections they wanted were full. Their kid was stuck in full DP for two years, ended up with a lower GPA because they were carrying six extra high-stakes IB classes they didn’t need for college, and missed out on the engineering electives they wanted to take to build their application.
For us, it all worked out. My son is a senior now, he’s got his animation portfolio done, and he got an offer from the University of Illinois’s program he’s had his eye on since freshman year. But every spring, when course selection opens up for CPS, I get three or four messages from other parents asking if I’ve heard of this happening, what they should do. It hasn’t gone away. The incentives still line up the same way, counselors are still just as overworked, and most parents still assume that if they check a box on a form, their request will be honored. The system isn’t out to get your kid, but it doesn’t prioritize your kid’s individual plans over the school’s numbers, either. All you can do is document early, follow up in person, and know that more often than not, if you push a little, you can get the schedule you asked for. It’s just not something that happens on its own.
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