I don't think you'd give the entire CPS student body a prep course, just the Juniors or Seniors. There were 106,000 kids in 9-12 so at most you'd be talking about ~25,000 students, of which perhaps half intend to go to college. Seems like there should be a way to find funding for 13,000 students......
Thanks for contributing to the discussion. This is an interesting point. I do have a couple of qualms with it, however.
First, this would probably cost a few million dollars to put together a program that even comes close to Kaplan/Princeton Review. I don't mean to be hyperbolic here. I think that's a reasonable assessment.
To put together such a program, the city needs to develop a curriculum for the ACT/SAT. To some degree, they can use Kaplan and other prep books/sites for guidance, but they'll probably want to make the test more individualized to CPS students. Kaplan is casting a nationwide net, but CPS would have the luxury of designing a prep curriculum for the CPS system. That luxury, however, is going to be more expensive. There will probably need to be some internal analysis done, maybe even hiring outside consultants, and there might need to be a curriculum committee put together to manage the process. An internal analysis or curriculum committee might not cost anything if you can add it on to somebody's plate, but if they spend time on that then they have less time for other things, so there really is no free lunch and it is a de facto expense.
At this point, we've got a curriculum, now we need to actually write lesson plans for this whole program. That's going to take time and require teacher compensation for the extra work. This curriculum is also going to need to be revised whenever there are updates to the test or CPS curriculum. That will, again, cost money.
Okay, now we have a curriculum and a lesson plan. All done, right? Well, if we record it, we probably need to get some IT people involved or at least have the IT people train the teachers on how to do it. We might run into video storage costs, depending on how we store it. We also probably need legal compliance to run over this thing and make sure we didn't accidentally (or intentionally) steal from the test companies. If we don't have recording equipment, that all needs to get purchased, maintained, and stored.
Alright, we're almost ready to go. We need to now generate hundreds of practice problems in multiple subjects that do not contain errors and are challenging and accurate enough to reflect the exams, and then we also need to put together entire practice exams that reflect the exams administered. All of these practice problems and exams will need to be updated with changes to CPS curriculum and the actual exam. This is likely to require hundreds or thousands of teaching hours initially and quite a bit for maintenance.
One last thing, we now need to make sure we have the facilities to teach all of these students and administer practice exams. It might be cheaper to do it in the schools, but it might be easier to rent out 200-300 person spaces to teach more students. Regardless of how it's done, we're going to need to pay the teachers for the actual time spent teaching, and we're going to need to compensate any proctors involved. We will also probably increase the burden on the Dean of Students, as cheating will inevitably be caught. Counselors will probably also see an increased burden with more kids getting anxiety over the process. Again, we already pay those people, but it's not a free lunch if they have to put other work aside. We either need to pay them overtime to catch up, hire more people to take care of greater burdens, or have more "deferred maintenance," so to speak, none of which are great.
Second, this whole exercise makes the assumption that CPS and New Trier (or the equivalent) kids are on the same footing by the time they hit Junior/Senior year. Quite frankly, New Trier kids are probably on average performing at their grade level or above, and CPS kids have probably, on average, been performing below their grade level for a decade of schooling. A quick Google search showed that only 10% of CPS students were at grade level in math by the 4th grade (I'm assuming things don't improve going all the way through high school) and 25% of CPS students were at grade level in reading. While the content might be the same, a multi-year gap in educational proficiency is going to make it significantly harder to bring kids up to the same level on the ACT/SAT. The solution to this problem is obviously not so simple as "well, just bring kids up to their grade level proficiency."
Third, we've tackled the problem for poor (generally, minority) students in CPS. Now, we've got to tackle it in two dozen more major American cities... That, or Northwestern needs to start pulling all of its recruits from CPS.
I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors.