Chicago Public School Tiers an Open City app

In Chicago, a student's chance of getting into the city's top, selective schools depends on where they live.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) places every part of the city into one of four socio-economic "tiers." On average, people from Tier 1 areas make less money and have less education, and people from Tier 4 areas make more money and have more education.

To look up your Tier, go to the CPS School Locator and enter your address:

CPS School Locator

CPS Tiers is no longer maintained

CPS Tiers was a tool that helped you find out what CPS tier you are in.

In 2012, when we first built this site, we did so because CPS made it very difficult to find out what Tier you lived in. Our goal was to make this one very important part of the enrollment process easier by making information easier to look up. And we were happy to do it for free.

When it was active, the website looked and worked like this:

CPS Tiers demo

However, because the Tiers changed every year, we had to update this website to match them, which was a bit of a laborious process. Now that CPS has followed our lead and made this information available on their School Locator app, maintaining CPS Tiers is no longer necessary.

We will continue to keep this site around to help explain the tier calculation process, and to share testimonials from parents who find the tier system confusing or unfair.

Thank you for using this site! CPS Tiers was an Open City app by Derek Eder and Forest Gregg with contributions from Juan-Pablo Velez and Josh Kalov.