A new charter school at Altgeld Gardens has opened. About 60 percent of the students there live in the public housing complex on the far South Side.

Details continue to surface about admissions irregularities at some of CPS’s best high schools. Sen. Dick Durbin wrote a letter in support of a child of one of his staffers, and Ald. Ricardo Munoz vouched for his own daughter. CPS Board President Michael Scott had a hand in blocking one politically connected student from getting into Whitney Young Magnet High, too.

The Illinois State Board of Education released preliminary results yesterday of this year’s Prairie State Achievement Exam. The results aren’t great. More than 1,070 schools in the state failed to meet No Child Left Behind standards, 250 more schools than last year. Only about half of 11th-graders in the state passed the math portion, though third-graders and eighth-graders did slightly better than in the past.

Nationwide, the trend doesn’t look so good, either. The latest results from the ACT college placement exam show that less than a quarter of students who take the test are “college ready” in math, reading, English and science. The numbers haven’t changed much since 2005, though two-thirds of test takers this year are ready for English and slightly more than half scored well in the reading section.

And for the recent high school grads…

Most universities in Illinois are trying to minimize tuition increases this year, the Trib reports. Tuition is up 5 percent at DePaul, while past increases were at least 6.5 percent. At UIUC, tuition is going up by less than $250 this year.