Photos: Eric Allix Rogers/Flickr
By Valerie F. Leonard
Chicago Public Schools’ segregation problem is not caused by magnet schools, charter schools, or any other type of school.
Our segregation problem has everything to do with systemic racism, supported by politics and policies that reinforce racism and classism.
For example, when Whitney Young opened in 1976, the student body reflected the racial makeup of the City of Chicago, with 30% of the enrollment being Black students, 30% being White, 30% being Latino, and the remaining 10% being Asian and other ethnicities.
There was a lottery system to maintain fairness.
When the school was built, the surrounding community was predominantly low-income, predominantly Black, with public housing, many run-down townhomes and empty Victorian mansions. There was a lot of vacant land; the most prominent building was the Chicago Police Academy.
Over time, as Whitney Young’s students’ academic performance remained stellar, White people began moving to the community. They wanted to live near a school that would provide a world-class education tuition-free. They fixed up the dilapidated mansions and houses and built new homes, and the home values in the immediate vicinity skyrocketed.
To right these historic harms, CPS will de-emphasize magnet and selective enrollment schools and focus on building neighborhood schools. Building neighborhood schools is absolutely critical.
Those Victorian mansions that were empty or undervalued in the 1970s now go for over a million dollars. The new community residents began questioning why they paid so much in property taxes but couldn’t send their children to Whitney Young, which was in their neighborhood.
There were policies in place that indicated that special consideration would be given to siblings of students who attended the school already. On top of that, the school had to accept 40% of its students from the local community. That policy did not exist before the community was gentrified.
To add insult to injury, CPS made the case to end the Chicago Public Schools Desegregation Decree by going to a so-called color-blind enrollment system for magnet and selective enrollment schools.
Instead of taking race into account, the new system would use census tracts that were historically low-to-moderate income, in addition to keeping the policies in place that favored siblings of children attending the school and children who lived nearby. White families began to move to those census tracts to give their children a better chance of being accepted into a top selective enrollment or magnet school.
As we warned CEO Ron Huberman, this policy would result in fewer Black students in schools like Whitney Young. Whitney Young’s Black student population is about 25% Black, while the Black population in Chicago is about 29% Black and the Black student population is about 39% of CPS. I understand that selective enrollment schools around the city have a declining Black population as well.
Other policies that have been detrimental to schools are the proliferation of new school formats like charter schools and turnaround schools. Let me be clear: charter schools in and of themselves are not the problem. The problem arose when Mayor Daley weaponized charter schools in his pursuit of building 100 new schools between 2004 and 2010. This would be achieved, in large part, by closing 80 traditional schools.
CPS pumped physical resources into schools targeted for closing and turned them over to charter schools. Essentially, they were transferring public assets — that charter schools were not qualified to receive otherwise — to private control. These schools popped up everywhere without regard to the fact that Chicago’s population and school enrollment were declining.
There were no financial or market feasibility studies to determine if there was a need for new schools in communities with declining populations. The Daley Administration created demand for the new charter schools by demonizing their own Chicago Public Schools, teachers and administrators. Parents began to believe that schools were better just because they were charter schools.
In many instances, the charter schools did not offer better alternatives than the traditional public schools they replaced. I believe this is due, in large part, because Mayor Daley and CPS were trying to achieve scale, like startup businesses.
The problem is that education is a developmental process, and our children are not widgets that you can pop off the assembly line. It takes significant lead time to plan for success and even more time to see positive results from a well-implemented plan. But I digress.
When closing traditional schools to reopen them as charters became politically untenable, CPS began to do school turnarounds.
Instead of closing schools, they fired school principals and entire staff and replaced them with their own people. The students remained in place.
The Academy for Urban School Leadership was given a contract to manage this process, and their schools got additional resources just because they were AUSL schools. With very few exceptions, the AUSL schools underperformed their traditional school counterparts despite having more resources.
Unfortunately, the years of disruption took its toll on the schools. Charter schools were being opened without solid plans. AUSL turnarounds were feeling more like hostile takeovers than welcoming environments. Parents began to move out of communities or pull their children out of local schools, sending them to other communities.
Unsurprisingly, school enrollment continued to drop, creating an environment to justify closing up to 100 under-enrolled schools in mostly Black neighborhoods. The number was eventually scaled back to 50 schools — on top of the 80 targeted for closure to implement the failed Renaissance 2010 plan, which became the blueprint for school policy under the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top initiative.
To right these historic harms, CPS will de-emphasize magnet and selective enrollment schools and focus on building neighborhood schools. Building neighborhood schools is absolutely critical.
However, I don’t see this as an either-or situation — either focus on neighborhood schools or selective enrollment magnets and charters. I see this as a both-and situation where all schools can co-exist — minus the political agendas that weaponize school structures to the detriment of true learning.
Full disclosure: I graduated from Whitney Young in 1981.
The opinions expressed in this column are the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chicago Defender.
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