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* Buried deep within the Chicago Public Schools board agenda for Thursday’s meeting is a proposed resolution entitled, “Resolution Regarding Values and Parameters for New Five-Year Transformational Strategic Plan, SY25-SY29.” And buried deep within that proposed resolution is this passage, which was spotted by some readers who are Chicago parents and who then forwarded it to me…
3) transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools
It sure looks like the resolution, if approved, would eventually move the district away from charter schools and selective enrollment schools. These are, of course, longstanding policy goals of the Chicago Teachers Union, which helped elect one of its own as mayor.
I reached out to CPS for comment earlier today. I’ll let you know if they respond.
*** UPDATE 1 *** CPS responded and confirmed…
The Board’s resolution aims to guide engagement and development in partnership with the District on a new strategic plan with an emphasis on strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting all students and closing opportunity and achievement gaps. Work on the District’s next five-year Strategic Plan has begun and will continue this spring with community engagement and outreach, beginning with the District’s Shape Our Future Survey as well as current engagement sessions about the District’s facilities master plan. The new strategic plan will be approved by the Board of Education in the summer of 2024.
While CPS will work with the community and its City partners to co-design the strategic plan, the parameters set a vision for the District to develop a plan that shifts away from a model which emphasizes school choice to one that elevates our neighborhood schools to ensure each and every student has access to a high-quality education in a supportive and welcoming school.
Specific community engagement sessions about the development of the new strategic plan will begin in February.
*** UPDATE 2 *** Hmm…
This came up during the runoff: "A Johnson administration would not end selective enrollment at CPS," his campaign had said after he was pressed by reportershttps://t.co/7JFgf8fwjj https://t.co/M0RDbphTBO
— Alice Yin (@byaliceyin) December 12, 2023
posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 10:54 am
Sorry, comments are closed at this time.
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Lane Tech. , Whitney Young, and Walter Payton might become different sort of schools.
Comment by Steve Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:12 am
It never ceases to amaze me how CTU wants students to attend lower performing schools. Social justice, eh?
Comment by Just Me 2 Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:31 am
Pushing people away from neighborhood schools en masse is completely counterproductive to the concept of public schools and it is out of hand in CPS. Best schools get better while the rest scuffle.
Comment by Sonny Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:36 am
Nefariously “buried deep within” the also deeply buried resolution, or plainly and clearly included?
Comment by Colors of Fall Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:40 am
===or plainly and clearly included? ===
Click the link and find it without searching. It’s buried.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:44 am
=would eventually move the district away from charter schools and selective enrollment schools.=
Not an entirely bad thing at all.
=It never ceases to amaze me how CTU wants students to attend lower performing schools.=
The “school” isn’t lower performing, the students are. The teachers and admin maybe working miracles even with low student performance.
Comment by JS Mill Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:46 am
Great. Kill select enrollment. Drive out great teachers and students who can’t deal with dangerous poor local schools. How about bringing neighborhood schools up to par. Families travel all across the city to these schools for a reason. They would be happy to cut out the commute if local school districts were any good.
You can’t have both sides of a negotiation controlled by the same party!!
Comment by CTU Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:52 am
I always appreciate the expertise of JS Mill. I don’t understand how people think you can take a finite amount of money, split it among two separate systems and not expect to diminish the quality of the product.
Comment by Norseman Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 11:55 am
Took longer to download the 6400 page doc than to find by scanning with my eyes. Page 3 lists it, it starts on page 21 and is found 2 pages later. Page 23 out of 6400 is buried. OK.
Comment by Colors of Fall Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:01 pm
As a person of color and graduate of a selective enrollment high school, we should be working to bring up the quality of neighborhood high schools, not destroying often the only quality options for schools for poor and minority students! You don’t need to shut down quality selective enrollment schools and charters to bring up the quality of neighborhood schools. If my local high school was anywhere near safe or had quality options, I would have gone. I also had plenty of peers who were children of CPS teachers…
The student and parent exodus from CPS and the city (taking their student driven state funding with them from CPS) will only accelerate if the only quality options for schools are shut down. I can’t believe in the pursuit of “equity” everyone will be given the choice of a crummy school. Thank you Rich for exposing this!
Comment by Bronzeville Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:05 pm
Invest in kids gone and soon charters - CTU must feel proud. Essentially removes any parental options for sending kids to alternatives to failing local schools. For many only option would be to move.
Comment by Donnie Elgin Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:06 pm
Not surprising under Mayor Gates administration
Comment by Sue Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:07 pm
I would love to see polling on this topic…from my recollection, this was a topic during the campaign Mayor Johnson quickly squashed as an option due to the backlash. If it is truly unpopular as I expect it to be, this is the sort of issue that would illicit a professional opposition campaign or IE in the School Board cycle and ‘27 Mayoral campaign.
Comment by LastModDemStanding Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:12 pm
Great idea to disband the 5 top high schools in Illinois and dumb down the curriculum for the best and brightest students in Chicago
It’s not just the kids that do stupid things Mayor Johnson
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/illinois
Comment by Lucky Pierre Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:14 pm
===OK===
Whatever. I stand by my story. Now either debate the actual subject matter or be gone, troll.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:22 pm
The entire reason you got selective enrollment schools in the first place was that neighborhood schools weren’t doing the job.
Comment by low level Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:24 pm
Eliminating selective enrollment schools doesn’t make neighborhood schools better. It just forces parents and students to decide whether to attend a poorly performing neighborhood school, a parochial school or to move out of the City completely so that they can attend a higher performing suburban school.
Selective enrollment schools have actually kept families within the City. If you care about your child’s education, you aren’t going to stick around if it means that your child is now required to go to a poorly performing neighborhood school.
Comment by Hannibal Lecter Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:29 pm
Charter schools are deeply unpopular, divert resources to create intentional redundancies in the name of *competition* and have mixed results at best. Even the Trib forced itself to publish a study that showed no statistical improvement over public schools. And they keep finding themselves in legal and financial trouble. No one’s complaining about the de facto moratorium on charter schools. Well, no one in the City, anyway.
I wouldn’t touch magnet schools with a ten-foot pole, though.
Comment by 48th Ward Heel Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:31 pm
If the Johnson admin wants to see a bulk of the city’s taxing base high tail it to the burbs, then here’s your blueprint.
Seriously, what a foolish proposal. This what you get for installing the head of RYH to run the board. And very disappointed in Pedro Martinez aligning himself with this.
Comment by Shytown Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:34 pm
The City’s continual downward spiral in pursuit of
“equality” in every form just continues to be a boom for suburban housing prices. More of this please.
Comment by DuPage Moderate Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:34 pm
== As a person of color and graduate of a selective enrollment high school, we should be working to bring up the quality of neighborhood high schools, not destroying often the only quality options for schools for poor and minority students ==
This all day.
Comment by Shytown Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:36 pm
===The City’s continual downward spiral===
This isn’t Facebook. Try avoiding Chicken Little comments.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:37 pm
6,460 pages? Reminds me of FDR’s quote about one of his aide’s lenghty position papers. When FDR was asked by the aide if he’d read his position paper, he replied “Read them? I use them for door stops!”
Comment by Anyone Remember Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:38 pm
CPS should agree to offer all current CTU members early retirement, as in now. Every current member is paid for life in exchange for releasing their hold on education in Chicago.
Comment by TFS Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:51 pm
== If my local high school was anywhere near safe or had quality options, I would have gone==.
Spot on. Scores of Chicagoans can relate to this.
Comment by low level Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:06 pm
They should not be equating CPS selective enrollment schools with charter schools. There’s no comparison.
One would think credentialed educators would know that.
Comment by northsider (the original) Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:08 pm
=I wouldn’t touch magnet schools with a ten-foot pole, though.=
Concur on this one. Understand the argument with selective enrollment, but you can’t have, for example, the highest performing fine arts curriculum or language curriculum at every school. And magnets aren’t selective enrollment - they’re neighborhood schools that fill their open space with kids who want to go there. They only accept if they have space.
Comment by Joe Bidenopolous Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:11 pm
Total respect to the commenter who feels putting something on page 23 out of a SIX THOUSAND page CPS document isn’t “burying” it. City Hall needs good spin meisters, apply today good citizen (banned punctuation)
Also if Mayor Miller of the blog ever bans excessive capitalization for emphasis as well as the exclamation point please name that policy for me? It’s all I want for Festivus.
Comment by ChicagoBars Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:18 pm
I hope there is a middle ground here. Underserved neighborhoods lack community institutions. By de-emphasizing neighborhood schools for about 30 years now, CPS has effectively removed anchor institutions from communities that need them the most. About half of CPS elementary school students and 75 percent of high school student do not attend their local neighborhood school. Hopefully the goal is to find a way to re-establish those schools without eliminating the opportunities created by selective enrollment schools.
Comment by Telly Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:20 pm
Actual CPS parent, here. Lots of incorrect information in these comments. Right now I have to drive 20-30 minutes each way because the CPS school closest to me is a magnet school (Disney II) and my son didn’t win the lottery.
Comment by supplied_demand Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:47 pm
@- DuPage Moderate - Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 12:34 pm:
===The City’s continual downward spiral in pursuit of
“equality” in every form just continues to be a boom for suburban housing prices. More of this please.===
Property taxes in the collar counties keep skyrocketing up as well. Existing homeowners have a hard time paying them. NO more of that please.
Comment by DuPage Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:47 pm
==And magnets aren’t selective enrollment - they’re neighborhood schools that fill their open space with kids who want to go there. They only accept if they have space. ==
This is wrong. I live 2 blocks from Disney II Magnet. You get in automatically if a sibling attends. All other students enter a lottery. 40% of those seats go to students within 1.5 miles of the school. The other 60% go to people living anywhere in the city.
Comment by supplied_demand Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:50 pm
==continues to be a boom for suburban housing prices.==
Apparently not a **BOON** for suburban education.
Comment by supplied_demand Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 1:52 pm
Why do some here assume that taking public ownership and management of well-achieving magnet and charter schools will cause them to decline?
Isn’t it just as likely that they will perform the same?
Comment by H-W Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 2:00 pm
=Property taxes in the collar counties keep skyrocketing up as well. Existing homeowners have a hard time paying them. NO more of that please.=
What? The collars are all PTELL counties so the max property tax levies can go up is 5% unless someone runs a referendum.
You need to stop with the dishonest hyperbole.
Comment by JS Mill Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 2:27 pm
“transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification”
This might also mean less focus on AP and honors classes because that does lede to stratification. A diverse school district can meet this goal by moving away from tracting. Other school districts are doing this.
Comment by Steve Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 2:29 pm
If the powers that be at CTU/CPS were being upfront about this effort and not burying it in a 6400 page report, they would’ve done some public communicating to sell it. Press release, op-ed, press conference, speech at the economic club. Briefing for electeds and other stakeholders. This is very much buried.
Fundamentally, CPS is 100,000 kids smaller than it was a decade or so ago. Unless the city can reckon with how to re-size its schools with this dramatic population drop, neighborhood schools are going to continue to get worse. And shutting down selective enrollments and magnets won’t appreciably improve neighborhood schools. These high-performing kids come from families that have the means to invest in their kids. They’re moving to the suburbs or going private. There’s no way a Jones kid is attending Phillips; too many shootings there and poor academics.
It’s fine to philosophically argue that the best and brightest kids should be dispersed throughout the city so their peers can benefit from their strengths. It’s an entirely different thing to stare down the reality of living in a chi-chi high rise in the South Loop and the prospect of sending your precious child to Phillips. No parent I know would make that choice; my family moved to the suburbs.
Even SDG knows better than to make kids go to tough neighborhood schools. All the funding for CPS - federal money, state money, local money - is based on enrollment (even the Totle I money has enrollment guidelines). The only way to fix this is for an honest discussion that the current system isn’t working and that the district needs to decide how to better serve its existing students with 100K fewer kids.
Comment by Immigrants Welcome Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 2:36 pm
I used to tutor English to families that had recently immigrated to Chicago. The parents’ questions were first and foremost about the schools. If the kids were older and would likely have no realistic chance at a magnet school, they were out of the city within a year.
I don’t know what kind of statistics there are from other places that closed their magnet and charter schools, but I suspect legions of those kids end up in the suburbs or private schools, and the receiving neighborhood schools of the rest of the kids barely move up in performance.
Comment by lake county democrat Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 3:22 pm
=== It’s fine to philosophically argue that the best and brightest kids should be dispersed throughout the city so their peers can benefit from their strengths. ===
No its not. That is not what happens. What will happen is that the brightest kids will learn less because they will be stuck in classrooms with other students that cannot keep up with them. The “brightest” students will become bored and disinterested while the teacher tries to bring the others up to speed.
Comment by Hannibal Lecter Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 3:23 pm
Supplied then you probably live by Schurz High School which is the perfect example of how a neighborhood school gets left in the lurch because people with more resources ship their kids off. Schurz backs up to multimillion homes in Old Irving and none of the local kids go there. With the current system, the people with the means to help their local school just opt out of social contract and airlift their kids to a better place. It’s basically privatization for people who have the time and resources for it and everyone else is out of luck.
Comment by Sonny Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 3:32 pm
Elections due have consequences.
Based on their track record, I am thinking that if the CTU and the educational establishment think this is a good idea then it probably is a very bad approach.
Parents are voting with their feet by moving out, going to charter schools or private schools.
Why not give parents more choices? Looking at the test scores, I wonder why any parent would have confidence in our public school system.
Comment by Back to the Future Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 3:49 pm
- JS Mill - Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 2:27 pm:
===the max property tax levies can go up is 5% unless someone runs a referendum.===
My taxes are both the tax levies AND the assessment of property value. The assessor raises the assessment every time housing prices go up.
You are right about referendums. There have been dozens of referendums over the years and many have been for new schools or remodeling, expansion, or replacement of existing schools. Most of these have had to do with new housing bringing in more students. If we wanted a new high school for example, we vote for it and raise our school tax to pay for it. So, our school taxes are higher to begin with, so any percentage of an increase is more in actual dollars then areas with lower taxes with an increase of the same percentage.
Comment by DuPage Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 4:44 pm
Not sure why everyone is complaining- If you didn’t know, now you know.
CTU got the reigns of the city and is running it the way they see fit.
Deal with it.
Comment by Frida's boss Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 4:48 pm
Frida- and yet this is coming from someone who sends her own child to a select admissions school and fails to timely pay her Chicago fees
Comment by Sue Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 5:01 pm
Voted for Brandon, am in the CTU and definitely do not want to see an end to selective enrollment programs. Would make more sense though to go with a minimum score (score as is involves a standardized test and GPA) then a lottery. As it is now almost impossible for most kids to get into Lane Tech, Whitney Young, etc.
Current Board though isn’t the one who will decide this. An elected Board will surely have some loud voices advocating for the Selective Enrollment system.
Comment by Common Sense Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 5:52 pm
Sue- is what it is. Their agenda has been transparent for years. The DSA has been open with what they’ve wanted as well.
Whatever you feel they do in personal life doesn’t matter. At no point have they backed away from this type of policy rather they run headlong into it and tell others be damned.
Elections have consequences.
Comment by Frida’s boss Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 5:58 pm
As “juicy” a target this is, place my money on IPI and or Tillman going after / Greg Bishop reporting on … https://nypost.com/2023/12/04/news/illinois-schools-segregated-classes-blasted-as-unconstitutional/
Comment by Anyone Remember Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 6:03 pm
Charters need to go, and there’s no need for 14; Special Enrollment schools
Comment by SammyG Tuesday, Dec 12, 23 @ 7:37 pm
==The collars are all PTELL counties so the max property tax levies can go up is 5% unless someone runs a referendum.==
There are ways to get around PTELL. We’re seeing a lot of new construction EAV growth and the district is playing “capture the levy.”
There’s a way to get around a referendum, too, and it’s called “Rent-to-Own.”
Comment by yinn Wednesday, Dec 13, 23 @ 7:01 am
=because the CPS school closest to me is a magnet school (Disney II)=
I’m in the same area. This is incorrect. You’re neigborhood school is Scammon. It’s very close to you. But you don’t send your child to it (I don’t either) because…….
Comment by Natty_B Wednesday, Dec 13, 23 @ 10:17 am