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* For background, here’s a Sun-Times article from last week…
In its first steps toward reshaping Chicago Public Schools, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Board of Education is proposing shifting back toward neighborhood schools and away from the current system of school choice where students compete for seats in selective programs.
The board has limited time to set new ideas in motion ahead of next year’s first school board elections, but any concrete changes made before then could shape the district for years to come.
A resolution up for a vote by the board on Thursday lays out a framework for a five-year “transformational” strategic plan that the CPS CEO will present to the board in the summer. It calls for a “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.” […]
This would be a radical departure for a school system built around allowing parents to choose where their children attend. Some 76% of high school students and 45% of elementary school students do not attend their assigned neighborhood schools. Chicago used to be a neighborhood-based school system, but has moved away from that model over the last 25 years. Just six years ago, CPS officials set up a new application system where they said they wanted every eighth grader to apply for high school, rather than automatically go to their neighborhood school.
* The CTU calls it “a step in the right direction”…
Though selective enrollment was originally designed to desegregate the school district, instead it has contributed to more segregation since a consent decree mandating racial diversity ended a decade ago. The Metropolitan Planning Council found that in 2000, Black students made up 24% of the enrollment at the top 5 selective enrollment high schools, and White students 27%. In the 2023-2024 school year, CPS data shows a deep inequity for Black students, who now make up just 10% of the enrollment at those five schools, while White students make up about 30%. This is especially concerning when white students make up less than 10% of students enrolled in the district.
* Former CPS CEO Janice Jackson wholly opposes the plan…
Should a student’s education be limited by their home address? Should ALL parents have the right to choose where their child goes to school? Does public school choice lead to better educational outcomes for all students?
Last Thursday, the Chicago Board of Education not only asked these questions, but prematurely and irresponsibly answered them when they adopted a resolution calling for —in plain English — phasing out Chicago’s network of selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools, and the policy of allowing students to attend non-neighborhood schools.
Regardless of where you stand on this issue (and it’s more nuanced than she describes above), Jackson does make a couple of good points about what’s known so far…
Project the impact on district enrollment and finances. Show how their plan will help or hurt student outcomes. Taxpayers also deserve to know where new revenues for promised neighborhood school investments will come from. Our communities are fed up with empty promises. […]
Who is managing community engagement, and who is accountable for the transparency, honesty and accessibility of that process to parents?
* But, to me, this is Jackson’s best question…
Lastly, why is this being done before the newly elected school board is in place? Why is an unelected board rushing through a decision that could profoundly impact present and future families in the district?
The CTU originally wanted a fully elected school board. With its former employee in the mayor’s office, it has since blasted the Illinois Senate President for trying to do just that, instead supporting a phased-in elected board. And now it’s supportive of a potentially huge systemic change before the first board members are even elected?
Fascinating.
posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:27 am
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I frequently remark upon the value of restraint and checks and balances when advocacy groups try to consolidate power and authority. My general remarks are that its great when you have control, but its a real SOB when you lose it. Better to spread things around and not get what you want 100% of the time, than to get 100% of what you want, until you get 0%.
Comment by Just Another Anon Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:34 am
You can stop talking when you have the votes
Comment by Socially DIstant watcher Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:36 am
To answer Jackson’s last question: To wield power. CTU doesn’t care about anything other than outcomes. Democratic process be [banned word].
Comment by twowaystreet Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:41 am
Janice Jackson’s last question on making changes before an elected board is seated sheds light on Chicago’s new political machine led by CTU/UWF and Brandon Johnson. This progressive machine is sloppy, chaotic, unorganized, and constantly stepping on its message.
Comment by pragmatist Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:43 am
“transition away from privatization”
that part, anyway, seems good
Comment by Anon E Moose Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:51 am
Some of the change in racial enrollment is due to the opening of new selective enrollment high schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods, such as Gwendolyn Brooks (1998) and Lindblom (2005). This meant that fewer kids had to travel to Northside, Payton, or Lane Tech. Is that good or bad?
Comment by Formerly Unemployed Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:53 am
A “framework for a five-year ‘transformational’ plan” is hardly a made decision. Such things rarely have much impact, especially in the education alternate universe.
Plenty of time for the new board to weigh in and make directional changes. OK to nip in in the bud, and make the paper, I guess.
Comment by walker Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:54 am
Both my daughters went to Lane, as did I back in the day. Activists know how to agitate, but when it comes to actually running things, they seem to quickly make a mess of it. See Brandon Johnson’s running of the migrant crisis. Strong-arming this detail-lite agenda through the school board is just the next disaster on their agenda.
Comment by PublicServant Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:55 am
“Taxpayers also deserve to know where new revenues for promised neighborhood school investments will come from”
The CTU seems to believe that if all students are forced back into their underperforming and nearly empty local schools, those schools will suddenly see an avalanche of investment from…somewhere? The idea that this would cause many more young parents to move out to the burbs has apparently never been thought of.
Comment by NIU Grad Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 9:56 am
“The idea that this would cause many more young parents to move out to the burbs has apparently never been thought of.”
Doesn’t seem that way although it’s perhaps the most predictable outcome in the history of cause and effect.
I assume CTU is focused on the fact that under this plan, at least on paper, it will get bigger and have more dues payers to try to prop up the pension plan.
Comment by Larry Bowa Jr. Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:02 am
“The idea that this would cause many more young parents to move out to the burbs has apparently never been thought of.”
The Catholic Archdiocese has a few under-enrolled high schools that would welcome new students, too. They lose a lot of their elementary school students to CPS.
Comment by Formerly Unemployed Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:09 am
She may be asking some of the right questions, but let’s not ignore this and her current role. People are right to fairly questions CTU and the Mayor’s motives, but we should also question the motives of the ed reformers that have been steering the bus for the last 25 years.
“Is Hope Chicago only open to Chicago Public School students?
Yes. Currently, Hope Chicago is only open to Chicago Public School students in one of our five Hope Chicago partner high schools.”
Comment by Chicago Blue Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:13 am
If there is a valuation impact on high value properties should the new tax regime be enacted, one would expect some amount of property tax burden to fall in response (shifting the burden to others). I wonder if policymakers have taken this into consideration.
Comment by Northside75 Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:19 am
Some neighborhood schools are great while others have significant issues (poor leadership, significant staff turnover, etc…). When my wife was teaching in CPS, her school on the west side of the city wasn’t able to staff key positions to meet IEP requirements. There are so many things broken at CPS that should be dealt with before even thinking about moving away from selective enrollment.
Comment by Chicagonk Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:20 am
== Lastly, why is this being done before the newly elected school board is in place? Why is an unelected board rushing through a decision that could profoundly impact present and future families in the district? ==
I think there are a variety of reasons.
As confident as they may be that they will be able to elect a “friendly” school board, elections can be unpredictable.
The folks who see this as creating a ‘disadvantage’ for their kids would push hard against it. Few people are as motivated as parents who think their kid is getting a ‘raw deal’ or being disadvantaged. Normally, very progressive and open-minded folks will take very different positions when that “openness” might harm their kid, in their opinion. Elected officials, even school board members will respond to that.
They can’t help themselves. Why wait? He has the power now. Why not use it?
From a CTU perspective, it is easier to convince one dude vs a school board.
You have a risk that by the time you have an elected school board, you will have a popular progressive governor who may be thinking about running for higher office. Standing up against ending selective enrolment would play well with parts of the Democratic party and provide him an opportunity to show that he isn’t ‘that liberal’.
Comment by OneMan Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:29 am
“Some 76% of high school students and 45% of elementary school students do not attend their assigned neighborhood schools”
Parents and students have made it clear they want/need to be part of choosing where kids are educated. But despite the numbers, CTU will jam this through. CTU will gain a temp victory but lose in the end as parents leave for suburban districts or choose private schools.
Comment by Donnie Elgin Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 10:45 am
@Larry Brown - if my experience tutoring English to newly arrived immigrant families is any indication, many of them would indeed leave the city for the suburbs. Their first questions were always about CPS and if they had older children who wouldn’t have a shot at the magnet schools, they left for the burbs after a year.
Comment by lake county democrat Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:02 am
Selective enrollment schools like Payton are some of the most diverse in the country, not just the state. The point about the board changing soon is spot on. I guess we know what one of the issues in the board elections will be.
CPS really needs to take a step back and re evaluate what it is proposing.
Comment by low level Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:07 am
Yes, there is a ton of nuance here which demands a lot of study and deliberation — something not likely to happen in a super-charge political environment.
Currently, more than half of CPS elementary school students and 75 percent of high schoolers do not attend their neighborhood schools. Is that working? No doubt it works for kids going to selective enrollment schools. But only a fraction of CPS students go to those school. What about the kids that bypass their neighborhood school to attend a different neighborhood school or a charter? Are the educational benefits worth the trip? I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s a mixed bag.
CPS has sought to de-emphasize neighborhood schools as a matter of policy since Paul Vallas took charge three decades ago. It no doubt works for some students, but it is objectively bad for many underserved neighborhoods and therefore bad for the kids who live there. In a lot of those communities, the local school was the last community anchor and it is now gone or a shell of its former self.
At the same time, Janice Jackson is right…the quality of education a child gets shouldn’t be solely determine by the zip code they live in. But do the intra-district school “choice” policies of CPS solve that problem or make things worse by de-emphasizing and defunding neighborhood schools? I’m not sure there’s definitive answer to that question, but we should sure as heck try to get one.
Comment by Former LSC member Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:17 am
What if Chicago Public Schools dealt with student assignment for kids with disabilities and learned how to resource kids rather than warehousing them?
Comment by Chicago voter Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:28 am
If I understand this correctly, then as a supporter of Catholic/Private schools, I support this. If your options are limited to your local underperforming school, or a private school, then I see private enrollment increasing.
Comment by Lurker Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:44 am
The reason for underperforming schools is the students and the families of which they are composed. When a school gets above a certain percentage of generationally deep-poverty afflicted students, with the learning disabilities, and behavior disorders that come along with that kind of poverty, it becomes difficult for schools to attract and retain the staff it needs, to properly educate the student body as a whole with an attention to each student’s gifts and needs, and to just keep order.
So the solution for this for the past 25 years has been to provide escape pods for the students with motivated parents, or academic or athletic talents so they can avoid their neighborhood school with all of its problems.
And this is an attractive idea. It fits with our American ideals of self-determination. But it leaves behind questions of social responsibility. By removing students with functional families, for instance, it leaves the neighborhood school that much worse off with even more deep seated poverty and all that goes along with that. What happens to those students? The reforms of the past 25 years haven’t cared as long as the escape pods are there for the better off.
So I think CTU is asking a good question there. I don’t know what the answer is, what is that balance of social responsibility and freedom of determination?
Comment by cermak_rd Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 11:58 am
Wow they coming for select enrollment and have the power to kill them. There is a tier system in place so anyone with the motivation and brains can go select enrollment. Most of the select enrollment schools are ranked in the top 100 in the country of over 15,000 high schools. Yet CTU so nasty about it, like this achievement is evil. Fortunately my kids will graduate by the time they screw up Lane and Jones, but I will vote and do whatever I can to elect a school board to support the teachers and administrators at these select enrollment schools.
Comment by CTU on both sides Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 12:05 pm
Back in 1995 or 1996 when Mayor Daley took control of CPS a few of the reasons for wanting to do this is 1) Provide more accountability in school performance. 2) Improve school quality combined with aggressive city redevelopment that kept young families in the city instead of moving to the suburbs. 3) Provide school choice for economically disadvantaged families. Over the course of the last thirty years, graduation rates and the overall improvement of CPS was in part driven by charter schools etc…To ignore this is absurd.
Comment by Teve Demotte Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 12:26 pm
selective enrollment was originally designed to desegregate the school district, instead it has contributed to more segregation
Snark ON
I didn’t realize that Chicago’s neighborhoods were no longer the most segregated in the US.
Snark OFF
Since the above is not true, how does neighborhood schools fix that complaint of the CTU?
Comment by Fav Human Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 12:31 pm
This is part of a five year plan, which starts with community feedback this spring and a final 5-year report this summer. The elected board will be in place earlier than 5 years. This feels like scare-mongering.
Comment by supplied_demand Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 12:57 pm
==The CTU originally wanted a fully elected school board. With its former employee in the mayor’s office, it has since blasted the Illinois Senate President for trying to do just that, instead supporting a phased-in elected board. And now it’s supportive of a potentially huge systemic change before the first board members are even elected?
Fascinating. ==
CTU is hedging their bets in case Mayor Johnson doesn’t work out.
Comment by ChrisB Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 1:29 pm
Another question, what happens when there are not enough children in the neighborhood? There are over 4,000 students in Lane Tech but the neighborhood is older and not of school age? Also, what about school like Chiarts with a diverse and talented school body suddenly this kids can’t go to a school tailored to their needs? And there are millions of dollars donated by parents to those schools for the purpose of supplementing the budget does that money get returned? Taken by CPS? Selective enrollment with all is problems has helped children. The neighborhood concept will result in people moving if and it’s a big if they can afford it cause the Walter Payton school will survive with rich families moving into the neighborhood.
Comment by Notatechie Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 1:33 pm
=== By removing students with functional families, for instance, it leaves the neighborhood school that much worse off with even more deep seated poverty and all that goes along with that. What happens to those students? The reforms of the past 25 years haven’t cared as long as the escape pods are there for the better off. ===
How is making children that are better off going to school with children suffering from deep seated poverty going to make the poverty stricken students better students? Are they miraculously going to become better students because some of the kids have more talents than the students they previously went to school with?
The answer is “no”. The only impact is that it would hold those students that would ordinarily go to a selective enrollment school back.
Comment by Hannibal Lecter Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 2:00 pm
=The reason for underperforming schools is the students and the families of which they are composed.=
Everyone should read and reread @cermak_rd’s post. It is spot on and 100% correct. It is one of the best posts I have read all year. So well done.
=as parents leave for suburban districts or choose private schools.=
You mean…school choice.
Comment by JS Mill Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 2:00 pm
Everyone should read the UofC report about the SE High Schools (https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2018-10/Selective%20Enrollment%20HS%20Snapshot-Feb%202018-Consortium.pdf). They found lots of interesting insights.
- Students who just miss the cutoff for admission do just as well or better on a variety of academic outcomes, including test scores and college enrollment rates, than similar
students who are admitted.
- Admission also had significant negative effects on low-income (Tier 1) student’s GPA and attendance at selective colleges.
The conclusion seems to be exactly what the resolution calls for: Given the academic success that high-achieving students have at other high schools, policymakers may want to invest in improving school climate at non-selective high schools.
Comment by supplied_demand Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 2:18 pm
Supplied Demand nails it.
Everything we think we know about selective enrollment public schools is wrong. The truth is they create a brain drain of both staff and most importantly students.
Tracking and selective enrollment are making life-changing decisions about a handful of lottery ticket winners when they as young as 7 or 8. Those whose tickets are not punched stay behind in under-resourced and under-staffed schools. Meanwhile the district showers every advantage on the selective enrollment schools that serve as media models for “what education can be.”
It’s a two-tiered education system, plain and simple, and we have known that for a long time.
The first wave of candidates for the new school board can run on selective enrollment if they want, and some no doubt will of the polling says they should.
Comment by Ruby Rutgers Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 3:32 pm
Most discussion of this issue I have seen includes references to “investment” and “resources” and things like that which are going to make this work. CPS is beyond broke and there will be no meaningful investment of anything in neighborhood schools—certainly not enough to make them good enough to be considered acceptable alternatives by parents of kids with prospects. People will leave the City in droves if there are no options to send their kids to top-tier schools in exchange for their tax dollars. I would think this was all posturing (and it may be) but I could also believe this is dogma being followed to its illogical conclusion.
Comment by Vermoulian Tuesday, Dec 19, 23 @ 4:31 pm