Edward Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts Student Numbers

The City of Chicago and its Board of Didactics have a long history of perpetuating segregation, starting with an 1863 city ordinance that required Black and White students to attend separate schools. Segregation in Chicago's public schools simply intensified when Chicago's Black population boomed due to the influx of Black Americans from the Due south in the offset half of the twentieth century, and it has been reinforced in the 20-first century through strategic policy decisions, privatization, and neglect.

In 2013, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel airtight the well-nigh schools ever closed at one time in U.s.a. history to combat a arrears in the metropolis's budget. The 50 school closures meant that more than 11,000 students were displaced and given the option to transfer schools. One-time CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett claimed that the district was able to go on track of where all but 7 students landed afterwards their schools closed, simply information technology was later revealed that CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education were really unsure of the whereabouts of more than 400 students – there was no record for these students of a successful transition to a new school.

A large majority of the schools airtight were on the Due south and Due west sides of the city where the students were bulk, if not completely, Black or brown. Of the fifty schools closed in 2013, forty-two had a population that was greater than 75 percent Black, and 88 percent of the students affected past the schoolhouse closures were Black. Neighborhoods such every bit Englewood, Austin, and Garfield Park faced the well-nigh instability, every bit multiple schools within a few miles of each other were shuttered or relocated. John Calhoun N Unproblematic School, formerly located in East Garfield Park, was airtight despite having high test scores and performance.

Since the mass school closures, CPS has seen a decline in enrollment every unmarried year, continuing to fuel what some have deemed a vicious cycle of disinvestment. This is likewise fueled past the ongoing exodus of Black families from Chicago: between 1980 and 2020, the Black population in Chicago dropped from one,187,905 to 787,551, according to the census. This population loss has led to decreased funding for schools in these neighborhoods; under CPS's Student-Based Budgeting (SBB) model introduced nether Emanuel, funding is allocated to schools based on the number of enrolled students.

"CPS puts these policies into place, including the expansion of charter schools, that atomic number 82 to a decline in enrollment in [CPS] schools in predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods," said Ballad Caref, an education policy analyst at the Chicago Teachers Wedlock (CTU). "And and then those schools, because of Student-Based Budgeting, don't get very much money, and so they tin can't offering things."

Decreased funding results in fewer options for students and makes schools even less attractive to potential families, perpetuating the bicycle of compunction. "Parents, if they have an culling, their kids aren't going to go to those totally underfunded schools," Caref said.

The 2013 closures also never translated to amend offerings for those students who remained in CPS. Subsequently the closures, the district said information technology would flood the schools receiving the dispersed students with resources. But in the aftermath, the district switched to SBB, and though they provided temporary transitional support, "they never actually did something that would reverse the trend in those communities," said CTU education policy analyst Pavlyn Jankov. "Instead, they doubled down on tying enrollment changes to the power of a school to provide things for those students."

As schools were shuttered in both the 2013 closures and through Renaissance 2010 – a program under and so-Mayor Richard M. Daley that involved closing eighty CPS schools and replacing them with a hundred charters. Selective-enrollment schools, lease schools, and magnet schools – known for their competitiveness – proliferated while neighborhood schools suffered. Between 2001 and 2019, in that location were 169 school closures and 193 school openings – only 29.five percent of openings were district-run schools.

Red pins stand for where schools were airtight in 2013, while green pins represent where charter schools were opened.

How Did We Get Here? The Origins of School Segregation

Residential segregation in Chicago – a product of twentieth-century restrictive covenants, redlining, discriminatory federal and private lending, and discriminatory housing laws that amassed Black residents in the Blackness Belt located between 12th and 79th streets and Wentworth and Cottage Grove avenues – set the stage for segregation in CPS. Attendance lines were fatigued to lucifer these segregated residential patterns without regard for pupil population or overcrowding.

Activists in the 1950s and '60s produced maps that showed how the district maintained Blackness students in schools with more than ninety per centum Black populations under Benjamin Willis, the superintendent of CPS from 1953 to 1966. These maps too showed that "doubleshift" schools – schools where students would attend school in 4-hour shifts to avert overcrowding – were overwhelmingly located in Black neighborhoods. According to a 1957 commodity in the NAACP mag The Crisis, the average White elementary school in Chicago had fewer than 700 students, while the boilerplate Black school had more than 1,200.

To address this result, the Board of Education placed students in portable classroom structures made of corrugated steel deemed "Willis Wagons" in the parking lots of overcrowded Black schools instead of allowing Black students to attend majority White schools. Willis became notorious for perpetuating segregation, and many civil rights leaders led protests against him from 1963 to 1965, including hunger strikes, picketing, boycotting classes, and burning mobile classrooms.

Public schoolhouse officials proposed plans to send Black students to underutilized White schools on the Due north and Southwest sides in guild to alleviate the overcrowding of Black schools. But across the Southward Side, similar many other places in America at the time, White residents met these changes with anger and violence. Anti-busing movements and protests made it clear that White people would stop at zip to ensure that Black students were not integrated into their schools. When CPS attempted to integrate schools such equally Bogan Loftier School in Ashburn in 1977, White parents protested and aggressively disrupted meetings to demolition the efforts.

Anti-busing sit-in outside Roberto Clemente High School Photo: Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum

In 1980, after "more than a decade of battles betwixt the federal regime and Chicago" regarding segregation in Chicago's schools, CPS was put under a consent prescript and a courtroom-mandated desegregation plan. While the decree was in place, officials relied on voluntary approaches, which included encouraging transfers from segregated schools and establishing integrated magnet and selective-enrollment schools which used race as an admissions factor.

Nether these policies, schools remained segregated.

In 1980, 82 percent of Blackness students in CPS attended highly segregated schools where at least ninety percent of the students were Black. In 1989, almost ten years after the consent decree was signed, 75 per centum of Blackness students were notwithstanding in extremely segregated schools. The prescript was lifted by a federal judge in 2009. In 2012, three years subsequently it was lifted, seventy percent of Black students still attended highly segregated schools.

After the Loftier-Rises Came Down, Then Did the Schools

Urban center disinvestment in public housing – which destabilized families and neighborhoods on the South and West sides – led the urban center'south investment in schools in these neighborhoods to collapse, as well.

After high-ascension public housing developments were demolished under the Program for Transformation and residents were relocated, side by side schools slowly began to shutter, also. Many schools that weren't closed during the Renaissance 2010 projection were eventually closed during the 2013 closures. "There are a number of schools that are along Country Street through Bronzeville that were airtight downwards," Jankov said. "The district response was [that] they aligned the schoolhouse policy to what they were seeing in the communities, which was this removal of housing investment in those communities."

Edward Jenner Unproblematic Academy for the Arts, located adjacent to the Cabrini-Green housing evolution on the Near Northward Side, was one of the schools that served children primarily in public housing. After the demolition of Cabrini-Light-green, the population of the school began to shrink, and soon it was the terminal remaining school that once served children from Cabrini-Green. The school was threatened with closure, and in 2015, a proposal was introduced by parents to merge Jenner with nearby overcrowded Ogden International School, a school on the Golden Coast whose population was more often than not affluent and White. At the time, Jenner was 98 percent Black and predominantly low-income. In contrast, 37 percent of Ogden students were Black.

The Ogden-Jenner merger was an case of a parent- and community-driven integration effort, merely to Caref, it was a unique case for a reason. "I recollect that school – even though it was predominantly Black – was in the 'adequate' neighborhood for White parents. And that's not truthful, necessarily, of schools on the Far South Side," she said.

The Shuffling and Reshuffling of Students

Many students directly affected by the 2013 schoolhouse closures were forced to transfer to any school was nearest or able to accept on more than students. These mergers dramatically altered the lives of students and parents of closing schools and overcrowded the schools that captivated them. The majority of schools that were airtight in the Southward and West sides were in predominantly Blackness neighborhoods.

Black and chocolate-brown students were disproportionately hurt by these closings, even by those that did non have place on the South and West sides. Joseph Stockton Elementary School was merged with Mary Eastward. Courtenay Language Arts Middle in Uptown, and although the school was i of the few airtight on the North Side, Courtenay had more than than 90 pct students of color, while Uptown is 54 percent White. The merger turned the heart school into what parents and teachers described equally a "state of war zone," filled with constant fighting between students.

According to a 2018 report by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, "students affected by schoolhouse closures experienced negative furnishings on test scores," though they experienced no change in their core grade betoken boilerplate (GPA) immediately after closure. But test scores and GPAs lonely are not adequate to measure the turmoil faced past students affected by the closure of their schools.

In a commentary on the study, Dr. Eve Ewing, a sociologist, author, and poet based in Chicago, wrote that "all schools involved in the closure process were embroiled in a highly stressful, internally competitive, even combative procedure that established their institutional futures equally being threatened by the institutional survival of their colleagues and neighbors. Given this context…any social cohesion that schools were able to develop whatsoever post-closure should be seen as nix short of miraculous.

"Ultimately," she wrote, "we must ask how and why we go along to close schools in a manner that causes 'big disruptions without articulate benefits for students.'"

One of the many decorated message boards that covered the walls of Robeson High School before the building was closed and torn down in [yr needed]. Photo: Olivia Obineme for S Side Weekly

Underutilization and Lack of Resources

When a school is enrolled at less than lxx percent of its capacity, it is deemed "underutilized" past CPS, even if the school doesn't have the same resources as better-funded schools to eternalize their enrollment – making it susceptible to closure. In 2018, CPS closed Robeson High School along with three other loftier schools located in Englewood, citing low enrollment. However, these schools were non well resourced. Jankov chosen this exercise "closure by attrition," saying that "even if you're a community that is nowhere nearly getting the services they need in their schools, if you're losing students, CPS was cutting funding from those schools. And so y'all end up with situations where even if a school didn't shut, your budget has been cut twice, thrice over a period of a decade and a one-half, and yous're no longer able to provide services."

In an interview with South Side Weekly, Ewing noted, "Chicago is all one property taxation base and one school district. And so having more than expensive homes in Lincoln Park vs. Englewood doesn't affect the tax base of operations.

"What does brand a deviation within Chicago is private fundraising that schools do," she continued. "Public schools are allowed to fundraise, and since communities with higher incomes are more likely to have dispensable funds to participate, this widens the gap in resources farther." Combine this with the per-educatee funding formula, and "neighborhood schools where enrollment has been dropping a ton have simply less coin to work with than a competitive school that is always fully enrolled."

Magnet and Selective-Enrollment Schools: A Failure of Integration

Many magnet and selective-enrollment schools in Chicago were created under the desegregation consent prescript in place until 2009.

Magnet schools are public schools that have specialized classes and a focused curriculum. Most magnet schools use a lottery system to make up one's mind admission, and the consent prescript called for the lottery for magnet schools to be "based on race, to ensure integration in enrollment."

CPS runs a busing program for magnet and examination-in schools – which include classical, gifted, and selective enrollment schools – in an effort to concenter various populations. But a 2019 WBEZ study showed that only xx percent of magnet and examination-in schools met the racial makeup goal of the desegregation court guild.

Under the consent decree, race was an admissions factor for selective-enrollment schools, which generally accept applications from across the metropolis and accept students based on grades or test scores. White students, who made upward 9 pct of the district's enrollment in selective-enrollment schools in 2009 when the decree was lifted, were immune upwards to 35 percentage of placements.

Jones Higher Prep, Lane Tech, Northside College Prep, Payton College Prep, and Whitney Immature Magnet High School are consistently ranked as the top v public high schools in Chicago. Each of these schools is a selective-enrollment school, and each of them has a disproportionately low percentage of Black students. While the commune as a whole is 35.8 percent Black, Jones is 11.6 percent Black, Lane Tech is 6.7 percent Black, Northside College Prep is 6 percent Blackness, Payton is 9.vii percent Black, and Whitney Young is 17.7 per centum Black.

CPS is aware of this discrepancy and utilizes a socioeconomic tier system to rank students based on where they live and counterbalance their chances of getting into a proficient schoolhouse. This system shows that lower-tier areas have less income and less education, while college tiers accept the opposite. In 2012, Derek Eder, a civic engineering builder, partnered with Open City to compile data nearly the meaning of this tier organization. The website they created points out that selective-enrollment schools are designed to increase the chances of disadvantaged students of attention better schools past reserving a certain number of seats for students from low-income neighborhoods. "The quota tries to go on wealthier students from dominating selective schools," co-ordinate to the projection. The assay concluded that "a high-achieving student from an impoverished area has a better chance of getting into a selective school than a similar educatee from a richer area."

Although this provision is helpful for some students, information technology does non dissolve the clear lines of segregation that determine the fate of a majority of depression-income Black and brown students who are bars to neighborhood schools. These selective-enrollment schools are not e'er nearby or physically accessible, and they have fewer seats. Fifty-fifty at present, elementary and high school students from the Due south and West sides of the city have longer commute times to attain their schools than their counterparts.

Privatizing Educational activity: The Charter Movement

Renaissance 2010 was a project of the Chicago Public Schools backed by business and philanthropic communities. The idea was to "launch marketplace schoolhouse choice by quickly calculation privatized charter schools"; the district would "manage the district similar a stock portfolio – phasing out weak schools and schools that would get under-enrolled due to competition," co-ordinate to a 2018 article by education abet Jan Resseger found on the National Instruction Policy Center website.

These charter schools are publicly funded like neighborhood schools, but they are independently run, somewhat similarly to private schools, and can receive private donations, equally well.

A 2017 written report conducted past the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that attending a lease high schoolhouse in Chicago led to substantial improvements in test scores, loftier school attendance, higher enrollment, and college persistence. Even so, critics of the lease movement have pointed to charter schools' lack of accountability," said Jitu Brown, national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance and sometime education organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Customs Organization. Unlike district-run schools, charters aren't required to have elected local school councils. "We've brokered the responsibility of educating children to individual operators with piffling-to-no accountability to the public," Dark-brown said.

Lease schools are also able to push out students who are not performing upward to standards. In 2014, the Tribune reported that charter schools expelled 61 out of every 10,000 students, whereas commune-run schools expelled only 5 out of every 10,000 students.

"They come up up with creative ways to kicking children out," Brown said. "They call it counseling a kid out, and their linguistic communication is 'it'southward non a adept fit.' But public schools don't have that pick and shouldn't accept that option. Because the schoolhouse must be ready for the child."

Dark-brown pointed out that where charter schools are built, the number of Blackness students decreases, citing the discomfort and alienation students of the shuttered and discarded schools may feel. Despite these schools beingness open enrollment and available to the public, students from the neighborhood oft struggle with reacclimating, and their parents might even decide to leave the schoolhouse altogether. "It is directly continued to the agenda of moving populations that are seen as undesirable out of municipalities as opposed to addressing the inequities that create the weather in the first identify," Dark-brown added.

"In many means, [charters] were sort of created to supersede district schools that were segregated, that were underfunded, that were predominant in the South and Due west sides," said Jankov. "Those lease schools were opened in those same communities where they closed schools under the pretense that they would be offer something new, something more effective with better results. The reality is those schools remain segregated, oftentimes with either segregated staff or overwhelmingly White staff."

Between 2001 and 2019, CPS opened 105 lease schools.

Disparities in School Quality: Teachers Work with What They Have

CPS data from the 2020-21 school year shows stark differences in access to quality schools and programs betwixt Black and White students.

The Greater Lincoln Park region, which is eighteen percent Blackness and 53 per centum White, has triple the number of high school fine and performing fine art seats per hundred students as the Bronzeville/Southward Lakefront region, which is 91 percent Black (xx-seven seats versus nine).

The Dyett hunger strikers led a silent march to President Obama's Chicago home followed by a vigil on September nine, 2015. Photo credit: Bob Simpson. Flickr. (CC Past-NC-SA. 2.0)

Dyett High Schoolhouse is i school located in the Bronzeville/Due south Lakefront region explicitly focused on the arts: after hunger strikers prevented the school'southward closure in 2013, information technology reopened in 2016 as a school for the arts, and students can cull one of v pathways to follow: digital media, music, theater, dance, or visual arts. When information technology reopened, CPS gave $14.6 1000000 in funding to refurbish information technology, adding amenities including a dance studio and a digital media lab.

King Peel started as a music instructor at Dyett in 2018 and taught beginner, intermediate, and advanced ring and choir as well as a piano course until leaving his position earlier this twelvemonth. "Dyett is special because it was a reopened school, and then they provided the funding so that it would succeed," he said. "But I take worked for a number of other schools in CPS that did non take that."

Mollison Elementary School is located in Bronzeville, but a couple of blocks from Armstrong (Lillian Hardin) Park, named subsequently jazz musician, composer, and bandleader Lillian Hardin Armstrong. Bronzeville itself has a long history of producing legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole. As a music teacher in that location, Peel described his class every bit "music on the cart," where he would move from room to room with very few instruments.

At both Mollison, where he worked from 2016 to 2017, and William Bishop Owen Elementary School in Ashburn, where he worked from 2017 to 2018, Peel was the only music teacher.

The differences in access to simple school art programs are stark between regions located on the North and South sides. During the 2020-21 school yr, there were zero seats per hundred students for fine and performing arts in the Bronzeville/Due south Lakefront region. In Greater Lincoln Park, at that place were lxx, in the N Lakefront region, there were fifty-two, and in the Central Area region, in that location were fifty-iii.

As a teacher at Dyett, Peel has felt the furnishings of lack of access to these programs in elementary school. "It's very hard to develop sixty children who take never had a musical experience, even after four years, if at that place's goose egg laid at the start," he said.

Nadine Smith is the but music teacher at Dyett now that Peel left. She started five years agone and has since taught choir and band. "At the elementary level is where students should be getting those foundational skills and should exist able to walk into loftier school and be prepared to get to the next level."

In a previous role as educational outreach coordinator for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, she visited schools on the North Side. "For some of the schools, i.due east., Northside College Prep...you've got to be kidding me," she said. "I thought I was walking in on a college campus when I walked into that school. Their strings department is extremely potent, and I mean simply large, beautiful basses in a room designated for the arts, for music; their orchestra is just profound," she said. "And I guess that poured kerosene on my desire to be able to run into that as well occur on the Southward Side of Chicago."

In 2009, when he lifted the desegregation consent decree, U.Due south. Commune Judge Charles Kocoras stated in an stance that within the district schools, "the vestiges of discrimination are no longer." Simply more than than a decade after, the commune remains highly segregated. Black students in Chicago are disproportionately harmed by school closures, decreased admission to quality schools, and the increasing privatization of Chicago schools.

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Madeleine Parrish is the Southward Side Weekly's educational activity editor. Chima Ikoro is the South Side Weekly's community organizing editor.

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Source: https://interactive.wttw.com/firsthand/segregation/chicago-public-schools-and-segregation

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