At the end of January, I stood on the sidewalks of Maryland Avenue in Washington, D.C., just outside the US Department of Education, talking with Jitu Brown, a community activist from Chicago, education organizer for the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, and the man who had brought about a dozen cities together to testify at a hearing earlier that day. He told me something that really doesn’t merit a story on its own but certainly has found its way into my long-term memory: “Problems in Chicago have a long shelf-life,” he said.
In other words, like a ticking time bomb, problems in Chicago have a tendency to go unnoticed for so long that we really don’t know just how bad things are until the world explodes. We just keep telling ourselves things are fine, because as far as we can tell, there’s no mold growing on the Twinkies just yet. Mr Brown and I were talking about school closings in several cities, but mostly in Chicago, and the “mold” on this Twinkie is the potential closing of 129 public schools in the city. Most closings will negatively affect black students in poor neighborhoods more than white or affluent students.
A few days ago, The Chicago Sun-Times published a story that hung its hat on the racial demographics at the schools Chicago Public Schools said were on a preliminary list of closures:
At the 129 schools on CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s list of schools that could be closed this year, 88 percent of the students are black. … Schools with at least 90 percent black students account for 103 of the 129. Just nine are majority Hispanic.
The racial breakdown of the schools that could be closed is not in line with the overall demographics of the district. Across the city, 41.7 percent of CPS students are African American, 8.8 percent are white and 44.1 percent are Hispanic. The rest are Asian, Native American or members of other racial groups.
That kind of disparity between the demographics in schools that might close and the demographics of students in the city on the whole formed the basis of a Title VI discrimination lawsuit against CPS more than a year ago. Based on the 2012 list, the lawsuit was filed by a group of Local School Council members but thrown out of circuit court. It continues on appeal in the Illinois Appellate Court.
But as I have reported, it’s almost impossible to make a case for discrimination using statistics and demographics alone. The Supreme Court is not likely to find that numbers make a very good legal argument when it comes to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Which brings me back to my conversation with Mr Brown: Chicago problems have a long shelf-life.
Here we are in 2013, and CPS says the schools it wants to close are underutilized and need to be closed. Based on objective Census data, I have no doubt the number of students attending those schools has dropped, although some people have questioned the exact numbers. But numbers don’t make a strong legal argument anyway, so let’s instead look at some of the events—deliberate, lawful acts, every one of them—that may have exacerbated that decline in enrollment:
- The No Child Left Behind law forces low expectations on failing schools.
- Teacher evaluations use data from standardized tests.
- Schools lose substantial funding from state and federal sources.
- Charter schools are an unstoppable force.
- Kids who have educational options abandon the school to pursue other options.
Only underutilized schools will be closed
Blogger Seth Lavin posed 10 questions to Chicago Public Schools officials about the school closing plan, including, “What data exist that shows closing underperforming schools results in academic gains for students?” They answered simply, “We are not closing schools based on performance. We are looking strictly at utilization in this process.”
Although the response appears at first … unresponsive, it’s really not. The district here says it’s not looking at the test scores to determine whether or not to close a school and therefore finds the question itself slightly irrelevant. So, I can see how the district thinks its unresponsive answer was appropriate if the question were irrelevant.
But in this answer, the district has revealed a complete misunderstanding about how each underutilized school became underutilized. The fact is, our direct attempt to fix the underperformance problem, applied years back, when the only label we put on the school was “underperforming,” started a process that would inevitably lead to us applying the “underutilized” label. We just couldn’t do anything to stop that train!
And the reason nobody could do anything to fix the underperformance problem or head off the underutilization problem was because the law didn’t allow any of those actions. The law instead required each underperforming school to focus its curriculum on tested subjects, such as math and reading at the elementary and middle school levels, running it into the ground, like a loss leader in a big portfolio.
Music, literature, physical education, and lots of fun classes got taken away. Good teachers, who didn’t want to spend their careers teaching remedial reading, made a B-line to the exits. Families, who wanted more than remedial math classes for their kids, moved out of the neighborhood. This irreversible, spiral chain of events had a certain end: a precipitous decline in enrollment at the school.
It’s interesting the Sun-Times article says “the district claims the city has lost 145,000 children from 2000 to 2010, though school enrollment dropped by about 30,000 during the same decade. CPS cannot explain the disparity in the numbers.” Maybe, just maybe, the 145,000 number represents only the 129 schools slated for closure—of course kids abandoned those schools—and 115,000 students enrolled in other CPS schools that avoided the closure list. I would leave too if my favorite classes, teachers, and opportunities for learning were being taken away. Either that, or CPS made the numbers up!
Teacher evaluations and funding losses
Teachers, on the whole, tend to care about their students, so they must be leaving the Chicago schools for other reasons, such as threats to their livelihood. This is also a problem at wealthier schools, where teachers have to show they improved kids who are already in the top percentiles, but that’s not the problem in Chicago. Here, the district has likely set the expectations so low for students at underutilized schools that teachers have great difficulty imparting any learning on them at all.
Students may not even show up for class if they don’t like school or if they have insurmountable family or neighborhood issues, and as a self-preservation mechanism, teachers won’t want to get stuck with a job-threatening evaluation based on test scores from students they never had a decent opportunity to teach.
Add to that the recent announcement from the Illinois State Board of Education that schools will receive even less funding in the next fiscal year than they feared. (CPS has shown a tendency to divert resources for learning away from underperforming schools and direct them toward the district’s selective-enrollment schools or neighborhood schools in more affluent and white areas. That has effectively meant black schools get a smaller piece of a smaller pie every year.)
So of course, the schools will close
All these factors just keep multiplying like compound interest on a savings account. Charter schools come in with promises of increased academic opportunities, though statistically they lack general evidence that they’re any better than the closed public schools they replaced. A few parents jump on the bandwagon long enough to get their kids through high school, others leave the neighborhood, and others are stuck with commutes to schools far away. Depending on their situation, some kids may not bother with school.
As I see this shelf-life thing in Chicago, the problems for each neighborhood school on the final closings list will have been put on the shelf a long time ago. (Mold may have been growing on the bottom of the Twinkies, but nobody noticed. CPS just reduced educational opportunities for students in these schools and told us everything was fine. Nobody listened to the kids who were screaming from the highest mountain they could find that they didn’t have the same opportunities as other kids in the CPS system.)
Anyway, the Twinkies now have years of mold growing on them in every color, and the district has no choice but to take them off the shelf and throw them away. That’s what we do during a thorough cleaning, after we have let things sit on the shelf for years and years.