Another Reason to Flee Chicago: the Schools

Many of Chicago’s black residents will skip this year’s upcoming elections.  They no longer believe Democratic governments are able to put a damper on rampant violent crime and have little faith that Republicans can do better.  As Politico reported last December, many of them are voting, not at the ballot box, but with their feet.  Chicago is losing its black residents who are moving to the less dangerous suburbs and farther.

But crime isn’t the only reason for black flight; lousy schools play their part too.  As horrifying as crime is, the Windy City’s attempts to educate its kids is itself a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street.

Consider:

There are 478 traditional public schools in Chicago and 150 of them have almost no students.  Manley High School, for example, has seats for 1,296 kids, but only 64 students actually enrolled.  Douglass High has space for 888 students, but only 44 attend.  Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has a policy of shuttering any school with under 70% enrollment, but an astonishing 55% of the city’s schools don’t hit that mark.

Declining enrollment is far from a new phenomenon; it’s been going on for over two decades.

It seems to matter little that CPS enrollment has plummeted by almost 25 percent from 431,750 in 2000 to 330,411 in 2021. And that it is projected by the district to decline to as little as 316,000 in 2024 and then further to as low as 262,000 by 2025.

Why?  It seems that the city’s residents see the system for what it is – incompetent at educating kids.

Most students that left Chicago schools – for reasons other than graduating – went to schools outside the city or transferred to private schools though both of those moves happened less this year than they did last year. 

In short, those residents are, once again, voting with their feet.  They’re leaving a high-crime city and its dysfunctional school system.  White kids?  They quit Chicago’s public schools years ago.  According to the Census Bureau, the city of Chicago is 47% white, 29% Hispanic and 29% black (a bit of double counting there), but its public schools are 11%, 46% and 36% respectively.

How dysfunctional are those schools? 

Many of them are entirely populated with children who can’t read or do math at grade level.  That’s right, schools like Manley, Douglass, Uplift, Hirsch and Tilden high schools have zero students either reading or doing math at grade level.

Most schools had proficiency percentages in the single digits. And sadly, these schools aren’t outliers academically. 

Across CPS, outcomes are embarrassingly bad. Only 27 percent can read at grade level and just 24 percent are proficient in math.

Horrified yet?  Well, buckle up, because it actually gets worse.  According to this article, while Chicago’s public-school kids are failing miserably, their teachers are busy congratulating themselves on their own excellence.

In Decatur, 97.3% of teachers were rated “excellent” or “proficient” in 2017, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. In 2018 that number was 99.7%. This year 100% of Chicago teachers were evaluated as excellent or proficient. The students are failing but the teachers are great? That contradiction shows the system is corrupt as well as incompetent.

Hey, at least they’re consistent: teachers reward students’ failure (with promotion to the next grade) much as they do their own (with gold stars labeled “Excellent” or “Proficient).  That way, everyone gets a pony.  Now, the cynic in me would point out that, in the process, little learning gets done and generation after generation of kids reach adulthood with no reasonable hope of succeeding in this society.

And that of course is exactly the way the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) seems to want it.  It resists even the most obvious reforms.  In 2013, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel shuttered 50 schools that had too few students to justify keeping them open.  At the time, the CPS was running a $1 billion budget deficit that the closures helped to reduce.  But no matter, the CTU raised the roof anyway.

The issue has again pitted Emanuel against the Chicago Teachers Union, whose 26,000 members went on strike early in the school year, idling students for seven days.

The firestorm of protest from the union had everything to do with keeping teachers in their jobs which invariably trumps all else, including educational competency and, in the case of almost-empty schools, CPS rules.  As a somewhat amusing aside, in 2019, the CTU actually opposed closing a school that had no students at all.  Quoth one union leader:

“Our union contends that no school should ever be closed in the city of Chicago, which is an action that will not only put student safety and academics at risk, but also further destabilize our neighborhoods.”

Which raises the obvious question, “what is it about ‘zero students’ that the CTU doesn’t understand?”  How can closing a school with no students “put student safety and academics at risk?”  It’s beginning to look like union leaders must have graduated from Chicago public schools.

Now, one sensible use to which all those empty school buildings could be put would be charter schools that seem to be able to do a significantly better job of educating students than do traditional public schools.  But that not only won’t happen in Chicago, it won’t even be considered.  The union of course rejects the concept of charter schools out of hand because they compare so favorably to the union-run variety and Mayor Lori Lightfoot isn’t about to buck the CTU.  All of the Chicago Board of Education’s members are appointed by the mayor and not one of Lightfoot’s appointees supports charter schools.

The incompetence of the Chicago public schools hits hardest at black and Hispanic students whose parents are too poor to get them out of Chicago and into a decent system.  The schools are doing an abysmal job of educating those kids and the teachers’ union, that no Democrat would dream of confronting, opposes all reform, even the most obvious.

Is it any wonder that those who can simply walk away, do?