Powerful.  A school principal gets unfairly cited for insubordination because he supported the opt-out efforts of parents.  Eloquent response.

CPS is not interested in anything that contradicts its ideologically driven anti-public-school privatization agenda; an agenda which includes, among other things, over-testing students, and the diversion of public education funds away from students into the hands of private interests. It was action I took against both of these backward elements of the CPS reform agenda that led to the Board’s warning resolution against me. The resolution contains two warnings.

 Here is another earlier link/story by LaRaviere that helps illustrate the absurdity of all of this. I appreciate this principal's civil disobedience.  May his kind multiply.

-Angela

Posted on August 28, 2015

Troy LaRaviere: My Statement on CPS’ “Warning Resolution”

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
I’ve been asked for my thoughts in response to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Board of Education issuing a “warning resolution” against me for opposing their backward education policy and corrupt fiscal management of our school district. Before responding, I have to write a few words about who I am.
I have never written about myself, and I don’t discuss myself in interviews unless the reporter asks a question that requires that I do. This is why it baffled me that the Tribune story on the warning resolution stated I worked to “raise [my] profile.” I work to raise the profile of CPS’ and City Hall’s incompetence and mismanagement. When I write and post, it is always about CPS policy; never about myself. However, it seems that it might now be helpful to tell you a few things about my record. After all, who am I to criticize CPS’ management, and why should anyone listen to me?
I am the principal of Blaine elementary school. When I arrived at Blaine in 2011, 79% of students were meeting standards—one of the highest percentages in the district among neighborhood schools. Just two short years later 89% we’re meeting standards—remarkable growth for an already high-performing school. Only 43% of African-American students were meeting standards on the ISAT test before I began my principalship. Just two years later almost 80% were meeting those standards (The ISAT was discontinued after two years).
Most importantly–according to criteria established by Rahm Emanuel himself, as a part of his principal merit awards–only three schools in the entire district have consistently met three or more of his four school excellence criteria—for three consecutive years.** That’s three schools out of more than 600. Blaine is one of those three schools. Although he calls it a “principals” award, Blaine’s progress has been the result of the collaborative work of a strong team of people. I lead that team.
One would think CPS and City Hall would pay more attention to the critiques of a principal whom their own criteria has identified as one of the district’s three most effective school leaders.
One would be wrong.
CPS is not interested in anything that contradicts its ideologically driven anti-public-school privatization agenda; an agenda which includes, among other things, over-testing students, and the diversion of public education funds away from students into the hands of private interests. It was action I took against both of these backward elements of the CPS reform agenda that led to the Board’s warning resolution against me. The resolution contains two warnings.
SUPPORTING PARENT CHOICE IN OPTING STUDENTS OUT OF TESTING
The first warning is in regard to actions I took in response to a PARCC testing Opt-Out movement initiated by Blaine’s PTA. It was the most successful elementary school opt out movement in Chicago, with more than 80% of our parents opting their children out of taking the test. It was a parent-driven effort and I fully supported their right to opt their children out.
Parents submitted forms directing us not to give the test to their students. CPS responded by telling principals that we must defy parents and sit the student down in front of a test—that only when the student refused it, could we allow him or her not to take it.
I know of no other field in which the professionals are ordered to disregard parents’ choices and force children to refuse to participate in what their parents have already refused to allow them to participate in. If a parent tells a doctor that she does not want her child to take a particular prescription, the doctor is not ordered to disregard the parent and put the medicine in the child’s hand and make the child refuse it himself.
CPS’ directive appeared to be a thinly veiled effort to pressure students into taking the test in defiance of their parents. It is blatant hypocrisy for a district that promotes itself as supporting “parent choice” to go to such great lengths to get children to violate the choices their parents make for them. I responded in an open letter to CPS stating:
“I will not be following ISBE’s ridiculous directives aimed at intimidating children and families into taking tests they do not want to take… No child under my watch whose parents have opted him or her out of the PARCC will be sat in front of any computer to take it, nor presented with any materials. The test wastes enough time on its own. We are not wasting even more learning time by engaging in CPS’ and ISBE’s test-driven political theater.”
This is the stance for which I was cited in the warning resolution.
Within the resolution the board plainly states that their reason for issuing the warning is because, “You publicly supported the Blaine PTA’s Opt Out initiative for the PARCC test.”
In response I return to my analogy with medicine. Doctors have the right to advise patients against taking unnecessary prescriptions and medical tests promoted by the hospital and the pharmaceutical companies that profit from them. Not only do they have that right, they have that obligation as medical professionals. As education professionals, we not only have the right, but we have the obligation to give our professional assessment of the worth and value of the tests promoted by our district and by the private testing companies that profit from the administration of those assessments.
In each situation there is a company that stands to profit, and an institution allied with that company. There to protect the interests of the child in either situation is the professional judgment of the doctor and educator. As they do in most aspects of their management of this district, CPS officials and the Emanuel administration are attempting to eliminate the professional judgment of educators from all major district decision-making.
In the end, parents must choose for themselves and the board of education certainly has an obligation to insist that principals administer the assessments to all who choose to take it. However, the board and CEO have overstepped their executive authority when they give directives to principals that prevent us from meeting our professional responsibility to speak openly to students and parents about the worth of these tests. If you believe doctors should not be prevented from advising parents to forego an unnecessary medical test for their children, then the same logic must apply for educators. In fact, that logic is even more applicable to educators since we work for the public, not private sector interests.
The only way to test the legality of an unjust policy or law is to break it. The classic examples are from our nation’s civil rights struggles. In order to fight segregated busing in Montgomery, Alabama for example, Rosa Parks had to test the law by deliberately breaking it. So let me state it clearly: I am deliberately testing the legal soundness of a policy that forces educators to violate parental choice, and prevents us from meeting our professional obligation to advise parents and students regarding the wisdom and need for them to subject themselves to an increasingly onerous load of unnecessary testing.
INSUBORDINATION: VIOLATING THE NO-QUESTIONS POLICY
The second thing I was cited for was insubordination when I violated a “no questions” policy at a district principals budget meeting. I sat there at the meeting listening to CPS officials blame Springfield and teacher pensions for the budget woes, while they completely ignored their own well documented corrupt and reckless spending (e.g., $20 Million Supes Contract, $340 Million Aramark Contract, $10 million central office furniture purchase, etc. etc.). So I stood up and asked the question anyway, citing several questionable expenses. Then CEO, Jesse Ruiz, stood up and told me that I was being disruptive. It is a profound moment of truth and clarity when a CPS official gets up and makes it clear that he considers asking relevant questions “disruptive.” I have already written extensively about the details of this encounter in a post entitled, “Adding Insult to Injury: A Look Inside a CPS Principals Budget Meeting.” In the resolution, the board cites me for insubordination, in part, because Ruiz asked me why I worked for CPS if I were so unhappy with its leadership, and I responded, “To save it from people like you.” It is important to note that Ruiz asked me to come into the hallway where he called me a “loud-mouthed principal” and asked me that question. In essence, the board is attempting to discipline me for answering his question. If he didn’t want an honest answer, he should not have asked the question.
Another disturbing thing about this resolution is the way I was informed about it. I received an email on Monday telling me I could come in on Tuesday at 1pm to respond to the allegations on a resolution that the board would be voting on the next day. The board clearly knew that I was scheduled to speak at the City Club of Chicago’s panel on CPS Bankruptcy at that time since one of their own—Jesse Ruiz—was also on the panel. I chose to keep my appointment on the panel and thereby miss my opportunity to respond to this absurd resolution.
WHAT NOW?
Yesterday, I drove by Washington Park to see if there was any organized activity at the scene of the Dyett School hunger strike. There didn’t seem to be, so I pulled away and headed toward 43rd and Vernon, about a block east of Martin Luther King Drive.   The entire part of the block facing 43^rd street is an empty lot on which once stood a fire-damaged slum I lived in as a child; where my brothers and I slept on floors and cots for months until the owner of Moore’s Furniture and Piano Mover’s donated a bunk bed to my mother. I go back there often to remind myself of the road I have traveled, and of the awesome responsibility I have been given. I came here from nothing. By any reasonable odds, I was not supposed to be here. And yet, here I am. I am not an overtly religious man but circumstances leave me no choice but to believe that whatever power put me on this earth—and in this position—did so for a reason. While I am here, I have a responsibility and a duty to use this position to advocate as strongly as humanly possible for the betterment of our city and its schools. That includes advocacy for sound evidence-based education policy and prudent fiscal management of district resources—the advocacy that led to the current warning resolution.
I will continue to support all of my PTAs efforts on behalf of the children and families of Blaine and I will continue to call out CPS on its reckless fiscal operational and educational mismanagement of our district at every opportunity they give me. Unfortunately, for our teachers and the students they serve, those opportunities abound.
I have been called a hero many times; and sometimes a saint. I am neither, by a longshot. Like all of you, I have my personal flaws and my ominous fears. However, each day I work to rise above those flaws and to rise above the foreboding limitations and restrictions of the corrupt system in which we find ourselves living and working.
Cord Jefferson and Hampton Sides once stated: “It is self-defeating to want our heroes to be perfect, because we aren’t perfect ourselves. By calling our heroes superhuman we also let ourselves off the hook: Why do the hard work of bettering the world if that’s something only saints do?”
We don’t need heroes, and we don’t need saints. We need a movement. A movement of hundreds of thousands of people across this city who stand together to retake it from the grips of the corrupt and inept elected and appointed officials who hold the reigns of power. The hero we need is the public itself, awakened and ready to change our collective reality; ready to serve as examples to our children—examples of citizens who come together to work and change our city for the better.
On a related and somewhat humorous note, one of the Board’s “Directives for Improvement” was for me to “Conduct yourself as a role model for students.”
I don’t imagine they’ll ever get the irony.

---

It is alleged that there is a media blockage regarding this hunger strike by parents wanting to re-open their neighborhood school. I can certainly say that this evening is the first I hear about this.   

The coalition’s [Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High Schoo] proposal is for a district-run, green technology school with partners including the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The other two proposals the board will consider to replace Dyett are from an arts education non-profit, which has proposed a "contract school" that would not be run by the district, and a former CPS principal, whose proposal does include a district-run school. But Dyett parents and community members say they believe the best option for future students is the proposal formulated by the community. 

This powerful story evokes memories of Civil Rights protests and civil disobedience.

As part of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School, Taylor-Raman and others have held sit-ins in City Hall, filed discrimination lawsuits and picketed Board of Education meetings. 

The Dyett hunger strike is only the latest flare-up in a public school system in turmoil. Contract negotiations between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union remain in a stalemate, and financial woes including some bad investment decisions (and the district’s unwillingness to renegotiate them) have left CPS begging for operating funds from a reluctant state government.

All else equal, I, too, like the idea of the community running the school, in partnership with the district.  This should exist as a default kind of opportunity for all communities.  Regardless, things have gotten quite serious over there in Chicago with CPS facing declining revenue and having to make draconian choices—consistent with the claim made within about racism and, I would add, power.  

Do read the entire report.  Yana Kunichoff is a Chicago-based journalist, is very talented.  I include several of her other news reports below.   

-Angela

Monday, Aug 24, 2015, 11:16 am

Chicago Parents Enter Week 2 of Hunger Strike Protesting Corporate Ed Reform and Dyett HS Closure

BY Yana Kunichoff

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“That it’s 2015 and not 1950 and black people have to go on a hunger strike to get a neighborhood school—it says to me I’m not even human,” one parent says. (Michelle Strater Gunderson)  

As schools across Chicago begin the cleaning and organizing process leading up to the first day of school on September 8, one will stay shuttered. Dyett High School, in on the edge of the Bronzeville neighborhood, won’t be opening its doors this year.
The high school has long been in the process of closing. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced in 2012 that Dyett would be “phased out,” meaning after 2012 no new students would be admitted, as a result of low test scores, and the building would be closed when the last class graduated.
Three years later, Dyett’s doors are now closed. But the fight to reopen the school is heating up. On Monday, August 17, 12 parents and neighborhood activists began a hunger strike, under the banner of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School, to demand that CPS make a decision on the future of the school and reopen it as a district-run, open-enrollment, neighborhood school that would allow all students to attend regardless of grades.
CPS announced last year that it would consider proposals for a new manager and school vision for Dyett. But after months of delays, most recently an August meeting rescheduled for September, and with a long history of mistrust between community groups and the district, community members say they’ve waited long enough.
"The city has sabotaged our community, which we know is undergoing gentrification. Why would they close the only neighborhood high school left for our children?” Irene Robinson, a grandparent with young children that would have gone to Dyett had it not closed, said in a statement.
They are calling for an emergency hearing at the Board of Education—and to ask CPS to make a decision that isn’t “based on political ideology or cronyism.” The coalition’s proposal is for a district-run, green technology school with partners including the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The other two proposals the board will consider to replace Dyett are from an arts education non-profit, which has proposed a "contract school" that would not be run by the district, and a former CPS principal, whose proposal does include a district-run school. But Dyett parents and community members say they believe the best option for future students is the proposal formulated by the community.
CPS stressed in a statement that the decisions around how Dyett will reopen will be a “community driven process.” “Identifying a high-quality education option for the former Dyett site is a priority for the District, and CPS is reviewing school proposals to determine the best open enrollment, neighborhood education option for the site," the statement continued.
But activists argue that more than the fate of Dyett is at stake in this fight. They say years of “education reform” have change the character—and schooling options—of their neighborhood. Bronzeville has been the target of many school closings and reform plans in recent years—more than 15 in just over a decade. The hunger strikers say these changes have made public high schools that can be attended without an application process in the area sparse, hunger strikers say.
Jeanette Taylor-Raman has spent all but the last three of her 40 years living in Bronzeville, and the last few nights sleeping in tents near the school while on hunger strike. She says the idea that her daughter may have to travel several miles to the nearest open enrollment high school instead of attending Dyett, is unfair. At issue, she says, is race.
“I live in a city where the only mistake of me and my children is being black,” she says. “I live in a city where the mayor and alderman don’t respect working families, no matter which way you try to say it.”
Taylor-Raman has been in a community group, the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), that has been fighting for Dyett since the school’s phase-out was first announced. As part of the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School, Taylor-Raman and others have held sit-ins in City Hall, filed discrimination lawsuits and picketed Board of Education meetings.
The Dyett hunger strike is only the latest flare-up in a public school system in turmoil. Contract negotiations between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union remain in a stalemate, and financial woes including some bad investment decisions (and the district’s unwillingness to renegotiate them) have left CPS begging for operating funds from a reluctant state government.
The demands of the CTU and the Dyett hunger strikers have important overlaps. In response to CPS calls for cuts in its pension contributions to teachers, the union has said that CPS is “broke on purpose.” Dyett hunger strikers also say they do not believe there is a lack of money for a neighborhood public school. Taylor-Raman points to the CPS purchase of a new building in downtown Chicago: “They don’t have a budget crisis if they can purchase a new building. Black and brown people are just not the priority.” (CPS claims it purchased the new building to save money over the long term.)
Also of great concern to both groups has been the sea change in the makeup of CPS. The closing of 49 public schools in 2012 received a huge amount of press coverage at the time. But even before that, reform measures like Renaissance 2010 and the Mid-South plan closed dozens of schools throughout the city and turned over many of the buildings to charter school operators. And in the latest CPS budget, money doled out by projected enrollment numbers resulted in an increase in funding for charters, while all the schools losing funding were run by the district.
With the additional possibilities of a teachers strike still looming amid continued budget cuts, the coming CPS school year will likely be one of continued protests.
The tactic of hunger strikes around social justice issues has a long history in Chicago. Little Village Lawndale High School, a social justice-focused high school, was opened following a hunger strike, and a group of residents in the Pilsen neighborhood stopped eating to demand the closure of a polluting, now-shuttered coal power plant.
With schools set to open in less than two weeks, it remains to be seen how the hunger strikers pressure will bear fruit. But that history of educational justice activism has helped Taylor-Raman spur her continuing fast, she says.
“That it’s 2015 and not 1950 and black people have to go on a hunger strike to get a neighborhood school—it says to me I’m not even human,” she says.

Yana Kunichoff

Yana Kunichoff is a Chicago-based journalist covering immigration, labor, housing and social movements. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Reporter, Truthout and the American Independent, among others. She can be reached at yanakunichoff at gmail.com.

More by Yana Kunichoff

• Chicago Parents Enter Week 2 of Hunger Strike Protesting Corporate Ed Reform and Dyett HS Closure
• Did ICE Violate Its Own Deportation Guidelines in Arresting Chicago-Area Unionized Meatpackers?
• Faced With I-9 Immigration Raid During Negotiations, Chicago Meatpacking Workers Walked Off the Job
• Mexico-EU Trade Agreement “Could Be Worse Than NAFTA”
• Chicago Teachers Union Rejects District’s Call for 7% Pay Cut, Files Unfair Labor Practice

School Closings in Chicago: Understanding Families' Choices and Constraints for New School Enrollment

January, 2015

Authors: 

Marisa de la Torre, Molly F. Gordon, Paul Moore, and Jennifer Cowhy; with Sanja Jagešić and Michelle Hanh Huynh

Full Publication: 

Nearly all students displaced by Chicago's 2013 mass school closure enrolled in schools with better academic ratings than their closed school. However, only one-fifth landed at top-tier schools and nearly one-quarter went to schools that were lower-performing than the welcoming schools assigned to them by the district.  This report tracks the enrollment patters of nearly 11,000 students required to transition to a new elementary schools after the closings. It also draws on interviews with parents to understand how they navigated the enrollment process and why some students ended up in their assigned school while others ended up in schools that were higher- or lower-rated than those assigned to them by the district.

Key findings from include:

• Nearly all displaced students ended up in schools with higher performance ratings than the schools they had previously attended (93 percent), though most of these schools were not substantially higher performing. While most displaced students did end up in schools with better performance ratings than their previous schools, more than one-third remained in schools designated Level 3, the district’s lowest rating. Just 21 percent ended up in Level 1 schools, the district’s top rated schools. Prior research from UChicago CCSR found that only displaced students who ended up in substantially higher-performing schools (the top quartile in the district) saw improvement.
• One-third of students did not enroll in district-designated welcoming schools. Of these, more than half landed in schools that were lower-rated than those assigned to them by the district. Because the district targeted most of their transition plans to the welcoming schools, these students also missed out on the extra resources given to the welcoming schools.
• Proximity to home was the deciding factor in most enrollment decisions. Whether they enrolled in a designated welcoming school, a higher-rated school, or a lower-rated school, most families based their decision first and foremost on location. Indeed, students travelled about the same distance from home whether they attended a high- or low-rated school, suggesting that parents chose higher-rated schools primarily when they were nearby. Although parents were seeking schools that met their children’s academic needs, they also felt compelled to choose a school in their neighborhood, oftentimes because of safety concerns. Finding a school close to home was not simply about convenience but also about practical circumstances and realities, including access to a car and work schedules.
• For many families academic quality meant something different than a schools' performance policy rating. The way that many parents defined academic quality was different than the official markers of quality represented by the district’s performance policy rating system. For example, many families defined academic quality as having after-school programs, certain curricula and courses, small class sizes, positive and welcoming school environments, and/or one-on-one attention from teachers in classes. Although some families did talk about their school’s official policy rating, most factored in these other "unofficial" indicators of academic quality when making their school choice decisions.

Publication Type:

• Report
• School Closings Report.pdf
   

As with all research that foregrounds actual tracking either in schools or between them—as is the case here in Chicago—is that rather than improving schools, they just sort or track kids better and in ways that are predictably stratified by race and class.  Moreover, this hierarchy that gets created by this sorting  is not lost on the children themselves.  

So much for "choice" systems and our so-called "meritocratic society" when choice is actually constrained by our states' cost-cutting agendas, poverty, segregation, low-community investment, and thusly, capacity to implement the kinds of changes to policy and practice that our communities want and need.

This should be of concern to us in Texas in the wake of House Bill 5 that essentially also tracks kids in schools by design.  Tracking is not new, but is in fact very historic, meaning that state policy has gotten layered over an already pernicious problem in education.


-Angela


JULY 17, 2014

The Big Sort: How Chicago’s school choice system is tracking kids into different high schools based on achievement

By Linda Lutton

The Big Sort: How Chicago’s school choice system is tracking kids into different high schools based on achievement

By Linda Lutton

This story also appeared at:

This spring, at grammar schools all across Chicago, thousands of eighth graders donned caps and gowns and walked across auditorium stages to receive their elementary school diplomas. This fall, the graduates from each of those schools will scatter—to more than 130 different Chicago public high schools, and counting.
But who goes where?
Over the past decade, Chicago has opened dozens of new high schools, and will open more this fall. The school district is trying to expand the number of “quality school options” and offer students a choice of where to go to school. And in many ways, Chicago high schools seem to be improving. Graduation rates are inching up. The city now boasts five of the top ten high schools in the state.
But a new WBEZ analysis shows an unintended consequence of the choice system: students of different ability levels are being sorted into separate high schools.
WBEZ analyzed incoming test scores for freshmen from the fall of 2012, the most recent year data is available. That year, the district mandated that every high school give students an “EXPLORE” exam about a month into the school year.
The 26,340 scores range from painfully low to perfect.
But WBEZ found few schools in the city enroll the full span of students. Instead, low-scoring students and high-scoring students in particular are attending completely different high schools. Other schools enroll a glut of average kids.
Think of it as academic tracking—not within schools, but between them.

Marshall High School English teacher James Dorrell sees pros and cons to a school filled with low achievers. He says a re-staffing and infusion of funds in 2010 has made Marshall a much better school, but it still struggles. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

The findings raise some of the same long-running questions educators have debated about the academic and social implications of in-school tracking. But they also raise questions about whether the city’s school choice system is actually creating better schools, or whether it’s simply sorting certain students out and leaving the weakest learners in separate, struggling schools.
WBEZ’s analysis shows:

• Serious brain drain. The city’s selective “test-in” high schools—among the best in the state—capture nearly all the top students in the school system. There were 104 kids who scored a perfect 25 on the EXPLORE exam. One hundred of them—96 percent–enrolled in just six of the city’s 130 high schools (Northside, Whitney Young, Payton, Lane, Lincoln Park, and Jones). In fact, 80 percent of perfect scorers went to just three schools. Among the city’s top 2 percent of test takers (those scoring a 23, 24, or 25 on their exam), 87 percent are at those same six schools. Chicago has proposed creating an 11th selective enrollment high school, Barack Obama College Prep, to be located in the same area as the schools already attracting the city’s top performers.
• Clustering of low-performing students. Fifteen percent of the city’s high schools are populated with vastly disproportionate numbers of low-performing students. More than 80 percent of incoming students at these schools score below the district average. The schools enroll 10 percent of all Chicago high school students.
• Black students are most likely to be affected by sorting. WBEZ’s analysis shows African American students are doubly segregated, first by race, then by achievement. Of the 40 most academically narrow schools in Chicago, 34 are predominantly black. Even though just 40 percent of students in the public schools are African American, Chicago has black high schools for low achievers, black high schools for average kids, black test-in high schools for high achievers.
• Within neighborhoods, more sorting. Schools within a particular community may appear to be attracting the same students demographically, but WBEZ finds significant sorting by achievement. Especially in neighborhoods on the South and West sides, the comprehensive neighborhood high school has become a repository for low performers; nearby charters or other new schools are attracting far greater percentages of above-average kids.
• The dozens of new high schools Chicago has opened since 2004 fall on both sides of the “sorting” spectrum. New schools with the widest range of incoming test performers include Ogden International IB on the Near North Side; Goode, a Southwest Side magnet school with preference for neighborhood students; and Chicago High School for the Arts, which admits students based on arts auditions. New schools showing the least amount of academic diversity include Daniel Hale Williams (where incoming students score at about the district average), as well as low-scoring DuSable Leadership Academy Charter (in the same building as Williams, ordered in 2013 to begin phasing out), Ace Tech Charter, and Austin Business and Entrepreneurial High School.

The idea behind school choice is to let families pick the type of school they want for their kids—that’s something more affluent Americans can do by moving or by paying for private school. Choice is also seen as a way to improve all schools by injecting more market-based competition into the school system.
But the sorting of students by achievement into separate high schools seems to be an unintended consequence.

“It certainly wasn’t a goal,” says Paul Hill, the founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and the architect of the “portfolio” school choice model Chicago and some other big cities are following. Hill says he and others were concerned about sorting based on race or class, but dramatic sorting by achievement level was not foreseen.
Chicago schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who has been on the job for a year and a half, says she is aware that students are clustering in different high schools, and concerned about it.
“There’s no research to support [sorting],” said Byrd-Bennett, who said she, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the school board “come from a very different belief system,” one that opposes sorting students by achievement level. “What we believe is you’ve got to elevate, raise the level and the quality of instruction at all of our schools, including our neighborhood (schools),” said Byrd-Bennett. However, she rejected the notion that sorting is an outcome of school choice or Chicago’s rapid expansion in the number of high schools.
“This has got to be a district of choice. If I choose to go to my neighborhood school, it’s because it ought to be a great school as well,” said Byrd-Bennett.
New York City and New Orleans see a similar dynamic
Despite most New Orleans schools being open to students of all academic levels, “high performing students tend to go to high-performing schools, and low-performing students tend to go to low-performing schools,” says Andrew McEachin, a North Carolina State University professor who has studied school choice in the now all-charter city. “So even though it’s a choice-based district, you see that there’s kind of like a tiered system, where people are choosing schools similar to their background and achievement levels.”

Click to try the interactive graphic.

Sorting is also is happening in New York City, according to Sean Corcoran, professor of educational economics at New York University. He found students tend to choose a high school that looks like their middle school in terms of race, poverty and achievement. “So you ended up having a pretty stratified system of high schools, where high achieving kids tended to cluster together and low achieving kids cluster together as well.”
Why does this happen? Researchers say “achievement” may be an indication of the resources students have at home. Higher performing students’ families are better at getting information about school quality, navigating the system, and securing things like transportation to school or test prep for entrance exams.
In Chicago, the city’s top 20 schools on the ACT exam are largely the same as the list of schools with the highest incoming freshman scores. It’s the same story for the bottom 20 schools.
McEachin and others say the consequences of sorting could reverberate to other aspects of the school system. “What is the unintended consequence of this ability grouping on the teacher labor market?” asks McEachin. “Is it going to make it even harder to get good teachers to the lowest-achieving students?”
Sorting by performance isn’t new in Chicago Public Schools, and isn’t unique to choice systems. Some of the city’s toughest high schools have not attracted generally higher performing middle-class students for decades. But with choice and a dramatic expansion in the number of high schools, parents and counselors say sorting is becoming more pronounced.
Students know the hierarchy

After eighth grade graduation, Chicago students scatter to 130 different high schools. Test scores show that high-performing students and low-performing students in particular are clustering into separate schools under the city’s school choice model. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

In Chicago, students can tell you which high schools are for which students. On a sunny afternoon before school let out in June, kids at Lane Tech—one of the city’s selective schools— describe the landscape.
“If you get straight As and you do really good on testing, the school you’ll probably get accepted into is Northside, Walter Payton, Whitney Young,” says freshman Amber Hunt.
What about the B students? “Schools with IB programs sometimes take solid Bs,” says Amber. “Charter schools are kind of like if you’re average, or slightly below average.”
Lots of students give the same answers. Ninth grader Evelyn Almodovar says she knows “C” students who went to private high schools because “they didn’t want to be embarrassed about going to a school that’s known as having worse students.”
And what about the lowest performers, those who struggle the most in grammar school? They go to neighborhood schools, every student tells me. “Low-ranking schools,” says freshman Anais Roman, naming a neighborhood school and low-scoring charter in her area.
Many elementary school counselors identify the same hierarchy as the kids do (one grammar school even posts its graduates’ “high school destinations” in the same basic A-to-F order).
In an indication of just how segmented high schools have become, a counselor said her elementary school sends “average” students to a nearby high school that’s seen as safe, that admits no low performers, and scores at about the district average. But she said she would not recommend the school for her top students—even though they’re eligible to attend. “I don’t think they would offer the academic rigor,” she said of the school.
A number of counselors lamented the sorting.
“We look at the suburbs, and we look at much of the rest of the country—there’s one school to go to based on your address, and that neighborhood high school would have all sorts of different programs available,” says Walsh Elementary counselor Kristy Brooks.
Brooks says she sees positive aspects to Chicago’s high school choice system—kids leave segregated neighborhoods and find new classmates and opportunities, students push themselves to get into top schools. But she says she sees neighborhood schools being left with low-performing students who didn’t have the academic performance or the help to get to another school. “I think in the long run it would be better to have equity in all schools,” says Brooks.
But if all students were in a single comprehensive high school, wouldn’t they be tracked within that school anyway? Does it matter if they’re in separate schools?
“In part it doesn’t matter—it’s disastrous either way,” says Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an opponent of tracking.
“But in part it matters because once we get to that point of between-school tracking, it’s even harder to try to address,” says Welner. If we’re going to reform the system and make it more equitable, starting with the kids in the same schools is a good first step.”
Top performers benefit from sorting

Marshall High School freshman Akeem Lofton graduated from a nearby grammar school and says he enrolled at Marshall for the school’s budding chess team, which made it to state this year. Akeem says he also applied to Westinghouse, a nearby selective enrollment school, but he wasn’t offered a seat. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

For many students at Lane Tech, this is the first time they’ve attended school with all high achievers.
“It raises the standards a lot,” says freshman Paradise Cosey. Amber Hunt describes being around high-scoring classmates as “good peer pressure. Everybody’s really focused on their grades.”
Another freshman says she feels more “comfortable” at 4,000-student Lane Tech than she did at her elementary school; she says this is the first year since fifth grade that classmates haven’t asked to copy her work.
High-performing students are like gold in a school. Everybody does better around them—including other high-performing students. And it’s not just about test scores. The biggest predictor of whether a school is safe and orderly is students’ academic achievement. Having top performers makes an entire school easier to run.
Paul Hill says some stratification doesn’t bother him. “One thing that this just demonstrates yet again is that human beings just love status hierarchies and we’ll create them any way we can.” Hill says Americans believe in equality, but they also believe in elite schools.
“But when it trickles down to the lowest-performing kids are in the schools with the least of everything, then that’s not tolerable,” says Hill.
The view from Marshall High, a school of “last resort”
At Marshall Metropolitan High School, 86 percent of students come in scoring below the district average. Some can’t read.
Marshall, the attendance-area high school for a big swath of Chicago’s West Side, is among the 15 percent of Chicago high schools enrolling vastly disproportionate numbers of low achievers.
“Well, I didn’t actually choose to come to Marshall,” says rising sophomore Kadeesha Williams. “My mom said because it was in the area.”
Kadeesha had wanted to go to Marine Military Academy down the street. “I wanted to be a Marine, so I wanted to get the type of education they get so I can get ready,” she said. But the family turned her application in late. “We went to take a test. But my mom, she lost the paperwork.”
Kadeesha’s mom says the paperwork was actually lost at the school—they had no record of Kadeesha taking the test, she says.
Kadeesha is liking Marshall. “Marshall’s a good school,” she says. “Because the teachers here, they’re very into you. They’re a lot of help.”

Students lead a discussion in a freshman English class at Lincoln Park High School. (Photo: Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

Other students say they came to Marshall because family went here. Some come to play for Marshall’s storied basketball team or, lately, the school’s budding chess team.
Teacher James Dorrell says for others, “it’s sort of like a school of last resort. They try to enroll in charter schools or selective enrollments, and once they can’t get in, they would come here” — though he sees Marshall as much more than that. About half of Marshall students come from the neighborhood, the other half from outside the attendance boundary.
Dorrell says after a re-staffing and infusion of money in 2010, Marshall is hugely improved. The entire school is set up to help the struggling kids who enroll here. Freshmen have double periods of English and math. Many take reading—a subject other high schools don’t even offer.
But more students still drop out than graduate from Marshall. And test scores have barely moved.
Marshall raises a question at the heart of tracking—and at the heart of Chicago’s system of school choice. Is it better to group low performers together? Better for whom?
“The pros are yes, we can have these interventions,” says Dorrell. “The cons would be–you would want some high achievers because they sort of raise the bar, and other kids could see what it takes to be successful. So I think having kids with higher test scores would benefit all of this group. But I also see the benefit of having these kids…tracked by ability.”
Marshall is open to all students in the neighborhood. But there are no freshman honors courses, no AP classes (the school is trying to change that). There’s little to attract higher achievers.
There are four new high schools within a mile of Marshall. Two are military schools with minimum test score requirements, keeping out low performers. The third is a Noble Street charter school, which requires much more effort to enroll than Marshall. (Parents need to come to an information session on a particular evening in order to obtain an application, for instance. Students must write an essay.) At the two military schools, 48 percent and 64 percent of incoming students score above average. At the Noble Street charter, 41 percent of students enter above average. At Marshall, the figure is nearly three times less — just 14 percent of incoming kids score above average.
WBEZ’s analysis shows that the story of wide disparities in the preparation of incoming students is repeated in neighborhood after neighborhood in Chicago—and raises questions about whether the city’s school choice system is creating better schools, or simply pulling away better performing students, leaving the low achievers segregated into separate, failing schools.
Michael Milkie, the founder and CEO of the Noble Network of Charter Schools, Chicago’s largest high school charter network, sees the entire question of sorting as a “red herring.”
“I think the most important part by far are the adults in the building, their ability to deliver instruction, and the school culture. Those are the things that far outweigh whether you have a concentration of certain learners or a wide variety of learners,” says Milkie. All his schools attract far more high performers than neighborhood schools in the same communities.
Lincoln Park High School: academically diverse, and de-tracking
Lincoln Park High School is an anomaly in Chicago. It enrolls everyone. A 30-year old International Baccalaureate (IB) program attracts elite students. Arts programs draw other kids. The attendance zone guarantees seats to students from both wealthy and poor families.
Principal Michael Boraz likes to say this is the most diverse high school in CPS, and maybe in the country.
“Not just in terms of our racial and ethnic and neighborhood makeup,” says Boraz, “but also academically. We have kids from the 15th percentile rank in their standardized test scores, all the way up to the 99th. So it really is truly a diverse school in just about every sense.”
School is about more than academics, says Boraz. It’s where kids learn to live and work together. And now there’s a big effort inside Lincoln Park to mix kids more.
International Baccalaureate classes once reserved for the elite were opened up to everyone last year. So many kids took the IB math final the school had to set up the test in the gym. Boraz tweeted out a picture of 300 desks.
One morning before school let out, students in a freshman English class at Lincoln Park took turns leading a class discussion on Richard Wright’s Black Boy. The class included low performers and high achievers.
Teacher Mark Whetstone said it was hard to teach a class with such “extreme” diversity, but says he enjoyed it “immensely.”
“And I think more importantly the kids at all levels benefitted from the makeup of that class,” says Whetstone. “I feel like my lower performing students rose to the challenge. They had great examples from their peers around them at all times. And at the same time, for some of my higher performing students, it was good for them to work with someone generally not at their level. To be able to interact, and also to be able to take a lead in the classroom.”
University of Chicago researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research are working on a report about the sorting that’s happening among Chicago schools. One of the authors, Elaine Allensworth, says Chicago needs to decide what it wants—a system that sorts students, or a system that mixes them together more.
“The solution is thinking about where we want to be as a society—what kind of system do we want—and how do we make that work for everyone,” says Allensworth.
Allensworth says researchers already know one thing: whatever approach Chicago chooses, schools need to increase supports for the lowest performing students. If kids are mixed, lower achievers need help keeping up so they don’t get frustrated and give up, and so they don’t hold back their high-flying peers. And if Chicago decides to keep sorting students by achievement, then the schools filled with the lowest performers are going to need a lot of extra resources.