Chicago Public Schools--From Worst to (Almost) First

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-08-09-chicago-public-schools-worst-to-first-bryk-review/



Across the country, the war against public education proceeds apace, and in many states the anti’s are winning.



Forty-one years ago, in “A Nation at Risk” (1983), a blue-ribbon national commission decried “the rising tide of mediocrity” in public schools. The report’s rhetorically masterful opening salvo drew widespread attention to what otherwise would likely have been a file-and-forget document: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” “A Nation at Risk” made education a hot-button issue on the nation’s political agenda and turned the bashing of public schools into a national pastime. As James Harvey, a senior staffer on the commission, pointed out years later, “The argument of wholesale school failure has been an essential bulwark of the effort to privatize public education by diverting public funds into school vouchers and unaccountable charter schools, particularly the scandal-plagued for-profit charter sector.”

Fast-forward to 2024: “Public Schooling in America,” a survey of state policies nationwide, concludes that seemingly distinct attacks on public education—through expanding charter and voucher programs; cutting funds for public schools, while providing added support for homeschooling; censoring what educators can teach and students can learn—are in fact intertwined, as “Christian nationalism and the extreme right have become mainstream in many states.” The report grades states according to how well they safeguard public schools. Seventeen states, almost all of them solidly Republican, received a grade of F. An increasing number of states (seven, in 2023 alone) have launched new voucher plans, often with little if any oversight. Money that previously went to public schools is being siphoned off to vouchers. Count Donald Trump among the public-school haters. In his 2017 inaugural address, he blasted “an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”

The drumbeat of criticism has generated widespread lack of confidence in public education. A 2023 Gallup poll found that, while just over three-quarters of parents report that they’re satisfied with their oldest child’s education, 41 percent believe the schools are doing a good job—that’s fewer than at any time since 2000. HOW A CITY LEARNED TO IMPROVE ITS SCHOOLS, a deep dive into Chicago’s public schools, delivers a powerful rejoinder to the naysayers. A district that used to be ridiculed has evolved into a model for big-city school systems. In autumn 1987, Bill Bennett, then the U.S. secretary of education, paid a whirlwind visit to Chicago. He didn’t like what he saw: “You’ve got close to educational meltdown here in Chicago … Is there a worse case? You tell me.” The fact that Chicago’s public schools were a disaster area wasn’t news in the Windy City—half of the district’s high schools ranked in the bottom 1 percent nationwide; nearly half of the students dropped out before graduating. Some schools were danger zones: “When I took my oldest daughter to school,” Florence Cox, Chicago PTA president, said in a documentary, “I actually felt that if I left my daughter there that day I would not see her ever again alive.”



Almost a decade before Bennett’s visit, fiscal corruption prompted state lawmakers to fire the school board and create a body to oversee the system’s budget. These failures had been the city’s dirty little secret, but the “worst in the nation” label went national. Naysayers pointed to Chicago as exhibit number one for the miseducation of America’s children. Bennett’s “gotcha” infuriated Chicagoans, catalyzing a reform effort that had already been ticking along, and since then Chicago public schools have become markedly better. Black and Latino third graders from low-income families have been, at least according to 2017 data, outperforming their counterparts elsewhere in the state. Graduation rates rose to 84 percent in 2023, within hailing distance of the national average. In 2022, three-fifths of high school graduates enrolled in college immediately upon graduating high school, an increase from previous years, countering the national trend of declining college attendance during COVID; more of them are earning degrees than in the past. This track record is among the best urban school systems in the nation.

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