Last week, Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis held a news conference in front of Mahalia Jackson Elementary School in Auburn Gresham, one of the many Chicago Public Schools (CPS) facilities targeted for closure. It is a school that CPS rates as being at just 40 percent of its ideal enrollment.
Lewis asserted passionately that the school “has a significant special education population. This school is not underutilized. If you look at the real numbers, this school is 77 percent utilized.”
Hearing such large discrepancies, it’s hard to determine where the real truth lies. The veracity of CPS utilization stats is a matter of much debate. And I don’t know where Lewis got her utilization number. But the figures are clearly very far apart.
So I looked for more data on Mahalia Jackson Elementary at schoolcuts.org. The school has 18 percent of its students in special education. This is a bit higher than the CTU’s own estimate that 12 percent of CPS students overall require special education support. But it doesn’t seem to fully account for such a huge discrepancy in these utilization figures.
To gain more clarity on the issue, I looked at the historical enrollment figures for the school on School Cuts. And it showed that Mahalia Jackson Elementary has seen a steady and significant drop in student enrollment since 2000. It had 501 students in 2000, and just 302 by 2013, or about 60 percent of the earlier population.
In addition to its sizeable drop in enrollment, the school also holds the lowest CPS performance rank (Level 3), and has been on academic probation for a decade. It is a school that has been both low-performing and losing students for many years. So a fair case could be made for its closure, if schools need to be closed.
What About the Other Schools Closing?
But is this typical of the schools being closed overall? To find out, I created a chart using data on schools listed as “Closing” on School Cuts as of 3/24/2013. I looked at the number of students in each school in 2000, the furthest date back for which the data was available. I then looked at the number enrolled in 2013, and calculated the current percentage of students remaining if you use the 2000 enrollment figures as a baseline of 100 percent. I also included the CPS performance level of each school to provide further context.
Please note that in some cases, the 2000 figures may have reflected overcrowded schools, and other schools that were viewed by the CPS as underutilized even back in 2000. What I was trying to get at was whether these are, in fact, schools that are serving significantly fewer students than they once did.
School Name |
Number of students (2000) |
Number of students, (2013) |
2013 students as % of 2000 enrollment |
CPS Performance Level (3 is lowest) |
| Altgeld | 798 | 443 | 56% | 3 |
| Armstrong, L. | 239 | 98 | 41% | 2 |
| Banneker | 537 | 337 | 63% | 3 |
| Bethune | 552 (’04) | 377 | 68% (vs. ’04) | 3 |
| Bontemps | 654 | 314 | 48% | 3 |
| Buckingham | 42 | 35 | 83% | 3 |
| Calhoun North | 573 | 314 | 55% | 2 |
| Canter Middle | 306 (’01) | 228 | 75% (vs. ’01) | 3 |
| Delano | 742 | 395 | 53% | 2 |
| Dumas | 641 | 331 | 52% | 3 |
| Duprey | 495 | 92 | 19% | 2 |
| Emmet | 736 | 458 | 62% | 3 |
| Ericson | 735 | 510 | 69% | 3 |
| Fermi | 486 | 237 | 49% | 3 |
| Garfield Park | 118 (’10) | 154 | 130% (vs. ’10) | 3 |
| Garvey | 659 | 315 | 48% | 3 |
| Goldblatt | 700 | 236 | 34% | 2 |
| Goodlow | 719 | 378 | 53% | 3 |
| Henson | 445 | 252 | 57% | 3 |
| Herbert | 515 | 355 | 69% | 3 |
| Jackson M. | 501 | 302 | 60% | 3 |
| Key | 670 | 306 | 46% | 2 |
| King | 414 | 284 | 69% | 3 |
| Kohn | 779 | 390 | 50% | 3 |
| Lafayette | 930 | 470 | 51% | 3 |
| Lawrence | 689 | 398 | 58% | 3 |
| Manierre | 815 | 351 | 43% | 3 |
| Marconi | 540 | 233 | 43% | 3 |
| May | 907 | 463 | 51% | 3 |
| Mayo | 497 | 408 | 82% | 3 |
| Morgan | 587 | 236 | 40% | 3 |
| Near North | 97 | 90 | 93% | 3 |
| Overton | 787 | 431 | 55% | 3 |
| Owens | 552 | 328 | 59% | 3 |
| Paderewski | 412 | 172 | 42% | 3 |
| Parkman | 374 | 231 | 62% | 3 |
| Peabody | 478 | 266 | 56% | 3 |
| Pershing West | 231 (’06) | 240 | 104% (vs. ’06) | 2 |
| Pope | 302 | 184 | 61% | 3 |
| Ross | 581 | 344 | 59% | 3 |
| Ryerson | 617 | 399 | 65% | 2 |
| Sexton | 754 | 359 | 48% | 2 |
| Songhai | 878 | 317 | 36% | 3 |
| Stewart | 504 | 256 | 51% | 2 |
| Stockton | 640 | 475 | 74% | 3 |
| Trumbull | 564 | 389 | 69% | 3 |
| Von Humboldt | 1330 | 362 | 27% | 2 |
| West Pullman | 585 | 301 | 51% | 3 |
| Williams | 868 | 256 | 29% | 3 |
| Williams Middle | 124 (’04) | 127 | 102% (vs. ’04) | 3 |
| Woods Acad | 862 | 371 | 43% | 3 |
| Yale | 490 | 186 | 38% | 3 |
The results? Many of these school have, in fact, seen a substantial drop in enrollment over the past 14 years. And many are also among the district’s lowest-performing schools.
The Demographic Rationale
In proposing these cuts, the district has faced charges of racism and classism because nine of ten students affected by this new round of school closures are black. But when you look at Chicago’s demographic shifts over the past decade, this is reflective of where the population declines have occurred.
U.S. Census Bureau data shows a steep decline in the city’s black population of 177,401 from 2000 to 2010. The white population declined by about 52,000. As of 2010, the number of African-Americans in Chicago was 887,608. The city also had almost 855,000 white residents, and just under 780,000 Hispanics. Over the decade, the Hispanic population grew by about 25,000.
The CPS population breaks down as 41.6 percent African-American, 44.1 percent Latino and just 8.8 percent white. African-Americans are disproportionately affected by CPS closings because their population has declined precipitously. Schools that are predominantly Latino are less affected because that’s the only major population growing in the city.
Meanwhile, the stats indicate that white people have mostly not been enrolling their kids in the city’s public schools in the first place. This is the real evidence of Chicago’s profound education inequality, not the fact that CPS schools in the South and West Sides are closing.
Over the past decade, African-Americans have fled the city’s blighted inner-city neighborhoods for suburbs like Matteson, Lansing, Calumet City, Park Forest and Richton Park — and for Southern cities like Atlanta. As a result, the African-American student population in CPS has dropped by more than 55,000 students since 2001, and the district argues that the city’s population drop correlates with communities having low-performing schools.
At the same time, it should be noted that overall CPS enrollment has declined just 6 percent since 2000. CPS has also opened more than 120 new schools during that time, many of them charters, with aggressive plans for further charter expansion, despite the student-enrollment drop.
It’s hard to determine what impact the charter movement has had in draining students away from the specific schools that are closing. But I think that the actions of the CPS should be more worrisome to those concerned about corporatism and school privatization than to those concerned about racism. Especially since the early results of the charter experiment have been very mixed.
The Academic Effect of Closures
If the impact of previous Chicago closings are any indication, most of these displaced kids are likely to benefit from the upcoming changes. A 2009 study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) found that when previous CPS institutions closed, the school closings had little overall effect on the achievement of displaced students. This was partly attributable to the fact that a large number of displaced students were re-enrolled in some of the weakest schools in the system. But displaced students who enrolled in receiving schools with strong academic quality or high levels of teacher support had higher learning gains.
In other words, kids who went from one bad school to another didn’t do worse, and the small proportion of students who went to better schools did better. As a recent Sun-Times article notes, students at nearly two-thirds of closing schools will be transitioned this time to schools with higher academic rankings, while the other third will go to schools with the same CPS ranking.
Meanwhile, CPS has had poor graduation rates for decades. But, as a 2011 report by the CCSR details, CPS graduation rates have risen dramatically and its high-school test scores have also been improving. Yet student achievement is still far from ideal. According to the CPS, only 7.9 percent of juniors in 2011 tested as college-ready.
And as the 2011 CCSR report summary notes, “racial gaps in achievement have steadily increased, with white and Asian students making more progress than Latino students, and African-American students falling behind all other groups.”
The Impact of Poverty
These results shouldn’t be surprising given the fact that black kids in Chicago have a more-than-even chance of living in poverty, and that in just about every country, poor students do worse than rich ones.
In fact, a 2013 study from the Economic Policy Institute found that U.S. students are actually doing better than they appear to on the international PISA test because the U.S. has greater social-class inequality than any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared.
The EPI study summary also notes that “disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.”
A Reason to Hope
So it appears that far from deserving blame, inner-city teachers are doing fairly well with the hands they’ve been dealt. And it’s clear that we need to be giving disadvantaged kids a better set of cards to play with.
On the whole, the overall improvement in CPS schools, the institution of a multidimensional teacher-evaluation process, and the move to get all kids into schools that have basics like libraries and air conditioning are probably positive developments.
It’s hard to determine the overall societal affect of these school closings, from the introduction of large empty buildings in local communities to the impact of making kids take potentially more dangerous commutes to school every day. But the data indicates that these closings are at least shuttering facilities with declining enrollment and mostly placing kids in better-performing schools.
Far from signaling doom and gloom, I think the data overall on Chicago’s schools, and even the data relating to these closings, gives reason for hope. But it’s also clear that attaining superior results for all students will require more than just effective school administration. It will take the societal will to address the economic inequality that is at the heart of the performance gaps we see in American students.