Category: Public Policy

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.

 

A video has been blazing across social media and drawing attention to the growing wealth inequality in America. Honestly, I’ve been a little surprised at people’s shock at the clip, because the data isn’t new.

But maybe I shouldn’t be. Because you need go no further than an article earlier this week by The Associated Press to see why people might be misinformed. The article creates the distinct impression that the rich may already be bearing too great a tax burden.

The stance the article takes is a bit disturbing coming from a major and respected news organization — and so dubious that I would not be surprised to learn that Scrooge McDuck wrote the article.

The article begins: “The poor rich. With Washington gridlocked over whether to raise their taxes, it turns out wealthy families already are paying some of their biggest federal tax bills in decades even as the rest of the population continues to pay at historically low rates.”

The article goes on to further explain how average tax bills for the wealthy are among the highest they’ve been since 1979. It doesn’t say tax bills for the wealthy are the highest they’ve been since 1979, merely that they are among the highest they’ve been. Which reads a little weaselly to me — or is that ducky?

Even if the statement is true without such equivocation, it should be surprising to no one, given that 1979, just before the Reagan era, is a nearly ideal cutoff point for a gold-swimming duck spinning a pro-wealthy tax narrative.

If you venture further back in history, the story becomes much different. In his recent book on income inequality, Beyond Outrage, Robert Reich notes that “in the half century spanning 1958 to 2008, the average effective tax rate of the richest 1 percent of Americans — including all deductions and tax credits — dropped from 51 percent to 26 percent.” In the ’50s, the wealthy paid nearly double the total tax percentage they do now.

The AP article goes on: “The average family in the bottom 20 percent of households won’t pay any federal taxes. Instead, many families in this group will get payments from the federal government by claiming more in credits than they owe in taxes, including payroll taxes. That will give them a negative tax rate.”

But the article doesn’t mention that, as the viral video demonstrated, 15.1 percent of those Americans aren’t  living large and tax-free. They’re living below the poverty line. And the article also fails to note that the poor pay more in state and local taxes than the wealthy:

Meanwhile, in his book Reich also notes that as recently as the 1980s, the top tax rate on capital gains was 35 percent. And as recently as 2000, the estate tax was 55 percent and started after $1 million, but is now just 35 percent, and kicks in at $5 million.

But this perspective is also missing from the AP article. And more importantly, you have to get to the 25th paragraph of the piece to learn that “average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2009, increasing by 155 percent.”

Who wouldn’t take a modest increase in overall taxes in return for a 155 percent increase in after-tax income? I sure would. This is the real story — and it’s buried. It’s buried so far that some newspapers cut the article off before it got to this essential fact. Pretty clever, Scrooge McDuck. Pretty clever.

The reality is that in every year of income growth in America since 1979, at least 85 percent of that growth has gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, as you can see in this interactive feature from the Economic Policy Institute.

Clearly, if any wealth redistribution has occurred, it’s been to the wealthy. If anything has been trickling, it’s been trickling up. And while there’s certainly waste in government, from our crooked healthcare system to our sometimes-dubious no-bid government contracts, the poor are not an appropriate target for further cuts.

In fact, as Reich points out, in 2012 “the U.S. Treasury would receive about $50 billion less than if the tax code didn’t allow for charitable donations — or about the amount the government would spend in 2012 on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is what remains of welfare.”

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that, as Reich also notes, “only an estimated 10 percent of charitable deductions are specifically directed at the poor or organizations expressly dedicated to helping the poor.” So the rich get nearly as much in charitable tax deductions for their pet causes as the poor do in welfare.

In a nation as wealthy as America, it’s disgraceful for anyone to go hungry or homeless while others have so much. And taxing the wealthiest Americans more to help the poor is a reasonable measure that could also help balance the budget.

This idea has been proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus in its People’s Budget, but has received little attention. The proposed budget suggests an additional tax bracket of 45 percent that kicks in over $1 million in earnings, and a 49 percent tax bracket for earnings of over $1 billion. It eliminates corporate welfare for oil, gas and coal companies, invests in job creation and infrastructure, and implements a progressive estate tax. And by making these changes, it creates a budget surplus within 10 years.

If you make more than $1 billion in a year, let’s face it, you’re doing pretty well. You’ve already got a room full of gold to swim in, and you won’t be hurting if you give a little more.  For America’s children — and its duck nephews — this approach probably warrants more consideration.

I was a late arrival to social media, drawn there reluctantly to stay on top of friends’ events in the post-Evite era. But in my time on Facebook, I’ve quickly gotten exasperated by the constant posting of graphics that support ideas that may well be true, but that do so using facts that are either unattributed or simply false.

Today was a case in point. I received the following photo from a few different people, accompanied by this text:

This is the most telling image you’ll see all week. You know how they say that if it bleeds it leads? It turns out that’s not true. If it bleeds white, it leads. You need to share this, for journalism.

The napkin’s scrawl points out the copious coverage a shooting in a white neighborhood got in comparison to four shootings in black neighborhoods. But the problem is that the first shooting mentioned in this article actually occurred in West Rogers Park. And Rogers Park breaks down as 39 percent white, 26 percent black and 24 percent Hispanic. In other words, it would be more accurate to describe it as an ethnically diverse neighborhood than as a white one.

Among the neighborhoods listed for the shootings at the bottom were New City, which is 57 percent Hispanic, and Gage Park, which is 89 percent Hispanic. So two of the four neighborhoods listed in the meme as “black neighborhoods” are predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, not black.

And while the Facebook post says, “If it bleeds white, it leads,” the article itself does not actually define the race of the woman in Rogers Park who was shot, or of the people shot in any of the other neighborhoods.

Moreover, a subsequent Chicago Tribune article indicated that the Rogers Park shooting was indeed the most serious. That woman was shot in the neck. The other victims were shot in the shoulder, the hand, and two in the leg. One of those leg wounds was an accidental, self-inflicted one.

It is likely true that shootings in largely minority neighborhoods receive less media attention. And when it comes to your chance of getting murdered, there’s no question that you’re much, much safer as a Chicagoan in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood.

But in the instance of this specific article, charges of racism seem to be misguided. And some of the facts being asserted in the photo are simply wrong.

The reality is that if someone is passionate enough about a topic to share their views with the world, they should also be diligent enough to make sure their facts are correct, especially if they’re doing it “for journalism.” And people passing along those perspectives should also make sure that what they’re spreading is the truth.

Because even if you are on the right side of an issue, if your facts aren’t right too, you may not have the credibility you need to effect real change.

 

 

In recent months, a rash of shootings have brought the city of Chicago national notoriety. With a final tally of 506 murders in 2012, more than any other American metropolis, the city has been dubbed by lazy journalists everywhere as “America’s murder capital.”

This has caused gun-rights advocates to hold Chicago up as the smoking gun in the gun-control debate. Look at Chicago, with its restrictive gun laws, they say in the comments section of every online article about guns. Chicago’s murder rate proves that gun laws don’t work.

Gun laws don’t deter criminals, the argument goes. Gun laws only prevent law-abiding citizens from being safe. As Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, was quoted saying in a recent New York Times article, “The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens, and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey.”

Virtually all Americans on both sides of the gun debate agree that that criminals — people who wouldn’t  pass an NICS background check — should not have access to guns. In fact, a recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that even 93 percent of gun households, and 85 percent of those living in a household with an NRA member, supported universal background checks for all prospective gun buyers.

And this is where the Chicago pro-gun argument crumbles. Because more than 80 percent of Chicago’s 2012 homicide victims had criminal records. The people whom we all agree should NOT have access to guns are overwhelmingly the ones being killed by guns in Chicago.

Eighty percent of 506 is 405. That means, at most, only 101 people who could pass a background check were murdered in Chicago in 2012. So you could fulfill gun-lover fantasies and arm every law-abiding citizen in Chicago with a concealed weapon, and even if the results defied all the data and that approach somehow saved some lives, it’d barely make a dent in Chicago’s homicide rate.

Meanwhile, people like Newt Gingrich would have you believe that because of gun restrictions, Chicago is such a murderous place that many people are afraid to even visit it. In a recent appearance on ABC News, he said:

“Well, I think it’s amazing that we’re having all this discussion about gun control. The President’s hometown of Chicago is the murder capital of the United States … Vice President Biden doesn’t seem to want to go there … It’s illegal to have all the guns that are killing people in Chicago. If gun control works, Chicago ought to be safe.”

I’m guessing that Joe Biden isn’t exactly shaking in his boots. Because when it comes to murder, it’s pretty safe to be a white guy in Chicago — even if you don’t have a Secret Service detail. According to the  2011 Chicago Murder Analysis from the Chicago Police Department (CPD), 19 non-Hispanic whites were murdered in the city in 2010. In 2011, 20 were.

Chicago is a city of over 2.7 million people, nearly 32 percent of whom (864,000 people) are non-Hispanic white. Using 2011 numbers, 864,000 ÷ 20 murders = 43,200. So if you’re non-Hispanic white in Chicago, you have a 2.3 in 100,000 chance of being murdered. That’s less than half the overall U.S. homicide rate of 4.8 per 100,000.

Chicago’s violence is intrinsically linked with poverty, drugs and gangs. And it is mostly a murderous place for those who are young, male, poor, black or Latino, and living in bad neighborhoods. According to the CPD, more than 90 percent of 2011 murder victims in Chicago were male. The average age was 28. More than 74 percent of murder victims were black, and almost 19 percent were Latino. And CPD officials estimate that more than a quarter of the victims came from warring factions of just one gang.

The 2012 Chicago homicide victims tracked by the Red Eye were concentrated in a handful of communities in the South and West Sides. Places like Austin (with 37 murders), Englewood (20), Greater Grand Crossing (23), Woodlawn (21), Chicago Lawn (22) New City (24), and Roseland (18) were killing fields. Whereas several well-known neighborhoods where white professionals congregate — including the Loop, Lincoln Park, North Center and Lincoln Square — had a combined zero murders.

As a longtime Chicago resident, I have very little experience with Chicago’s gang-afflicted neighborhoods. But I see the parents in these neighborhoods cry on television when their kids get shot. And I have never seen any of them, or their community leaders, argue that the problem is that there just aren’t enough guns in their neighborhoods. It’s mostly old white guys who don’t live in Chicago — guys like Richard A. Pearson and Newt Gingrich — who say things like that.

We need to protect the people in these neighborhoods. The kids who grow up to be the criminals responsible for these murders must be held responsible for their actions. And too many of them aren’t. But as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, we’re also doing very little to give the kids in these neighborhoods the positive alternatives that most other Americans take for granted.

African-American and Latino males who are freshmen in Chicago Public Schools have only a  3 percent chance of getting a bachelor’s degree by the time they’re 25. It’s harder for these kids to get a good education than to join a gang. And it’s tougher for them to get an asthma inhaler than to get a gun.

While improving inner-city education and healthcare is an important but difficult battle, a lot could be done to stop the influx of guns right now. Chicago could enact stronger penalties for illegal gun possession, which now results in an average six-month sentence.

Neighboring communities could help stop the flow of guns into the city, since nearly 20 percent of Chicago crime guns are traceable to one gun shop  just a few miles south of the city’s border. The state of Illinois could enact commonsense laws to prevent gun trafficking — without denying law-abiding gun owners their guns. It could require firearm registration, restrict purchases and sales of multiple firearms, require reporting of lost or stolen firearms, and regulate private firearm transfers.

Nearby Indiana could enhance its laws similarly, instead of having some of the weakest in the nation. And at a national level, we could actually try to keep guns out of criminal hands, instead of allowing 40 percent of legal gun sales to take place without any background check at all.

And those who keep arguing that Chicago’s murder rate means that gun laws don’t work could do a few things too.

For one, they could stop disingenuously ignoring the examples of New York City and Los Angeles. They are the only two U.S. cities with more people than Chicago. They both have fewer murders than Chicago. And they are located in states — New York and California — with more restrictive gun laws than Illinois.

They could also stop calling Chicago the nation’s murder capital, since that’s really only a fitting moniker if true is false and math is hard. On a per-capita basis, Chicago’s not even in the top ten.

That’s right, ten cities in the U.S. with populations exceeding 250,000 had higher murder rates than Chicago in 2011. And so did 10 more between 100,000 and 250,000 in population. Twenty cities in the U.S. are more murderous than “America’s murder capital,” the supposed smoking gun of gun-control failure.

What’s America’s real murder capital? New Orleans. That city struggles with some of the same gang, drug and poverty issues that violent Chicago neighborhoods do. It also has some of the loosest gun-control laws in the nation. And in 2011, it had more than triple the murder rate of Chicago at 57.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. If you really want to find a smoking gun, that’s probably the first place you should look.