Chicago Board of Education Passes Plan That Could End School Choice in the City
They don’t care about the kids. They consider the move a “critical step toward closing opportunity and achievement gaps.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson promised he would not touch the selective-enrollment high schools, the one bright spot in the dismal school district.
Don’t ever believe politicians, especially far-left ones like Johnson.
Johnson’s Board of Education passed a resolution that could keep kids out of those high-achieving schools and remain in the failing schools.
This new “policy could eliminate the opportunity for students to test into one of CPS’s selective high schools.”
The resolution starts on page 21 (emphasis mine):
Reimagined Vision: A community-informed plan that brings together educational and operational
goals to:
1) ensure fully-resourced neighborhood schools, prioritizing schools and communities most
harmed by structural racism, past inequitable policies and disinvestment;
2) ensure equitable funding and resources across schools within the District using an equity
lens;
3) transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that
further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from
neighborhood schools;
4) include the community in designing plans for previously closed and currently
“underutilized” schools that reimagines these buildings as community assets, hubs, and
resources
From NBC Chicago:
Some parents in the district however feel the move could wind up hurting students by taking away opportunities to test into selective schools, like Walter Payton College Prep.
“The selective enrollment schools are one of the shining stars of CPS. They are actually something that CPS has done right,” Katie Milewski, a CPS mother said. “And it needs to be supported.”
“Neighborhood schools absolutely need help. No doubt about that. I’m not sure why those concepts are mutually exclusive,” Milewski continued. “Why neighborhood schools can’t be built up, at the same time of supporting selective enrollment and magnet schools?”
The district’s statement makes me want to puke (emphasis mine):
“The Board’s resolution aims to guide engagement and development in partnership with the District on a new strategic plan with an emphasis on strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting all students and closing opportunity and achievement gaps. Work on the District’s next five-year Strategic Plan has begun and will continue this spring with community engagement and outreach, beginning with the District’s Shape Our Future Survey as well as current engagement sessions about the District’s facilities master plan. The new strategic plan will be approved by the Board of Education in the summer of 2024. While CPS will work with the community and its City partners to co-design the strategic plan, the parameters call for ‘a model that centers neighborhood schools by investing in and acknowledging them as institutional anchors in our communities, and by prioritizing communities most impacted by past and ongoing racial and economic inequity and structural disinvestment.’ Specific community engagement sessions about the development of the new strategic plan will begin in February.”
We’ve always known the Chicago Board of Education and teachers don’t care about the kids. They were the worst during COVID.
If they truly cared about the kids, they would have invested in these schools long ago. How does depriving students of a great school like Lane Tech (my dad went there!) help a school?
I do not understand how keeping those kids who can get into those schools in the neighborhood schools helps those who cannot test into the college prep schools.
How does this work? (Rhetorical question. I know the answer.)
The Chicago Tribune‘s Editorial Board scorched Johnson and others who do not want anyone to succeed (emphasis is mine):
The resolution is fertilizing the soil for a five-year “transformational” strategic plan, apparently coming this summer from Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. The resolution calls for “a transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.”
That’s obfuscating language, of course, which is this administration’s preferred mode of communication, especially when it comes to launching trial balloons like this one.
“Transformation” is a Pravda-esque word for remaking something the way the people in power want it to be remade. “Transition away” minimizes change that many people, especially working-class Chicagoans of color, don’t want. And, yet worse, the resolution accepts the false binary that selective-enrollment schools hurt neighborhood schools, when a decent system would improve the latter even as it retains the former.
The Editorial Board is correct. No matter what they say, we all know how this will end: no more school choice.
Chicago leaders insist they don’t see these schools falling apart. Parents can still send their kids to the schools!
But that expectation could change if people in the community say that’s what they want. Officials plan to hold meetings over the next few months for the public to weigh in on how they want this transition to take place.
“This plan needs to be guided and informed by the community,” Board President Jianan Shi said. “The goal is that we’re able to change [the] current competition model so that students are not pitted against one another, schools are not pitted against one another.”
That’s a massive pile of horse crap. It is all about the Chicago Teachers Union and politicians.
Johnson used to organize for the CTU. The CTU literally had him in its pocket when he ran for mayor, too.
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Interesting how the left claiming to be looking out only for the children always stops school choice in favor of the NRA donor class.
NEA, not NRA
It’s going to be up to the parents to stop this crap
“Investing” means hiring new teacher union members, which will increase the union’s ability to help Johnson remain in office.
The only way to get quality education is for the CPS to get competition from competitors.
Illinois needs tuition vouchers!
Throwing dollars at schools that have failed to educate for more than 40 years is just plain stupid.
AZ has a model for real choice with $ that follows the Student to the educational choices of the Parents that best fits the Student. Beg Ed is terrified of actual competition b/c they know they can’t compete. The only thing that keeps them on the grift is their monopoly on public funding. Allow the Parents to utilize those per Student dollars and their empire crumbles.
How can we make it crystal clear to parents that the Teachers Union is only about making their employment richer–it really has ZERO to do with the kids, with the students, with any educational goals or practices? How can we help parents understand that the Teachers Unions only care about the kids when it helps them line their pockets?
The first thing I did when I graduated high school was leave Illinois. Even as a kid I could see it was a steaming, fetid, progressive shitpile.
The mayor’s 5 year plan, reminiscent of some of Stalin’s in predictable outcome, spells out its goals as such:
“…strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting all students and closing opportunity and achievement gaps.”
This is the very essence of “equity” and the deconstructive maleducation that is the result of kowtowing to the Marxist teacher’s unions. You want an education gap? It is the one between the unsuccessful government schools and the private, or better, homeschooling options. There’s no better way to keep the populace compliant than depriving them of the tools to better themselves and be successful (read it: non dependent on the government) than the joke that is public education nowadays.
One question: where do the Chicago “elite” send their kids to school?
When all of the kids are stuck in failure factories, they will all be equally mis-educated
Confirmed: Gubmint schools are merely perpetual job programs for adults; not the best educational choice for students.
*change my mind*
I think they sold themselves short, here. They meant,
Reimagined vision optics view look dream
The whole resolution sounds like nothing but the sort of typical empty-minded marxist blathering that low IQ university pets learn phonetically and repeat endlessly to anyone unlucky enough to find himself within hearing distance of one of these retards. They are idiots who are playing at being intellectuals but they come off like bull dykes playing out their demented versions of “a man”, just walking around spitting and farting, scratching their make-pretend balls, and trying to pick fights with every little guy they see.
Another great thing Governor DeSantis has done.
I believe there is $8700 available to any student who wishes to attend any school in Florida.
Stay in your failing school if you wish or enroll your child in a Catholic school a charter school that will kick out the troublemakers so that the rest of the children learn
Madness! I taught in a Title I school in D.C. (1967) where the test (and reality) disparities were so great that I ended up using the best students to assist the others, which may have helped some slower students in that environment, there was little ability to advance the better students, although they actually learned more to fulfill their roles.
Fast forward to Obama/Biden 2023. We have 2 Grand kids who tested into Lane Tech – both very talented; both excelled; both received an excellent education provided by suprelative teachers.
If Chicago actually follows this policy, how many aware parents will move to States more dedicated to a meaningful education? How many talented minority (and White students) will be deprived of the “public” education they deserve?
On the plus side, we can all see how highly the Chicago Teachers Union and the NEA value students and “education”.
A personal note: In 1967 as a teacher I was paid $5,500 a year – a significant diminution from what I made in New York in construction.