Chicago Public Schools' Twisted Goal: End Selective Enrollment Schools While Keeping Nearly Empty, Failing Schools Open

by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner of Wirepoints

There’s little that better highlights the moral bankruptcy of Chicago’s ‘equity’ agenda than a look at how CPS is treating two of its schools: Northside College Prep and Douglass High.

CPS and union officials want to end selective enrollment at Northside, a diverse, top-performing school where blacks and Hispanics excel at the highest level. At the same time, those officials want to keep open Douglass High School, a nearly-empty, all-black neighborhood school that spends over $68,000 per student…and yet not a single one of its students could read or do math at grade level last year.

That’s the official policy of CPS and the union – to eliminate selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools – ’choice’ schools – and to double down on neighborhood schools where, collectively, just 25 of every 100 kids can read at grade level.

The whole move is CPS’ ultimate expression of “equity.” As Mayor Brandon Johnson put it: “When students succeed at a selective enrollment school, particularly black students, all other black students who don’t meet those same standards get shamed.” The mayor is basically saying that if all minority kids can’t excel, then none of them should. 

That’s a vile argument. The students at Northside should be commended and celebrated for their success – not guilted. And struggling students at Douglass shouldn’t be shamed, but rather encouraged and inspired to reach higher levels of achievement. Lowering the bar for these children does them no good.

Unfortunately, those in charge of Chicago remain openly hostile to the measurement of student achievement. “A standardized test that has roots in eugenics to prove the inferiority of Black people should not be the measurement,” Johnson argued during his mayoral campaign.

And there’s a more cynical reason for that hostility: high-performing black and Hispanic students are a threat to the narrative of universal white supremacy and race-based oppression.

And so CPS’ successful schools have to be eliminated.

Closing down success

Last December, the school board passed a resolution in its five-year strategic plan that “shifts away from a model which emphasizes school choice.” That means goodbye to selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools.

But 14 of Chicago’s top-15 performing schools by reading proficiency are selective enrollment or magnet schools. All of them provide minority students the chance to compete at the highest level. 

Take Keller Elementary Gifted School, where 36 percent of students are black. Ninety-six percent of those black students meet or exceed grade level requirements in reading. For the 14 percent of students that are Hispanic, 100 percent are proficient. Both are at par with their white and Asian counterparts.

It’s the same at Northside College Prep, which has some of the best black and Hispanic results in the state. Over 90 percent of its diverse student body is both reading and math proficient.

All those schools – and the students that attend them – are at risk if CPS follows through on its plan. Count on students who can leave the system to do exactly that, and for the many students who remain, to sadly struggle as they attend schools with far lower standards and expectations.

Maintaining failure

On the flipside of the “choice” schools are the hundreds of low-performing, half-empty or worse traditional neighborhood schools that district administrators, union officials and pols consider untouchable.

More than one-third of Chicago’s 474 traditional, stand-alone public schools are currently running half empty or worse, according to CPS’ 2023-2024 school utilization data.

The city’s 20 most-empty schools are operating at 25 percent or less capacity, with the worst less than 10 percent full.

Douglass High School is the worst. With a capacity for 888 students, it has just 34 enrolled, resulting in a 4 percent utilization and a cost of $68,000 per student. Not a single kid was proficient in math or reading in the school in 2018, 2019, 2021 or 2022 (proficiency data was redacted in both 2020 and 2023) – despite the fact that the school had nearly as many employees (22) as it had students (35).

A similar story can be told for schools like Manley and Austin and Hirsch – they are empty, failing schools.

What’s amazing, but unsurprising, is how much money CPS is prepared to spend to keep these places open. The district’s latest capital spending proposal calls for over $1 billion to be spent repairing and renovating those 20 most-empty schools.

Absurdity

Many of these near-empty schools should be closed and sold off. With so few students attending, they aren’t “community centers” anymore. And they’re certainly not centers of learning.

But what do CPS officials do? They call for an end to the city’s best schools – killing the chance for Chicago’s minority students to thrive. 

It’s absurdity in the name of “equity.”

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