Chicago DUers with kids in school:

[Brigid]

Are your kids' schools being closed? If so, what are your plans?

[frazzled]

1. I don't have kids in school, but ...

I read the local news, which is the extent of my knowledge.

All of the school buildings proposed for closing are being consolidated into other schools (which are also said to be underutilized). So it's really a question of schools being consolidated. There are also some "co-locations"--programs being moved to another school as a "school within a school." Six schools have been proposed for turnarounds. You question sounds as if you might think programs are being closed down, and that people are simply left in the cold on their own. That's not really the case: they will be reassigned to other schools or can choose to go elsewhere to another program.

On local NPR yesterday I heard a discussion. Families can choose to go anywhere in the city, including magnet schools like Science and Math Technology, etc. Of course, there is probably more demand than spaces in a lot of the "good" schools. Or they can go to the newly consolidated school.

The biggest issue here has been safety: kids having to cross gang lines, which are very specifically neighborhood bound. That is why they closed no high schools, because that is where the gang/safety issue is greatest.

Here's a list of the buildings to be "closed," that is, consolidated into other buildings, co-located, or turned around.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cps-school-closings-20130321,0,2802079.htmlpage

[HiPointDem]

3. that's why they didn't close any high schools *this time*. because previous closings

were incriminated in the rise in gang violence.

One of the signs carried by CORE protesters during the June 19, 2009, picket of the Hyatt Regency Hotel listed all of the schools that had been closed by Arne Duncan between the time he was appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Chicago's public schools (July 1, 2001) and the end of December 2008 (by which time he had been announced as the choice of Barack Obama for U.S. Secretary of Education.

In January 2009, Duncan added another 22 schools to the list of 63 on the sign above, bringing to 85 the schools he had tried to close. What is left out of the corporate narrative about Arne Duncan's school closings is that most of the schools Duncan closed were not "failing" in any reasonable sense of the word. In fact, a large number of those schools were eliminated because they were in way of real estate developers with Chicago clout (e.g., Jacob Riis Elementary or because Duncan wanted to vacate the school so that he could give the building away to a charter school developer (many of those on the list, including Austin, Calumet and Collins high schools and Donoghue, Howland, Bunche, Morse, and Gladstone elementary schools)

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=746


*Those* schools were closed because they were "failing" -- *these* schools are closed because they are supposedly 'underutilized'.

It's all bullshit, because charter schools keep *opening*.

The open enrollment policy was put in place to facilitate charters.

[HiPointDem]

2. 91% of cps students are minority. i doubt many DUers have children in them.

41% black, 44% hispanic.

[frazzled]

5. I have (non-minority) friends who sent their kid to high school in CPS

Jones Prep, in the South Loop (even though they live on the far north side), and a good school. I also met a couple from a MoveOn action in 2006, both MIT grads, who had moved from a suburb into the city specifically so their son could go to Whitney Young (that's where Michelle Obama went to high school). Both these are "selective enrollment" schools (not charter), meaning you have to apply.

But you're right. I don't know how it got that way, because I only moved here in 2004. But that the district is 91% minority is amazing and distressing.

I had an interesting insight when we got an invitation the other day to a fundraiser for an arts/social project that will be taking place at the home of some very famous leftists, whom I shall not name. (We got invited because an East Coast artist who is a friend of ours is going to be there.) I was remembering that my husband's cousin once told us that he had taught the kid to whom this couple were guardians when he was in law school, and how amazing and wonderful he was. I wanted to be able to introduce ourselves in that way, but I couldn't remember the young man's name, so I googled. And I noticed that ... where had these famous leftists and people involved in education sent him? To the University of Chicago Lab School, of course. I don't blame them a bit. But it's story after story, aside from the paltry two I've noted above.

I used to live in the Chicago area back in the 1970s. The district was in disarray then and its still in disarray now, it seems. Not altogether, but in many ways it just can't keep up. It was a mess before Richie Daley got here; and before Arne Duncan got here; before Rahm Emanuel got here. I know there are many excellent teachers and many excellent pockets and programs, but when you have 91% minority, mostly poor kids, it's a really tough thing to turn around. Especially when the city lost so much population, mostly in minority neighborhoods, between 2000 and 2010: the biggest loss of population in the country.

My kids went to city public schools, but in a city where there was a 50-50 white-minority population. It was the most excellent education I could ever imagined them having gotten. I was very saddened that just before we left there, they were changing the district to move back to "neighborhood" schools, which meant of course, racially and socio-economically segregated schools, imo. In Chicago, I don't think there are very many racially and socio-economically segregated schools. They're pretty much all minority black and hispanic, with a smattering of white and Asian kids.

[HiPointDem]

6. as you say, jones prep is a selective enrollment high school. it isn't open admission; it's

admission by test score.

jones prep is 31% hispanic, 29% white, 24% black, 11% asian.

http://schools.chicagotribune.com/school/jones-college-prep-high-school_chicago/

that's why i said "most" DUers. I was going to add "except in selective enrollment or suburban schools" but I didn't want to put too fine a point on it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. My child is in CPS

No, her school is not closing.