Chicago Public Schools’ Twisted Goal: End Selective Enrollment Schools While Keeping Nearly Empty, Failing Schools Open
24th January 2024
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.