Chicago wants to keep poor students in failing schools for equity
Zachary Faria
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Mayor Brandon Johnson lied during his campaign to become mayor of Chicago, but now he has erased any doubt: He wants to make life harder for poor students by destroying selective enrollment in the name of “equity.”
Johnson said during his campaign that “a Johnson administration would not end selective enrollment at CPS schools.” Now, his board of education is pushing forward a plan to end selective enrollment and force students to attend their neighborhood schools. That selective school enrollment that Johnson is opposed to helps academically gifted low-income students get into higher quality charter and magnet schools that are the highest performing in the city and among the best in the country.
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But academic achievements are racist, according to Johnson and his broken worldview. “Our current system of school choice sorts students based on test scores and other things,” Chicago Board of Education Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland said. “Research has demonstrated the harm that’s caused by this sorting.” The board’s CEO said these schools lead to “stratification and inequity.”
That magic word “inequity” is the key one. In the worldview of Johnson, his board of education, and the activists cheering this decision, any gap in achievement is the result of racism or bias. Therefore, they want to destroy the gap, not by lifting the students performing the worst, but by tearing down those performing the best. Lifting up failing students is too hard. Preventing gifted low-income students from rising up and making their colleagues (and their public school leaders and teachers unions) look bad is the easiest way to make everyone equal and achieve “equity.”
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This is the same view that has led California to eliminate advanced math courses and some schools to eliminate grades entirely. As always, students from rich families will not be affected by this. They can afford tutors, advanced instruction outside of classes, and extracurricular activities to pad their college applications. It’s poor students who are academically gifted and rely on their grades, coursework, and standardized test scores to rise to the top who will be limited. Those students also happen to be racial minorities, meaning Chicago is only going to make its racial inequity worse as it drags those students down.
All the talk of equity in schools is about creating equal outcomes for students, which always means dragging high-achieving students down rather than lifting underachieving students up. If you yoke oxen together, you can only go as fast as the slowest ox. That is how Johnson wants Chicago’s schools to operate because his teachers union buddies want more funding for public schools without the expectation that they need to work as hard or match their more successful charter school counterparts.