Current Issue

School closings

As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.

Cover Stories

April 03, 2013

Most of the corners along 16th Street, in the heart of the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, are vacant lots. On snowy winter days, no one clears the sidewalks in front of the lots, forcing pedestrians to trudge down the middle of the street.

Here and there, a run-down building still stands—some house little neighborhood stores, others are boarded up and tagged with graffiti. Only two new buildings exist: a fire station and an apartment building on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. once lived in 1966 during his stint in Chicago to protest the city’s segregated housing.

April 03, 2013

When CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett narrowed down the initial list of schools targeted for possible closure, she put out this challenge to communities: Explain why your schools are underutilized and low-achieving. Byrd-Bennett said she wanted to hear about issues of school leadership, teacher turnover and professional development. “I want to know, how do they expect to address these issues?” she said in February. “I do not want to be interpreted as saying they are at fault. I just want them to explain their current situation.”

April 03, 2013

Where are all the children who should be crossing 71st Street?

The bell has just rung at Bond Elementary School in Englewood, and students are coming out of the front door. Some older children linger, talking and chasing each other on the sidewalk in front of the school.  But it is a blustery winter day and most of the children rush home.

April 03, 2013

When CPS closed neighborhood schools in the past, the action rarely resulted in substantial academic improvement in the schools left behind. Today, most of these schools are struggling to hold on to students.

Catalyst Chicago analyzed the current academic performance of neighborhood schools in areas affected by school closings and found that two-thirds of these schools now are at Level 3, the lowest rating possible on the CPS performance scale. Almost 90 percent are considered underutilized by CPS standards.

February 04, 2013

In 2008, a federal judge freed CPS from the dictates of a long-standing desegregation decree that had kept at least some racial balance in the district’s elite selective schools.

To try and maintain that balance in four selective high schools—Walter Payton, Jones, Northside College Prep and Whitney Young, bar-none the best high schools in the city—CPS officials started a program that offers seats to promising black students from the district’s worst elementary schools, who otherwise would not have qualified for admission.

February 04, 2013

The sign taped on the door says “No Boys Allowed.” Inside the room, donuts and small, white Styrofoam cups of orange juice and water sit on a desk.

Several young women slowly walk in with a look of consternation on their faces. “It is critical down there,” says one.

“That is crazy,” says another.

Teacher Magen Kilcoyne, whose curly, sandy-colored hair is pulled back and who is dressed in black cargo pants and a black “Bowen Class of 2012” T-shirt, shakes her head as she plops down copies of author Nathan McCall’s book “Makes Me Wanna Holler” on everyone’s desk.

February 04, 2013

In an effort to expose more students to college-level work, CPS has in recent years pushed more students to participate in Advanced Placement classes.

The district has included AP enrollment in its school achievement formula, grading principals on the number of students who take AP classes and pass AP tests. In some ways, the policy has worked: Since 2000, CPS has quadrupled the percentage of students taking AP classes citywide, with participation increasing by an average of 13 percent every year.

February 04, 2013

Selective schools and military high schools (which also have selective admissions criteria) have some of the highest pass rates for students of color on Advanced Placement tests. One of those schools is Rickover Naval Academy, housed in the Senn High campus in Edgewater.

In spring 2011, 52 percent of the Latino students at Rickover who took AP classes passed at least one test. In spring 2012, the rate fell to just 35 percent for Latinos, but half the school’s 12 African-American AP students passed an AP exam.

October 23, 2012

Dressed in a gray suit, Doug Maclin stood behind a podium facing the panel of CPS board members, looking a bit uncomfortable. He was at the May meeting to brag about the changes he had accomplished during his short tenure as principal of Chicago Vocational Career Academy.