At busy board meeting, race back in mix in magnet and selective school admission policy Posted By Rebecca Harris and Sarah Karp On Wednesday, December 16, 2009
In Government and Policy Reversing himself, CPS CEO Ron Huberman said today that race will be a consideration in admissions to magnet and selective enrollment schools – initially as a backstop to a new policy that relies heavily on other factors.

Huberman also predicted that CPS will wind up back in court, perhaps eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, defending the policy.

Previously, CPS officials ruled out race as a consideration. But at today’s Board of Education meeting, Huberman said that once students have gone through the admission process as laid out in the new policy—passed unanimously—he will look at the racial and socio-economic makeup of the incoming classes. If the populations of magnet or selective enrollment schools are skewed so that there’s less diversity, he said, he will adjust the admission criteria.

“We will do a gut check before sending out admissions letters,” Huberman said. “We will look to see how many white students got in, how many African American, how many Asian?”

In other developments at the board meeting:

•    Huberman pledged that he will close no high schools this year because of safety concerns. The administration also presented the board with detailed guidelines for closing schools or putting them on turn-around status. Officials said that under previous the administration, the criteria for closings—mainly under-utilization and poor performance—were unclear.

•    During a long, contentious public comment period, a group of parents and activists called for a new neighborhood high school to be opened in Carver Military High School. Instead the board gave the go-ahead to Chicago International Charter School to open  a school serving students from 6th to 12th grade in the old Carver Middle School. The activists opposed that move.


The change in course on the magnet and selective enrollment admissions policy comes after weeks of growing discontent with the proposed new policy. In September, a federal judge terminated the desegregation consent decree that required CPS to use race as a factor in determining who was admitted into magnet and selective enrollment schools.

For magnet schools, Huberman’s initial proposal reserved seats for all siblings of currently enrolled students, set aside half the seats for neighborhood children and divided the rest among students in four socio-economic categories, determined by the area in which a student’s family lives. For selective enrollment schools, half of the seats would be awarded by test score ranking and the rest portioned out by socio-economic category.

Announced in early November, CPS officials have spent the last month testing the proposal in six public hearings and meetings with aldermen and community groups. Many expressed concern that the policy would serve to shut out black and Latino students, especially because many of the best magnets are in predominantly white neighborhoods and white and Asian students tend to score better on the admissions test.

Acknowledging those concerns, Huberman revised the proposal to reserve up to 40 percent of seats for neighborhood children in magnets and up to 40 percent awarded based on test scores in selective schools.  Huberman could lower the neighborhood and test score rank portion to 30 or even 20 percent if they are causing the schools to re-segregate.

This policy will be in place only for a year. Huberman said that in January he will lay out a more formal process for community input to develop a new policy. He said that after thorough vetting by the legal department, race might be part of the policy created next year.

By the time Huberman made his presentation to the board, many community members had left. Earlier, Phil Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, led a group of at least 50 people into the room chanting “Educate or Die.”

Jackson and others accused the district officials of rushing a decision and said that they were wrong to discard race from the admissions’ process.

School closings

Huberman will announce in January which schools he intends to close and turn around. All of them will be subjected to the new criteria that he laid out on Wednesday. 

In the past, these drastic steps were taken when a school was under-utilized or had too many students performing below grade level on standardized tests.

Now, CPS officials will look at a broader range of factors, including value-added test scores, attendance and freshmaen course completion rates  to determine which schools could be closed for poor performance. 

(Also on Wednesday, CPS posted Performance Policy Reports for each school showing how many points they garnered. Schools that got less than 33 percent of possible points are eligible to be shut down or turned around.)

There are also clearer criteria for closures triggered by declining enrollment. A school would have to have both fewer than 250 students, and be using less than 40 percent of its building’s design capacity. Magnet schools and early childhood centers will not be closed.

The closing policy includes a “Student Bill of Rights,” developed partly in response to findings from a report by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, that found that many students fell behind after their schools closed but that those in better-performing schools were more likely to catch up.

Now, schools will not be closed unless students can be assigned to a better-performing receiving school. If that school is more than 1.5 miles from a student’s home, the district will provide transportation. The district will also try to provide extended instructional time in all receiving schools.

The district will also complete a “safe passage plan,” with the Chicago Police Department and the Chicago Transit Authority. Huberman pledged that the plan would be shared with parents.

Chicago Board of Education member Norman Bobins pointed out that such steps are easier proposed than taken. “It’s all in the delivery,” he told Huberman, who responded that staff would monitor whether Student Bill of Rights benchmarks had been met for each student in a closing school.

Fenger High School

Testimony before the board grew fiery and disintegrated into several shouting matches as parents and activists decried the violence faced by high school students from the Altgeld Gardens area who travel as far as five miles to attend Fenger High School.

“Every passing period, I’m paranoid because I don’t know if I’m going to get jumped on,” Fenger student Deontea Jones told the board. “We need a neighborhood school so we can have safe passage, and don’t have to worry.”

The neighborhood lost a high school when Carver High School was turned into Carver Military Academy. About two dozen members of the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a coalition opposed to Renaissance 2010, gave the board a proposal for a new Hazel Johnson School of Environmental Justice that would share Carver Military Academy’s building, in Hegewisch.

Cheryl Johnson, executive director of People for Community Recovery, said that since the conversion violence has increased.

In the hallway after the testimony of Johnson and others, Chief Administrative Officer Robert Runcie said it was unlikely that the board would grant GEM’s wishes. He said that the CICS charter school set to open in Fall 2010 in the old Carver Middle School had been vetted by the community’s Transition Advisory Council, set up by the Office of New Schools to consider such proposals.

“CICS are high quality schools, and they have long waiting lists,” he said. “A cross-section of community members have determined that this is what they want.”

But Johnson and others said that since the TAC met, the situation has deteriorated, as evidenced by the beating death of Fenger High School student Derion Albert. They said it was an emergency and they wanted a public school that had a local school council. Charter schools are also public, but they are generally run by not-for-profits and have few, if any, parents or community members on a governing board.

In the meantime, Runcie told parents, CPS is addressing Fenger’s problems by bringing in motivational speakers, holding assemblies, and increasing the number of security guards at the school. He said the district had agreed to provide transportation to students who transferred out of Fenger – so far, more than 150 have accepted.

But Rico Gutstein, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who helped write the neighborhood school proposal,   told board members that “the transfers are not the issue.” He asked if they would consider an emergency meeting.
“…Or do you want the blood of another child on your hands, because you refuse to hear the people’s voices and act quickly?”

Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart, addressing the board about an unrelated issue, also weighed in.

“Carver was built for the Altgeld community. Give the school back,” she said.






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