Current Issue

School closings

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

race and class

November 02, 2005

Shiva Singh Khalsa and his wife, Shabad Kaur Khalsa, went through more than a dozen schools before they found the perfect fit for their son, Amar Dev.

The Khalsas are Sikhs and Amar, 6, wears his long hair tied in a ball and practices a vegetarian diet. They finally decided on Passages Charter, an elementary school founded to serve a diverse immigrant student population.

"My wife looked at 13 schools—the best schools in the city—and nothing held a candle to Passages," Khalsa says.

November 02, 2005

Brennemann Elementary recorded a couple of troubling trends in the three years between 2002 through 2005. Total enrollment fell by 28 percent and a smaller share of its students were living in the Uptown school's attendance boundaries.

Other neighborhood schools in the community were noticing similar shifts in enrollment. Arai, which will close next year, and McCutcheon were losing students, too.

November 02, 2005

It's a Tuesday afternoon, and a group of 8th-graders loosely file into John Yolich's social studies class at Uplift Community School.

"Let's get comfortable," Yolich tells the kids draped in loose-fitting T-shirts who slowly break away from private conversations and find their seats.

November 02, 2005

To understand the identity crisis in Uptown, walk down the 900 block of West Wilson Avenue, just off of Lake Shore Drive. Just past Clarendon Avenue stands Uplift Community School, one of the first to open under Chicago Public Schools' Renaissance 2010 initiative. A sign in front reads "Arai," the name of the middle school in the same building that is being phased out this year.

October 05, 2005

Jean Carter-Hill, an Englewood resident for 37 years, has seen scores of nonprofit groups, intent on turning around the poverty-stricken community, come and go. Their plans never got off the ground.

"We had organizations come from outside the area telling us what they wanted us to do," says Carter-Hill. "People lost patience. There was internal fighting. Everybody wanted to be in charge."

But a new group that initially got off to a rocky start has made Carter-Hill take notice.

October 05, 2005

State Rep. Mary Flowers remembers fondly growing up in Englewood in the 1960s. Working two-parent families lived there, she says. So did notables such as journalist Vernon Jarrett, former state Sen. Charles Chew and Richard Stamz, then a popular personality on black radio. People looked out for other people's children.

"We were like a family," says Flowers, who lived on West Normal Parkway, across the street from a teachers college that has since moved and been renamed Chicago State University.

September 02, 2005

Educators have long known that many Latino students do not complete high school. Still, education models have remained the same. It is imperative that school districts listen to students, teachers and parents and begin to implement new approaches.

July 29, 2005

Overcrowding is often considered to be primarily a concern in Latino schools and neighborhoods, but a small yet significant number of overcrowded elementary schools are predominantly African American, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data for the current school year.

About one out of four, or 32, overcrowded schools is majority-black the analysis found. About half are predominantly Hispanic; largely white and integrated schools make up the remaining one-fourth.

July 29, 2005

For many years, the Chicago Board of Education has concentrated federal Title I money in schools that rated highest on a special poverty index.

A steep sliding scale—ranging this year from $200 to $980 per low-income student—provided schools with the highest poverty rates proportionately more of this federal discretionary money and won praise from researchers studying urban district funding strategies.

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