The Chicago choice system works exactly as every choice system works: It segregates students by ability.
“But a new WBEZ analysis shows an unintended consequence of the choice system: students of different achievement levels are being sorted into separate high schools.
“WBEZ analyzed incoming test scores for freshmen from the fall of 2012, the most recent year data is available. That year, the district mandated that every high school give students an “EXPLORE” exam about a month into the school year.
“The 26,340 scores range from painfully low to perfect.
“WBEZ found few schools in the city enroll the full span of students. Instead, low-scoring students and high-scoring students in particular are attending completely different high schools. Other schools enroll a glut of average kids.”
And more:
“The findings raise some of the same long-running questions educators have debated about the academic and social implications of in-school tracking. But they also raise questions about whether the city’s school choice system is actually creating better schools, or whether it’s simply sorting certain students out and leaving the weakest learners in separate, struggling schools.
WBEZ’s analysis shows:
Serious brain drain. The city’s selective “test-in” high schools — among the best in the state — capture nearly all the top students in the school system. There were 104 kids who scored a perfect 25 on the EXPLORE exam. One hundred of them — 96 percent — enrolled in just six of the city’s 130 high schools (Northside, Whitney Young, Payton, Lane, Lincoln Park, and Jones). In fact, 80 percent of perfect scorers went to just three schools. Among the city’s top 2 percent of test takers (those scoring a 23, 24, or 25 on their exam), 87 percent are at those same six schools. Chicago has proposed creating an 11th selective enrollment high school, Barack Obama College Prep, to be located in the same area as the schools already attracting the city’s top performers.
“Clustering of low-performing students. Fifteen percent of the city’s high schools are populated with vastly disproportionate numbers of low-performing students. More than 80 percent of incoming students at these schools score below the district average. The schools enroll 10 percent of all Chicago high school students.
Black students are most likely to be affected by sorting. WBEZ’s analysis shows African American students are doubly segregated, first by race, then by achievement. Of the 40 most academically narrow schools in Chicago, 34 of them are predominantly black. Even though just 40 percent of students in the public schools are African American, Chicago has black high schools for low achievers, black high schools for average kids, black test-in high schools for high achievers.
Within neighborhoods, more sorting. Schools within a particular community may appear to be attracting the same students demographically, but WBEZ finds significant sorting by achievement. Especially in neighborhoods on the South and West sides, the comprehensive neighborhood high school has become a repository for low performers; nearby charters or other new schools are attracting far greater percentages of above-average kids.”
Some reform.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, but a lot of parents think this is a *good* thing. I’m always amazed by how many parents will go to amazing lengths to keep their kid away from “bad influences”, whether that be the “bad” kids who disrupt classes or merely the “slow” kids who require more of the teachers’ time. And surprisingly (or not) most parents think their kids are the ones who need to be protected from “bad influences” – almost no parents recognize that their kids might *be* the “bad influences”.
I don’t know whether the lengths I would go to would amaze people, but I would prefer that my children not have disruptive kids in their classes.
FLERP!
That is kind of you to leave more “disruptive” kids for me to teach. Has anybody figured out that kids are disruptive because their needs are not being met? They may be homeless, or hungry, or lacking adequate adult supervision. As a superteacher, I will remedy all problems and accept all criticism due me for being an unworthy teacher in a high poverty school with surprisingly low test scores.
You’re overrating my influence. I just stated my preference. There isn’t much I can do to get disruptive kids out of my children’s classrooms. The more effective remedy would be for me to get my children out of disruptive kids’ classrooms.
FLERP!
Taking your kids out of the disruptive students class is certainly the easiest solution and one that I think many parents choose.
The article points out that schools with a higher percentage of high achieving students tend to be safer. This is certainly high on any parents list of good attributes for a school.
The problem is “high achieving” is defined by a single test. Have one bad day, and you are tracked as “bad” for life. I do think disruptive kids should not interfere with families who want to learn. As long as there is always a chance for the student to be recognized for improving behavior. But I, too, grow tired of the problems other kids cause my own kids with a 5% disrupting class, interrupting, ridiculing, disrespect, violence, and monopolizing the teacher’s time. The problem, as mentioned, these kids can also be the star quarterback, prom queen, or dad as PTA president. Teachers and schools are also unable to deal with the discipline problems due to threat of law suit. My own child was badly beaten in elementary by a kid who could not be disciplined due to a small group of parents threatening suits for any disciplining of their kids. We moved our student out of that district and the violent kid ended up eventually in detention.
MathVale,
Is the problem really that students are sorted based on a single exam? It seems to me that if students were sorted based on a better metric (multiple exams, grades, whatever you think would give a better picture of academic ability) there would be EVEN MORE academic segregation than currently exists in Chicago schools.
The article states students are sorted based on the EXPLORE exam. Yes, it is a problem to sort students based on a single or even any exams. Students are not metrics.
MathVale,
Presumably the problem with using a single exam to decide if a student is high performing or low performing is that the exam will show that a truly high performing student s low performing and a truly low performing student is high performing. These mistakes in classifying students means that there will be less actual segregation by student ability than if we used a more accurate method that made no mistakes in classification of students.
Yes, admitting students to schools solely on the basis of a test score is a really bad idea.
In my district, teachers are assaulted.
No, the exam could favor certain types of students. Bias is not always symnetrical.
MathVale,
Is it your position that alternative methods of assessing achievement for these qualified admission schools in Chicago would result in less segregation by achievement in those schools?
NJ Teacher,
And I’ll bet the teachers are cited for poor classroom management. Some kids are just not managable. Getting something done about it is just not a priority for the powers that be. Leave it to the lowly teachers to handle the problem. Keep the numbers looking good.
Great reasons why public schools should not be allowed to have admissions tests, as several of Chicago’s elite quasi private magnet schools do.
Diane – Did you really mean to say that every school choice program segregates students by ability?
Joe, I agree with you but…
Charter schools often do segregate through a variety of tactics as well. For instance my school district has a demographic that does quite well. That very demographic also concentrates its populations in three large apartment complexes. A new charter is starting next year one block south of our district lines. This charter has bombarded and targeted those apartment complexes with marketing and recruiting while ignoring other geographic parts of our district.
Yes, these things happen. The same charter chain has done the same with two megachurches in another nearby community.
They are basically “rigging” their lottery by creating a schools that will allow for a concentration of familiar cultures.
What should our district do in response since we compete with them in this market system? One thing we could do is create an admissions selective program that is a school-within-a-school configuration to attract those parents to our district. They would find an honors program that separated their kids from mainstreamed classrooms very appealing.
Plus, this has the added benefit of getting the students with the best test scores to stay and boost our ratings in that sphere. (Or simply allow the charter to scoop up these students and then brag about their results.)
See the problem here? School choice advocates have to grapple with the fact that segregation will occur. Since test scores have become the currency by which schools are evaluated, right or wrong, the competition will keep ramping up to get the best students. Leaving everyone else where?
“. . . this has the added benefit of getting the students with the best test scores to stay and boost our ratings in that sphere.”
That is a sad, sad statement on the state of affairs! Along with this one:
“Since test scores have become the currency by which schools are evaluated, right or wrong. . . ”
It’s not a matter of right or wrong, because using those test scores in such a fashion is COMPLETELY UNETHICAL, in other words, COMPLETELY WRONG!!
Duane, I agree with you entirely. But test scores are constantly trotted out and they trump everything in policy discussions and the media.
It is a sad state of affairs but it is what has been happening. I don’t agree with it, but it is the only data that gets crunched. And researchers provide little concern as to its flaws and inaccuracies.
Wow. This really IS the “civil rights issue of our time”!
The civil rights issue of our time….how to resegregate schools.
That seems to be the mission.
What next? A full-scale revival of the KKK?
Don’t count that out – since Obama’s election the SPLC has reported a striking uptick in various hate groups and on-line hate websites.
I don’t believe most parents want racial or even economic segregation; they simply want the best education for their child.
The system is set up so that parents have to choose segregation if they want academic advantages for their child because public education still insists that the needs of poor or minority children outweigh the needs of middle class or non-minority children.
I’m having trouble believing you wrote that with a straight face. Please visit some public schools in poor, minority, urban areas and then visit some public schools in affluent, mostly white areas. The differences are shocking – and not in the direction you seem to believe.
Yes, Dienne, I absolutely wrote that with a straight face.
I think you’re comparing affluent public districts with poor public districts.
I’m talking about within the SAME district; if it’s a majority-poor urban district (like Broad-infested Dallas ISD), elementary school X nestled in an affluent neighborhood gets few resources because the limited resources are directed at the poorest schools.
When Affluent Elementary gets nice stuff or special programs, it’s usually because the parents have kicked in the extra money–but in my district, even that is heavily limited to keep every school equal (equally low, in my opinion).
The numbers back me up–the affluent parents get tired of it and pull their kids out.
The parents are not racist or elitist, but school choice is the only way they can get their kids in schools with the programs they want.
Again, like it or not, look at the percentage of middle-class kids (of any race) in urban districts; it’s pathetic.
“. . . because public education still insists that the needs of poor or minority children outweigh the needs of middle class or non-minority children.”
Bullshit!
I live in a district with a very wealthy south end and a much poorer (though not inner-city) north end. My north-end school with 40% free and reduced lunch absolutely gets less support (financial and otherwise) from the district administration than the south end schools. Most of the district administration is from the south end. While the money for the south end can be used for field trips, special events, and enrichment curricula, the north end schools like mine struggle to have enough books, copy paper, and even tissues. My colleagues on the south end are amazed that I have to carry a crate of copy paper in the trunk of my car for when the copy paper runs out, and that I have to take my students on field trips on public transportation, rather than school buses, because the public transportation is free.
The reason is because Utah schools highly depend on student fees for secondary schools. Because 40% of the students in my school receive fee waivers, versus 10% or less in the wealthier schools, my school starts with much less in the budget. And that’s not counting the things that the district will pay for, such as air conditioning, new carpeting, building additions, etc., for the wealthy schools, but not my school. Why? Because first, almost the entire district administration comes from the south end, so they hear from parents in their neighborhoods. Second, the parents at the south end have more money and more lawyers and threaten to sue. They get whatever they want. We get the leftovers, if we get anything at all. And my district is not a tiny district. We have 70,000 students in the district, which is one of the 100 largest districts in the nation.
The disparity is in Chicago, too. Schools in higher income neighborhoods here are given what they need to thrive, while schools in low income areas are starved of resources.
This is a very interesting article and I wonder if there is any way to construct a school system in a large metropolitan area where every school reflects the characteristics of the metropolitan area.
With traditional zoned schools we end up with highly segregated schools like PS 29 and PS 321 in New York City through a combination of carefully drawing catchment lines to start and families competing to move into the catchment district after those lines have been drawn.
If you force uniformity across schools in the district, the relatively wealthy whom are concerned with their children’s education (as the article says ” High performing students are like gold in a school. Everybody does better around them—including other high-performing students. And it’s not just about test scores. The biggest predictor of whether a school is safe, orderly, and set up for learning is students’ academic achievement. Having top performers makes an entire school easier to run) will tend to leave the district either by moving to a suburb or sending thier children to private school.
As the article points out, even if you manage to have high schools that are all close to each other in SES makup, it does not mean that the classes will be made up of a diverse set of students. If each high school follows Marshal’s lead and has reading classes to help the high school students who can not read AND an IB program for high achieving students, what overlap would we expect in those classes?
Lincoln Park High School seems to make the school work and is attractive to both high and low achieves (though from the graphic it would appear mostly high achieves). That would be an interesting school to study.
Or is the biggest predictor of academic achievement is whether a school is safe. Correlation is not causation and there are likely confounding variables – family income, education level of parents, poverty, access to quality tutoring, lower neighborhood crime rates, transience, health issues, adequate nutrition – just to name a few.
In our society, the biggest difference between rich and poor students from K-grad school is the wealthy are allowed to fail while for the poor and middle class, one strike and you are out. Do poorly on a test, steal a iPod, get a DUI, fail the SAT and your life outcomes are very different depending on your social class. Money buys second chances whether affluenza or having a wealthy parent shield a poor performer in college. The poor and middle class must work harder for less.
MathVale,
You can certainly dispute some of the points in the article, but from an individual parents point of view it really does not matter if safety causes high achievement or high achievement causes safety. Since you desire both for your student, you will seek out high achieving and safe schools. If the relatively wealthy can’t find them in the local urban school district, they can move to a suburban school district or sen their children to a private school.
But you said “The biggest predictor of whether a school is safe, orderly, and set up for learning is students’ academic achievement.” I was disputing your point and your confusion over trying to establish two measures as causation plus ignoring confounding effects, not the article.
MathVale,
That is a direct quote from the article so I don’t see how you are not disputing the article. I will copy that section of the article again for you:
“High performing students are like gold in a school. Everybody does better around them—including other high-performing students. And it’s not just about test scores. The biggest predictor of whether a school is safe, orderly, and set up for learning is students’ academic achievement. Having top performers makes an entire school easier to run.”
Again, this is a direct quote from the article.
I believe the vast majority of parents want good neighborhood schools as long as the rights and needs of all kids are balanced.
Although that balance has been preserved in the suburbs so far, urban districts abandoned it decades ago.
Right or wrong, countless people I know across the country feel that urban schools usurped the noble goals of desegregation with an anti-white agenda that soon extended to include Asians as well.
I, in fact, experienced this when I enrolled my own child in an urban district. I was told that although he qualified for GT services, he may not get them because he was white and the GT spots were limited for white kids. I said, “But he’s a minority in this district!” And the reply was that “Whites abused majority status pre-desegregation, so they may not now claim minority status to reap those benefits.”
This didn’t happen in 1970; this happened in 2001. My child’s school was 10% Anglo and 100% of the Anglo kids were middle class. The rest of the school was non-Anglo and poor. And yet time after time after time, the white kids were held back from all sorts of things (Hispanic and Black kids could request classes with their friends; white kids in a grade level had to be evenly divided among homerooms to prevent a “majority white” class even though that was numerically impossible given the number of whites).
Once, my kindergartner daughter came home and asked why her culture wasn’t special.
So, predictably, after the first round of white flight and now black flight, the schools are completely out of balance economically. Most urban schools are majority poor, which means their academic performance is often lower. And yet, instead of trying to rebalance the schools to benefit all kids, any incentives to attract higher performing kids (likely middle class, so likely white) are fiercely resisted.
Middle-class parents want fairness and balance, but that isn’t an option in urban districts unless they go to screened schools. It’s also the absence of the middle class in urban districts that allowed the reformers to swoop in.
We can’t fight the reformers if we don’t realize that, as with the Nazis, much of what they promise sounds good to beleaguered, broke middle-class parents who’ve experienced what my family experienced.
What is GT!
Gifted/talented?
Yes, gifted/talented.
In Dallas ISD, kids were given a battery of assessments to determine need for GT.
White kids who met the criteria could not access the program if the % of whites who qualified exceeded the % of whites in the school (or something like that). Our first-grade year, I think 10 families who wanted to make the neighborhood school work bailed out for magnets or private or the suburbs. At the magnets, the % of white kids was higher and so their child could get the GT services only if they went to a magnet (screened) school.
Now in Dallas, some admins are refusing to suspend non-whites if white kids attend the same school because they have been told that the % of non-Anglos suspended for fights/drugs/on-campus sex/etc is too high when compared with % of white kids suspended.
I could understand this if white kids who committed the same acts were not be suspended, but that’s not the case.
THIS type of stuff is what is causing parents to embrace reformers whether we like it or not.
Wow! There is a range of problems I knew nothing about.
I talk about all of these issues and there effects in my new book, On the Same Track http://www.amazon.com/Same-Track-Twenty-First-Century-Resegregation-Education/dp/0807032972. The article’s authors used it as a source. Yes, this is replicated in other choice systems. The authors mention NYC and it happened in Boulder, Colorado as well.
We cannot throw away kids because we see them as “disruptive”. We discipline them and teach them other strategies.
We cannot throw away kids because they have a learning disability, or are low achievers. We give the school and its teachers the supports that it needs to make sure the kids can keep up. The philosophy of sort and select and segregation has gotten us into the mess we are in.
Many who post here lament the decline in vocational education for those students not interested in going to college. It seems to me that the matching of academically low achieving students to the vocational high schools in Chicago might be seen as a good thing to those that condemn a “one size fits all” approach to high school education. Do you agree?
No, that would be a very bad thing. Your bias against and ignorance about vocational ed programs is stunning. Advances in technology used in “vocational employment” and advances in the institutional knowledge and technology in the building trades, for example, mean that underachievers will not do well in Vo Ed settings. You need to get your understanding of vocational employment up to 21st century standards. Some people are satisfied pushing paper and information all day long and others have to work with their hands as well as their minds. Your elitism about the different value of VoEd vs. college is an anachronism. Just look at the training and skill set needed to deploy and stand up IT infrastructure. This is not your grandfathers VoEd.
Jon,
Are the Chicago Vocational Carrier Academy and the other vocational schools in the story my grandfather’s vocational education? That is where those that score poorly on the exam tend to go to school. Do you think that a poor idea?
Ideally, a neighborhood school would be flooded with services for the disruptive and the low-performers WITHOUT punishing the on/above-level kids.
However, if the above-level or on-level kids are predominantly white/Asian in a district that is majority minority, then a whole race thing is raised that is not the fault of the white child.
Or, if the above-level kids are predominantly middle-class in a district that is majority poor, then a whole elitism thing is raised that is not the fault of the middle-class child.
THIS is what makes charters, choice, vouchers and “reform” so attractive: there is in urban districts the expectation that middle-class kids and/or whites/Asians should always defer and yield any programs to the disruptive and/or the low-performing.
I’d assert that it’s actually the uncompromising refusal to allow any hint of sorting that might benefit strong students–especially if they are white or Asian–that has gotten us into the mess we are in.
No, we cannot throw away innocent children because they are disruptive. But there has to be a better way to remediate that doesn’t completely sacrifice the education of kids who are ready, willing, and able to learn. Whether it is because of the incentives of NCLB/RTTT, or the prevailing philosophies in ed schools, or both, any classroom with a critical mass of disruptive and/or low-performing kids is going to be a place where a bright or merely proficient child will be hard-pressed to get a decent education. Too often the needs of the kids who are a safe bet to score a “3” are completely shunted aside.
The white enrollment of Chicago’s public schools is 9%, an embarrassingly low number given that the city is 34% white, as are 50% of CPS teachers. The academically narrow 100% minority schools probably haven’t had a single white student for at least two decades. There simply aren’t enough high-performing students to spread evenly among all schools in numbers that will make a meaningful difference for the school and not hurt the high-performing kids.
Sorry “their” not “there”
In Chicago, we are very lucky to have a handful of quality education reporters, and Linda Lutton-the author of this piece- is one of our best. Those of us in education already knew the intentional sorting process of a “choice” system, but this report really gave us some hard data to reference.
The implications of this report center around 1) debunking any “miracle school” claims (ie Chicago’s flagship charter, Noble St-takes higher scoring kids. They do not have a “secret sauce”. Their academic program is mediocre at best, they have large numbers uncertified/inexperienced teachers, high teacher turnover rates, repressive discipline systems, high student pushout rates, and a test-prep curriculum-in many ways a #FalseChoice for parents), and 2) as Diane points out, this is a new segregation-a separate and not equal form of schooling based primarily on test scores, although this ‘sort’ also has racial and class disparities.
The Chicago Public Schools is intentionally diverting funds to selective enrollments and charters on the basis that they are doing better academically. As this report points out, the sorting of students accounts for a large majority of difference between schools. As neighborhood schools are starved, the students still attending those schools-who are disproportionately the highest needs students-are left with the fewest resources, the largest class sizes, the least access to libraries/librarians, art, music, etc.
Basing a school system on “choice” discriminates against students with special needs, English Language Learners, students suffering from living in deep concentrated poverty, students with severe trauma and PTSD, students in the foster care system, and immigrant families.
Also, Illinois already has one of the most regressive school funding formulas in the country (that is, the districts that have the highest needs get the least funds since IL relies heavily on local property taxes to fund local schools leading to these savage inequalities.) So Chicago’s highest needs students are doubly screwed. The rights of these children are being violated.
Hope this doesn’t double post, had some tech issues.
A few points:
– While there seems to be political ways of gaining entry into the top schools, the normal way isn’t based only on one test. It’s a combination of 7th-grade scores, entrance exam and standardized test scores. It used to include attendance, but the flu epidemic a few years back caused them to drop that.
– in addition, since race could no longer be considered in admissions, they have tried to recreate those conditions using census economic data plotted geographically. Generally, about half those accepted have the highest scores, then students from four census blocks divided evenly. It’s a formula they’re continuing to tweak, but if you live in an affluent census area and your student gets a B jn 7th grade, your chances of getting into Northside or Payton are very slim. On the other side of the economic spectrum, there is a minimum cutoff for the top schools out of concern that the student can handle the accelerated program.
– Complicating all this is the fact that Chicago has always been a very segregated city. Selective enrollment schools have opened on the south and west sides, and as that excellent article points out, they do draw African American and Hispanic students to them. But traveling to someplace like Northside College Prep from the far south side would mean a commute on public transportation of two hours or more each way. Things have been changing, especially on the north side, but that kind of change takes generations.
– finally, I do not know whether the selective enrollment schools receive more money or if they simply are losing funding at a far lower rate than neighborhood schools. These are schools people seek to enter so their enrollment stays relatively stable. Meanwhile neighborhood schools see their potential enrollment being poached by the selective-enrollment schools, magnet schools and now charter schools. In addition, since those selective-enrollment schools draw highly interested parents, outside fundraising tends to be more successful.
None of what I’ve listed takes away from or contradicts what was included in the BEZ report. But there were some misconceptions in some of the comments that I felt needed to be corrected.
As a follow up, here’s a link to the Chicago selective enrollment schools cutoff scores. http://www.cpsoae.org/Selective%20Enrollment%20Cutoff%20Scores%202013-2014.pdf
I didn’t realize that they’d tweaked things so far more students from the tiers are accepted than purely ranked students.
High score is 900. A “B” in 7th grade essentially knocks 25 points off a score.
For those who find all this strange – and it can be considered strange, consider that there’s a kind of sorting that goes on in suburban areas too: school districts with higher test scores also tend to be in areas with higher costs of living.
Chicago did not propose Obama Prep HS. in a part of the city already well served by such schools, that was all Rahm, so much so that CPS leadership was apparently caught flat footed by his announcement.
Parents of high performing kids are not going to put them in classrooms with low performing kids. Be they liberal or conservative parents.