New fast track to CPS top-flight schools? :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education

New fast track to CPS top-flight schools?

ECONOMIC DIVERSITY | Enrollment system can hurt poor kids in gentrified areas

January 24, 2010

BY ART GOLAB AND ROSALIND ROSSI Staff Reporters

You could live in a $600,000 home within walking distance of Wrigley Field, yet when your kids test to get into one of Chicago's elite selective-enrollment schools, they may be competing mostly with children from the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

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These town homes in the 1400-1500 blocks of North Clybourn, in the shadow of Cabrini-Green, are worth more than $500,000, but they're in the Tier 1 census tract.

(Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)

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Homes such as this on North Bernard in Albany Park are valued at $300,000 to $550,000, but the neighborhood is also dense with apartment buildings and is in Tier 1.

(Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)

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These bungalows on West Aurthur, selling for as much as $400,000, are part of a single-family residential oasis in a Tier 1 tract in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

(Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)

A quirk in the Chicago Public Schools' new enrollment system puts children from parts of some economically better-off neighborhoods such as the Near North Side, Albany Park, Rogers Park and Uptown in the same category as children from the city's poorest areas, such as Englewood and Lawndale.

That's because the new system is designed to emphasize economic -- rather than racial -- diversity, and it assumes that where you live determines how well-off you are.

Some, however, fear that wealthier families living in census tracts classified in the system as being "poorer" will now be able to "game the system" for admission to elite schools. Studies have shown that test scores closely track with income, and students from wealthier families will likely have an edge if they test against poorer students.

Likewise, poor students who are members of some of the last remaining low-income families in recently gentrified neighborhoods now classified by CPS as "richer" could be at a disadvantage because they would be testing against students from wealthier families.

With the new system, the neighborhood where a student lives has suddenly become a major factor in whether that student is accepted at a selective enrollment elementary or high school.

That worries Phil Jackson, founder of the Black Star Project, who protested the changes at a recent School Board meeting.

"You can game the census tracts," Jackson said. In gentrifying census tracts, "usually the people who are performing the best are probably going to be'' children of wealthier parents, he said.

Asked about the criticism Saturday, Mayor Daley was vague.

"We're trying to give a good education for every child. We have to give everybody options, but we have to give them a good option in the community," Daley said.

Under the new system, approved in December, 40 percent of seats in elite schools such as Northside College Prep or Keller Regional Gifted will go to the highest-testing students citywide.

Sunday, January 24, 2010