Chicago parents give school closures a poor report card
A year after nearly 50 schools closed, overcrowding and safety are big concerns
CHICAGO — It’s the end of the first day of school, and Irene Robinson is making the rounds outside Anthony Overton Elementary, in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood on the city’s South Side. She shakes hands with other parents and stops a young boy running down the block: “Did you think you was going to walk by without giving me a hug?” she asks.
In the school’s windows is the reflection of children getting off the bus, and the summer air buzzes with breathless young voices. With the hubbub, it’s easy to forget that the building has been empty for the past year.
Now, Overton is just a bus stop on the route that former students travel to get to their new schools.
“I have nine grandchildren who go to the Chicago Public Schools, but six of them was kicked out of their school because they closed Anthony Overton,” says Robinson in a voice that quavers. She was interviewed last year by Al Jazeera America about her opposition to the closures; one year later, Robinson is just as angry.
Despite months of parent and union protests, the CPS boardvoted to shutter 49 schools in May 2013 — most of which, like Overton, were located in the city’s impoverished South and West Side neighborhoods. Of the 12,000 students who were affected by this decision, 90 percent are African-American.
The Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, a group appointed by the Illinois state legislature to bring accountability to Chicago’s school closings and consolidations, called it “the largest downsizing of Chicago’s public school system ever undertaken.”
CPS is the third-largest school district in the country, and it has long struggled to equip its schools, which now number 665, down from more than 700 last year. Most were shut down, with students shifted elsewhere, while others were consolidated; according to the district, the decision was made to fix a $1 billion budget deficit and to better redistribute resources among schools in low-income areas. But one year later, the closing costs have overrun their budget and CPS insists it remains in a financial crisis, which has led to more cuts for neighborhood schools.
Parents who were assured that the school closures would provide more resources and a better education for their children say the promised benefits have yet to materialize, and many feel their children are worse off now than they were before.
Meanwhile, the number of charter and selective-enrollment schools has grown: more than 33 charter-school campuses have been opened since 2011, with seats for 23,000 students, according to the task force.
Pauline Lipman, a professor who studies education reform at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says, “The closures have created root shock — the same kind of effect as pulling a plant out of the ground.”
Overcrowded classrooms
For CPS, whether a school is eligible for closure is a matter of math. The district uses a complicated formula that relies primarily on the number of children per classroom, a calculation that came under fire for not Chicago parents give school closures a poor report card | Al Jazeera America: