Curious City: Were Chicago's public schools ever good?
(Source: Metro High School yearbook, 1978)
Our questioner Julie had completely forgotten she asked this when we reached out to her. She lives in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood and didn’t want to say much more about herself. But here’s what she wanted to know:
There is reporting about how Chicago Public Schools is slowly getting better. Was there ever a time when they were good?
As an education reporter, I’ve heard many versions of this question during my time covering Chicago Public Schools, and that’s partly why I wanted to take a stab at answering it. But I also wanted to tackle this question because it asks us to think about our relationship with the public schools and what we expect them to do.
Measuring a school or school district’s success or failure is no easy feat, and it’s even harder to measure over time because the standards and metrics have changed significantly. A recent study from the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research stated that “discrepancies are due to myriad issues with publicly reported data — including changes in test content and scoring — that make year-over-year comparisons nearly impossible without complex statistical analyses.”
Because the definition of “good” is subjective, we solicited your help in defining how to use it while reporting this story. Some of you suggested using standardized test scores, which go back decades. (Schools haven’t used the same test over time, making comparisons difficult.) Others suggested we consider grades or safety.
Curious City is a news-gathering experiment designed to satisfy your curiosities. You ask your questions about Chicago, the region and the people who live here, vote for your favorites, and together we discover answers. It’s your Curious City.
Ultimately, we decided to look at when CPS did a good job preparing students for successful careers; that is: When did the district best prepare people to be productive, taxpaying citizens? Career readiness is a consistent expectation, and it’s possible to compare one era to another.
The 1940s, a Golden Era?
Based on this measurement and what historians and other experts suggested, the 1940s would seem the best contender for the district’s golden era of public education. Schools provided valuable workforce training that was needed in the local industries, like steel and iron work, retail and office or clerical jobs.
The 1940s saw the culmination of a series of unprecedented investments in public education, mostly from the federal government. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 funneled millions of dollars into vocational training. Chicago schools set up programs in accounting, drafting, welding, and even “household arts.”
After a lag during the Great Depression, the war effort and New Deal programs brought even more vocational programs. One example: In 1939, the city built Chicago Vocational High School, and quickly turned it over to the U.S. Navy to train young men in aviation mechanics. (By the late 1940s, control of the school returned to the Chicago Board of Education.)
Another example to point to: More than a dozen local unions collaborated with and supported the programs at Washburne Trade School to train future electricians and carpenters.
(Courtesy Chuckman's nostalgia and memorabilia website)
New Deal programs of the 1940s brought more vocational programs to public education, like this automobile shop class at Albert Grannis Lane Manual Training High School, now named Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago's North Center Neighborhood.
But Dionne Danns, an education historian at Indiana University, provides a fast reality check when it comes to assessing the era. She points out that, at the turn of the century, and into the 1940s, people did not even need a high school diploma. In fact, most people weren’t even finishing elementary school.
“You didn’t have to go to school for a job,” Danns says. “You went to school because they wanted you to go. They were opening more schools because they wanted immigrants to go to school and learn what it meant to be American.”
And more importantly, Danns says, the 1940s can’t count as a golden era of public schooling because schools were not providing education to all children; African Americans, Latinos and other minority groups did not have access to the same public schools as whites.
Women were just beginning to gain access to colleges and careers. Many attended the Lucy Flower Vocational School, which offered a home economics program and some two-year programs in sewing, dressmaking and millinery (hat-making).
A study out of Loyola University pegged Chicago Vocational High School enrollment in 1946 at Curious City: Were Chicago's public schools ever good? | WBEZ 91.5 Chicago:
