John Mulcrone

Dr. Parks
Sociology in Action
Chicago Public Schools: A Land of Extremes

Chicago is a huge city. With over 2.7 million residents, it is one of the biggest cities in the world.

With all of those people, a large, well-funded public school system is necessary. In many cases, that is

true. Chicago Public Schools provides a spectacular education to thousands of students every year.

However, due to a number of factors, some schools in the city struggle to provide a decent learning

environment to their students, especially at the high school level.

To understand why Chicago has an issue with educational inequality, you first have to understand

how the city’s public schools are arranged. There are eleven “selective enrollment” high schools in the

city. To enroll in one of these, a student must take the CPS selective enrollment test and be granted

admission. The eleven selective enrollment schools are Brooks, Hancock, Jones, King, Lane Tech,

Lindblom, Northside Prep, South Shore, Westinghouse, and Whitney Young. These are some of the top

high schools in the entire United States of America. Competition to gain entry to these schools is fierce.

If a child is not admitted to one of the aforementioned schools, parents will sometimes decide to send

their child to a private school or a charter school rather than their local “neighborhood” school. This

often leads to neighborhood schools being filled with the poorest and lowest performing students

academically. Many of these schools also are struggling keep enrollment at a feasible level. When there

are not many students at a school, that school will not receive as much funding or resources. CPS

allocates funding based on how many students are in a school. It creates a situation where you have these

students that need the most help but have the fewest resources available to them. This is further

discussed in this WBEZ article. The Washington Post also did a story last year on the city’s 2013

decision to close 50 Schools, a decision that was met with a great deal of backlash at the time.
To illustrate some of the disparities between these schools, take these statistics. The college enrollment

rate of Northside Prep (the city’s top performing school) was 96 percent in 2017. That same year,

Douglass, a small neighborhood school on the city’s west side, had an enrollment rate of 32 percent.

While these two schools are extremes, it illustrates the difference between the two ends of the spectrum.

Chicago Public Schools also publishes “on-track rates” for 9 th graders. A student is considered on-track if

they accumulate at least 5 credits in that first year. Across the board, students in selective enrollment

schools are more likely to be on-track than students in regular neighborhood schools. There are also

other environmental factors that impact this educational inequality. In Julia Burdick-Will’s article School

Violent Crime and Academic Achievement in Chicago, she points out that schools in areas plagued by

violent crime tend to have much lower grades and test scores. It is hard for students to actually focus and

learn when they need to worry about the danger around them. In Ginny Lane and Amy White’s journal

article The Roots of Resegregation: Analysis and Implications, they argue that part of this massive

epidemic of educational inequality is a purposeful attempt to continue to drive a wedge between races and

social classes. While I find that to be a bit extreme, there’s no denying that much of the educational

inequality in Chicago is partly drawn across racial lines. The struggling neighborhood schools are largely

scattered throughout the South and West sides of the city, and populated largely by students of color. In

John R. Logan, Elisabeta Minca, and Sinem Adar’s article The Geography of Inequality: Why Separate

Means Unequal in American Public Schools, discusses how schools populated with students of color are

more likely to underperform. All of these issues combine to hit small, neighborhood schools in poor

neighborhoods the hardest.

The media often covers the struggles of many of Chicago’s local schools, but they sometimes fail

to put these struggles in a context of race and class. It isn’t always stressed how kids in neighborhood

schools often don’t receive the opportunity to succeed just because of the situation they are born in. One

latent function of some schools in Chicago being thought of so highly is that some of the neighborhood
schools like the ones discussed here are forgotten. It’s important that all schools in the city provide their

students ample opportunity to succeed.

Burdick-Will, Julia. “School Violent Crime and Academic Achievement in Chicago.” Sociology of
Education, vol. 86, no. 4, 2013, pp. 343–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43186790.
Lane, Ginny G., and Amy E. White. “The Roots of Resegregation: Analysis and Implications.” Race,
Gender & Class, vol. 17, no. 3/4, 2010, pp. 81–102. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41674753.
Logan, John R., et al. “The Geography of Inequality: Why Separate Means Unequal in American Public
Schools.” Sociology of Education, vol. 85, no. 3, 2012, pp. 287–301. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/41507163
“School Data .” Chicago Public Schools, cps.edu/SchoolData/Pages/SchoolData.aspx.