The Chicago Public Schools Board of Education recently made a bold statement to address historic wrongs by pursuing policies that increase equity and reduce “opportunity gaps [that] are driven by long-standing structural racism and socio-economic inequality … this is the foundation upon which our current school choice system was built.”
Many outsiders condemned the statement as a threat to close selective enrollment schools and charters, something never stated in the document. Rather, the board, for the first time in its history, acknowledged the uneven and inequitable impacts of choice. Pitting schools against one another with an enrollment system that ranks and sorts students by test scores has created a more segregated and unequal school district.
As graduates of Whitney Young Magnet High School, we can attest to the promise and peril of an approach that produces clear winners and losers. For far too long, our schools have run families through a “Hunger Games” style obstacle course of feast or famine.
We became Dolphins in the early 1990s and 2000s. As one of the only integrated schools in the city, Whitney Young fostered our intellectual and social growth in innumerable ways. We met lifelong friends from all neighborhoods, racial and economic backgrounds who challenged our assumptions and worldviews in ways we cannot begin to measure. If only the majority of Black and Latino students in Chicago could access similar opportunities and experiences.
Whitney Young was originally conceived as a school that would fortify and revive the West Side, established in 1975 as a beacon of hope in a neighborhood pummeled by poverty, disinvestment and subsequent violence.
Plans were hatched in 1970 to build the school on an empty lot that was burned by arson fires in the 1968 riots catalyzed by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The school was literally a phoenix rising from the ashes, designed to provide Black children in the area with the world-class education they were denied in a segregated school system that, through the 1960s, forced Black students to learn in trailers to block integration.
In the 1990s through the early 2000s, the district was still governed by a federal desegregation decree. Whitney Young’s student body was over 50% Black throughout the 1990s and ranged from 30%-40% in the 2000s.
Whitney Young increasingly serves privileged students
Now, according to the state school report card, Black enrollment is just 17.1%, white enrollment is 25.1%, Asian 24.3% and Latino enrollment 28.5%; simultaneously, the number of students living in poverty has declined precipitously to 36%. In other words, one of the best schools in the city has increasingly served the most privileged students, a pattern that tracks with other top high schools in Chicago.
We applaud the Board of Education’s mandate to ensure “that all students receive the opportunities and resources that meet their unique needs and aspirations; prioritizing those most harmed by past, and ongoing, disinvestment and inequitable racial and economic policies and practices.”
This clarion call to action is a long time coming to right past wrongs that have increasingly reproduced the wrongs themselves. While the original vision guiding Whitney Young’s construction was a bold new approach to addressing decades of racial segregation, the model itself has become an extension of the very segregation it hoped to address.
We desperately need new models like the joint CPS and Chicago Teachers Union pilot of Sustainable Community Schools. The model requires deep community and student praxis to build curriculum, after school activities, and professional development for school staff. This is a key strategy to bridge the divide between the selectivity of Whitney Young and the comparatively starved neighborhood programs.
When we fully invest in SCS it will open up a myriad of career pathways, defined by the school communities themselves, that will greatly improve student interest and engagement. For example, new initiatives could focus on green technology skills linked to engineering and computing to tackle the imminent threat of climate change and ameliorate the cumulative impacts of pollution and toxins that contaminate too many of our frontline communities.
We will never address systemic racism without anti-racist practices and policies. The Board of Education is asking us to embrace the original intent and spirit of civil rights crusader Whitney Young. Now is the time to implement the original vision for the school with fidelity.
Jackson Potter is vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. He is a lifelong Chicagoan, Chicago Public Schools graduate and teacher. Crystal Gardner is associate political director of United Working Families. A lifelong Chicagoan, she grew up and still lives in Austin.
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