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.
