Chicago Public Schools comprise a vast, labyrinthine system boasting over 316,000 students across 630 locations. Many rank among America’s best. Many others are chronically underperforming Title 1 schools, with high volumes of students coming from economically disadvantaged families, ranking among the nation’s worst. AI could play a massive role in undoing the socioeconomic and racial gaps in educational outcomes that have come to characterize American metropolises like Chicago. But there’s a problem: AI programming is accelerating much faster in the nation’s high-income K-12 schools.
I was an evaluator for a nonprofit that provides student support services to Chicago high schools. Whenever I made my initial rounds at a school, a quick peek at its technological resources was often a reliable predictor of its ability to meet students’ broad needs. The differences in the quality and volume of computing labs at a school like Lincoln Park High School on Chicago’s wealthy north side, where the local population is 75% white, versus Raby High School, located in economically distressed East Garfield Park which is 83% Black, were stark.
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