Chicago’s public schools are emptying. Politics
makes it hard to fix
Segregation intensifies a problem schools face
all over America
Mar 16th 2023 | CHICAGO
FROM THE OUTSIDE, Hirsch Metropolitan
High School, in Greater Grand Crossing, a neighbourhood on the South Side of
Chicago, looks as grand as ever. Its handsome building, constructed in the
mid-1920s in red brick with turrets in cream terracotta, occupies most of a
city block. The problem is on the inside. The school, which was built for 1,100
pupils, has just 113 on its books. That is far too few to provide a broad
education. “They don’t even have enough funding, barely, to have full classes,”
says Maria Owens, a lawyer who volunteers on the school’s council. Though the
school has been able to start a theatre programme, other extra-curricular
activities are lacking. The swimming pool and music room are out of use.Hirsch is one of dozens of schools across
Chicago, mostly on the west and south sides, that are struggling with enrolment
that has collapsed. Though schools across America are losing pupils, in
Chicago, the problem is particularly acute, partly due to the city’s policies,
and partly due to its deeply ingrained racial segregation. Chicago’s mayoral
election—the run-off of which is on April 4th—has focused so far almost
exclusively on the problem of crime. Yet both candidates have backgrounds in
education. Paul Vallas is a former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools;
Brandon Johnson is a former public school teacher who is backed by the
teachers’ union. And education has a history of tripping up Chicago’s
politicians.The basic problem is an “overproduction
of schools”, says Stephanie Farmer, an academic at Roosevelt University. In
2006, Hirsch still educated almost 900 pupils. But since then, dozens of new
charter schools have opened, even as the number of school-age children has
fallen, particularly in majority-black neighbourhoods like Greater Grand
Crossing. The result is that there are too few pupils to go around. And since
2017, money has been distributed to schools on a per-pupil basis. That means
that schools that shrink invariably have to make cutbacks. Teachers are laid
off; discretionary classes and activities are cancelled; sometimes classes of
different year groups are even combined. In 2019, Ms Farmer calculated that
most of the underfunded schools in the city are in majority-black
neighbourhoods.Yet money is only part of the problem. Though,
on paper, funding follows individual students, “equity” grants from the school
district mean that smaller schools do in fact still get more. These have surged
since the pandemic, thanks to higher property-tax revenues and federal pandemic
relief cash. For example, according to state figures, in 2022, Hirsch spent
$42,000 directly per pupil, against a figure of $17,000 across the Chicago
school district in general. Extra spending “is basically what’s holding the
schools together right now”, says Andrea Zayas, who teaches at a charter
elementary school.But it is not enough to stop schools from
losing pupils. A school with just 100 pupils needs almost as many janitors,
security guards and librarians as one with 1,000, which means even very large
per-pupil budgets do not always go far. Nor can cash solve the problem that
there are not enough children for a sports team. According to data collated by
ChalkBeat, a website, from 2018 to 2022 high schools with fewer than 250 pupils
lost a third of their enrolment. Larger schools grew slightly.The obvious solution is to consolidate
schools—reallocating some buildings and closing others. Yet that is politically
difficult. Starting in 2013, Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s former mayor, closed 50
struggling schools, largely to save money. But there were unintended
consequences. Pupils who moved sometimes found they were persecuted by gangs at
the schools they arrived at. Research by the University of Chicago found that
those moved also saw their test scores plummet, at least initially. All that
convinced many black voters that the closures were simply a way to remove money
from their already struggling neighbourhoods, says Daniel Anello of Kids First
Chicago, an education NGO.So far, neither candidate for mayor has
outlined what they would do. Mr Johnson’s education plan argues that more
social services should be located in underused school buildings, to help share
the burden of maintaining and staffing them. That could be helpful, but is
unlikely to be enough. Mr Vallas has said that he is committed to school
choice, but he has not explained what should happen to the schools parents
decline to choose. They may both be hoping to dodge the problem: in 2025,
control of schools will be handed to a 21-member school board, which by 2027
will be fully elected, with no mayoral input.Yet the problem is more urgent than that.
A new teachers’ contract is due to be negotiated next year, and teachers are
likely to push for pay increases (though over a third already make more than
$100,000). A black hole in Chicago’s municipal pensions plan (which covers
non-teaching staff at schools) may have to be filled from the schools budget.
And kids are already struggling to catch up from pandemic school closures. Just
a fifth of Chicago’s high school students are able to read and do maths at
their appropriate grade level, a far lower rate than in 2019. Whoever wins the
election may find that, after months of talking about crime, education is in
fact what defines their first term. ■