This is the third installment in our occasional series on poverty and segregation in Chicago’s schools.
The Chicago Public Schools system is often disparaged, but there’s little evidence that the district is worse than others at educating schoolchildren. What CPS struggles with is educating poor kids. As does everyone else. CPS just has many more of them.
On the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, given to children in grades three through eight, 59 percent met or exceeded standards in reading statewide, compared with 48 percent of CPS students. In the apples-to-apples comparison of low-income students, however, the state and Chicago totals were identical. In math, among solely low-income students, Chicago nosed out Illinois:
All this suggests a different approach for improving Chicago’s public schools. Rather than concentrating on raising test scores, school and city officials should focus on sharply reducing CPS’s low-income proportion. Do that, and test scores and graduation rates will take care of themselves.
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CPS’s low-income proportion climbed to 82 percent by 1994, and it’s remained in the 80s since. The statewide proportion has increased from 37 percent to 50 percent since 2000.
