What’s remarkable about Chicago’s schools is not only how deeply segregated they are, but how long that’s been true—and how blase everyone is about it. Except for a handful of selective-enrollment and magnet schools, the schools have been nearly all black, brown, and low-income for more than 25 years now. The schools were also segregated in the 1960s and 70s, but in a different way: the enrollment was about half white and half black, but the two halves went to different sets of schools, with conspicuously different conditions.
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Segregated schools would be a problem even if the students in them got equal academic educations. Schools prepare students socially as well as scholastically. Racially and economically separate schools prepare students not for life in an increasingly diverse nation, but for more segregation. Kids who attend poor African-American schools are much more likely to remain in poor African-American neighborhoods when they grow up than kids who start out in such neighborhoods but attend integrated schools.
School desegregation wouldn’t be quickly and easily accomplished in a city and region that are residentially segregated, and fresh ideas for moving in that direction are needed. But this isn’t a challenge we should keep shrinking from simply because it’s hard. We’ve already sacrificed the futures of countless kids for generations.
Things at Bradwell did improve, slightly, because of the pressure put on the board by the school’s parent-teacher council, headed by Ray, who was then 33. The boycotts she organized prodded the board to oust an unsympathetic principal, start a busing program to temporarily ease the overcrowding, and make plans to build a small school nearby.
Chicago also began welcoming charter schools during the 2000s, further shrinking enrollments in schools in African-American neighborhoods. Almost all of the 50 schools CPS closed this year because they were “underutilized” were in black neighborhoods.
